Marina Carr has moved to the city. The bogs are gone; it’s all shiny marble and new sofas. The couples have names like Ben and Catherine, not Portia and Raphael. Their clothes are bespoke, not threadbare, and they speak as if reared with marbles in their mouths, not briquettes. Welcome, Marina, the city needs you…. read more +

The infamous riots at ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ took place this week in 1907. Colin Murphy uncovered some old diaries with an account of the week by an ordinary theatregoer… Saturday January 26, 1907 Went to John Synge’s new play tonight, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’. Rehearsals had been held in secret,… read more +

Colin Murphy recalls interviewing John Mortimer in 2005 For Prospect Magazine, 19 January 2009 “I’ve got a bouncy Jesus somewhere,” said John Mortimer. He sat at a writing desk cluttered with little plastic figurines: Shakespeare, Freud, and numerous Jesuses. His eyes sparkled behind inch-thick glasses, and he slumped a little in his chair.

Steve Collins, doctor and aid worker, director of Valid International and Valid Nutrition. As told to Colin Murphy. Published in the Irish Independent. I went to Africa in the summer of 1985, on my holidays from medical school. I travelled through Uganda (where there was a coup), Congo on a bicycle, Chad (where a civil… read more +

Listen to my extended radio report from Harlem on US presidential election night, and after. Includes an interview with the Rev Al Sharpton on the challenges ahead for the Obama administration and for the civil rights movement.

There’s a Bright Side Somewhere Jenkins Washington sings gospel, like his grandparents taught him.

“Everybody here that voted for John McCain, raise your hand!” said Michael Hardy into the microphone. Nobody raised their hand. On 145th Street in Upper Harlem, the crowd in the meeting room of the House of Justice (motto: “No Justice, No Peace”) was feeling good. “It certainly looks like there’s gonna be a new day… read more +

Originally published in the Irish Times. Posted here again now due to Valentino Achak’s Deng’s visit to Dublin. One night in the summer of 2001, I stood in a field, in thick mud, holding a clipboard and a torch. The torch showed up a row of primitive huts, and I moved from hut to hut,… read more +

Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 31, 2008 There are two moments in ‘No Man’s Land’ that are great theatre. Late in the first act, Michael Gambon, playing Hirst, a writer of apparent high class and distinction, lapses into a drunken, maudlin reminiscence. He is haunted by the dream from which he has just woken,… read more +

Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 10, 2008 It’s not difficult to imagine Brian Friel and his Field Day buddies sketching out the framework for ‘Translations’, in Derry in 1980. They start with the premise of setting it during the 1830s Ordnance Survey, an exercise that involved “standardising” Irish place names in brutish English: a… read more +