Murphy

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<br/><br/><br/><p><br/>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)<p><br/></p><br/>