Thomas Murphy Knihy

The second collection of plays by "The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian FrielIn 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.

The Irish playwright Tom Murphy's first novel. Featuring a 38-year-old who returns from America to the small Irish town of her childhood, it is a story about the awakening of a woman's capacities for love and sex, and a tale of family rivalries.

The play is about a wealthy man who has become a prey to drink and is brought back to the right path when he sees the need to oppose the evil manipulations of a villain. Tom Murphy is one of the top playwrights still writing in Ireland.

Vera O'Toole, a call-girl in New York, sustains herself with the dream that she can some day be reconciled to her family in Ireland, but when she returns home her dream turns to nightmare

The Sanctuary Lamp is set in a church. "Murphy, in the best traditions of Bunuel, takes a hallowed institution and populates it with social misfits who desecrate every convention in both thought and action…Murphy's savage indignation is unbearably true…" (Irish Times)

An epic family drama, shot through with dark humour, The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant tells the tragic story of a family disintegrating, having lost its moral values.Arina is an ambitious woman. As a servant girl she marries into the degenerative family she works for; her ruthless energy saves it from bankruptcy and she expands the family estate into an 'empire'. As matriarch she rules with an iron hand, her avarice insatiable, until she questions what it is all for. She slackens her hold and loses her power to the hypocrisy and relentless grasping of her 'chosen son'.Inspired by The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant is a haunting new work from leading Irish dramatist Tom Murphy, who has worked closely with the Abbey Theatre throughout his career.The play premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Ireland, on 3 June 2009.