Der irische Dramatiker Tom Murphy ist bekannt für seine intensiven Auseinandersetzungen mit der irischen Gesellschaft und ihrem komplexen Erbe. Seine Stücke legen oft die verborgenen Spannungen und anhaltenden Auswirkungen historischer Ereignisse auf das gegenwärtige Leben frei. Murphys Stil zeichnet sich durch rohen Realismus und tiefgreifende psychologische Einblicke in seine Charaktere aus. In seiner Arbeit untersucht er Themen wie Identität, Erinnerung und die beständige Suche nach Sinn in einer sich dynamisch verändernden Welt.
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
Vera O'Toole in New York lebend, kehrt zur Beerdigung der Mutter in ihre Heimat, das irische Städtchen Grange, zurück. Ausgerechnet sie hat das Prestigeobjekt der Familie, das Imperial Hotel, geerbt, sie, von der die drei jüngeren Geschwister nicht einmal wissen, wie sie in New York ihren Lebensunterhalt verdient. Es kommt zu einem possenhaften Krieg um das Erbe. Mit Akribie und Komik zeichnet der Autor das Tun seiner Helden, zeigt, wie sie im Dickicht von Moral und Doppelmoral ins Straucheln geraten.
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 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)
