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...

"One of the greatest Irish plays of the century" (Irish Times)

"The language of the play is on a sort of inspired bender. It surfeits on its own potency. Tom Murphy's gift - here and in his other plays - is at once to stimulate and destabilise. It's a thrilling and intense experience to sit in a theatre and hardly to know where you are or that anything exists beyond the stage in front of you...This is a dark, funny, consuming evening of high points, breaking points, hangovers and hints - uncertain hints - of hope" (Observer)

Famine portrays the Great Hunger of the Irish in 1840s, with fresh pathos and insight. "The macabre business of blight and death, of wakes and murder, of poisoned love and lost hope, and the scandal of an emigration policy that was in effect one of transportation...are some of the modern Irish theatre's most powerful and poetic scenes." (Observer)

"The most distinctive, the most restless, the most obsessive imagination at work in the Irish theatre today" Brian Friel

The Wake recounts the story of a woman, returning from the USA to her home town in Ireland. As her family learn of her years as a prostitute, she learns their attitudes and Irish society in general. A homecoming play, haunting yet fiercely comic.

This epic family drama, told through the lens of dark humor, tells the tragic story of a family disintegrating, having lost its moral values. Inspired by The Golovlyov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Irish dramatist Tom Murphy weaves a haunting story of an ambitious servant girl who marries into the degenerative family she works for. Her ruthlessness and 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 all is for. She eventually slackens her hold and loses...