Tom Murphy
The playwright the Abbey honoured with a season of six plays in 2001 was a Tuam boy who played centre half-back for the Galway vocational schools in the early 1950s. Tom Murphy, born on 23 February 1935, was the youngest of ten; his brothers and sisters left one after another for Birmingham until only he and his mother were at home. His first play, A Whistle in the Dark, was turned down by the Abbey's artistic director, opened at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London in 1961 and caused a storm there and in Dublin when the Abbey finally staged it.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
ClintMalpaso, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Tuam High Cross, St. Jarlath's College on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
The plays
Murphy went to Archbishop McHale College in Tuam and worked closely for the rest of his life with the Abbey and with Druid in Galway. Famine of 1968 is his epic of 1846 and 1847; The Sanctuary Lamp is his anti-clerical play; and in 1985 Druid gave the world premieres of Conversations on a Homecoming and Bailegangaire, with Siobhán McKenna, two of his finest. His one novel, The Seduction of Morality, came in 1994, and in 2012 Druid toured three of his plays together as DruidMurphy. He died on 15 May 2018. The model on this page pins Tuam's square and the college; the Druid guide has the Galway side of the story.
Questions people ask
Where was Tom Murphy born?
What was Tom Murphy's first play?
Written from Wikipedia, "Tom Murphy (playwright)" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.