Murphy Plays: 2

Represents some of the work of the Dublin playwright, Tom Murphy. "The Gigli Concert" had its London premiere at the Almeida Theatre in 1992. "Conversations on a Homecoming" was revived at the Abbey Theatre, and "Bailegangaire" was first performed in Galway and London in 1985.

The second collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel In Conversations on a Homecoming, Michael returns from America to Ireland for a long-awaited reunion with his drinking companions: "A bilious bar-room comedy on the irreducible elements in the Irish character and the death of the Kennedy dream" (Observer), Bailegangaire "is as complex and haunting as one of Yeats' later poems...A senile bedridden old woman rehearses over and over again an epic tale of a village laughing match...Meanwhile her two granddaughters struggle to release themeselves from the prison of remembered unhappiness. "Here is a potent allegory - of the need to exorcise the past and its myths if one is to be happy in the future." (Sunday Telegraph) Tom Murphy was born in Tuam, County Galway, his other plays include Conversations on a Home Coming, Balegangaire and A Thief of Christmas; The Morning After Optimism, The Sanctuary Lamp and The Gigli Concert as well as more recently Cupa Coffee and The Wake (1996), and She Stoops to Folly. His career has been closely associated with The Abbey Theatre, Dublin who have produced many of his plays.