Category: Tommy Murphy

PACKER AND SONS is a new Australian play by Tommy Murphy. It is a play that focuses on the men of the Packer dynasty. Sir Frank, Kerry, Clyde and James. We meet Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch – another Australian power merchant family. And wheeler-dealer Jodie Rich – a failed power interloper. No women appear in this two and a half hour saga – is it that their invisibility or silence is a tacit wink that they are consenting agents to the world about them? Silence is Consent? On a bare stage, Design, Set and Costume, by Romaine Harper, supported peripherally…

STRANGERS IN BETWEEN, is a revival production of Australian writer, Tommy Murphy’s 2005 play. This play won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2006, and it is satisfying to see that there was some good reckoning in giving this play such recognition, as this present production at the Seymour Centre reveals it as a timeless insight into its world. Director, Daniel Lammin, has with his Designers: Set and Costume by Abbie Lea Hough; Lighting by Rob Sowinski (associate, Bryn Cullen) and Sound by Raya Slavin, come up with solutions that place the scenarios of the play clearly and securely in…

MARK COLVIN’S KIDNEY, is a new Australian play by Tommy Murphy. There are some 28 characters. The play, however, is virtually a two-hander involving a true story concerning Mary-Ellen Field (Sarah Peirse) and Mark Colvin (John Howard). Elle MacPherson, an ex-pat Australian business woman, hires another ex-pat Australian, business advisor, Mary-Ellen Field, to sort out her business arrangements. Some time into their trusting relationship, some negative articles begin to appear in the press. Ms MacPherson, taking advice from other aides, suspects the ‘leaks’ for the said articles were coming from Ms Field. She is gradually removed and loses her job…

I have not read PETER PAN in any of the manifestations, by J.B. Barrie, that Tommy Murphy, the present adaptor of this Belvoir production tells us learnedly about, in the program notes. I have not even seen the Walt Disney animated adaptation. I only know it from little snippets on the old Walt Disney show of my growing up, on Sunday nights at 6.30 on Channel 9, watching it in our fibro housing commission in North Ryde. I remember Peter in a costume like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, with hands akimbo on his hips, and Captain Hook with a hook…

Advice for every writer: Write what you know. In the program notes from Tommy Murphy: “Memory is like writing a play. After about a year of writing, something clicked in the story and I was surprised to discover that much of the play is in fact underpinned by disputed memories. Perhaps this is a likely conflict in a family, among people who may have opposing interpretations of their shared history and shared identity. The voices in this play stem from people I know and love but as soon as they found their way to the page they were characters bending…

  DOUBLE EXPOSURE is part of a triple bill of Comedy and cabaret offerings that play on alternate nights in the Downstairs Theatre until the 14th February. The brochure for this show says “Two strange men, two strange minds, one big night of stand up comedy.” The first half of the program features Marty Murphy in HAPPY AND CLEAN, directed by Tommy Murphy. Marty Murphy, dressed in a period pin striped suit and shiny black shoes, with a white handkerchief tucked, necessarily in the suit pocket, and very neat hair, “takes us on a surreal journey as he reveals how…