Murphy Plays: 3

"The Morning After Optimism" borrows patterns from European fairytale to explore the relationship between reality and illusion. "The Sanctuary Lamp" is a play about spritual refugees, and "The Gigli Concert" is the story of a man who, wishes to sing like Gigli.

The third collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel "James in The Morning After Optimism is literally on the run, a comically exaggerated villain in flight form his crimes, seeking refuge in a fairytale forest. Harry in The Sanctuary Lamp is holed up in a church like a mediaeval outlaw, hoping to keep at bay the guilt of his messy life. JPW King in The Gigli Concert is a kind of cross between Dr Livingstone and Robinson Crusoe, a missionary who has become a shipwrecked loner, an Englishman sent to Dublin by a cult to convert the natives, and left there, beached and bereft." (Fintan O'Toole)