Just days into the Dublin Theatre Festival and already it is obvious that two playwrights stand pen and shoulder above all others: Brian Friel and Tom Murphy. Fortunately at least four productions of their works will continue after the Festival winds to a close on October 14th. Friel’s The Yalta Game – a painfully perfect depiction of an illicit love affair, imbued with two note-perfect performances from Ciaran Hinds and Kelly Reilly – part of the 3 Plays presentation which runs at the Gate until November. And Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark, The Gigli Concert and Bailegangaire remain in the Abbey and Peacock theatres until at least the same month.

This really is contemporary Irish theatre at is finest and Murphy, in particular, is justifiably proud of the retrospective at the Abbey. Why?

“I’m very proud that another generation is involved in the work” he says. “It is a huge punctuation mark for me. It gives me an opportunity to look again at at least six of my plays. And I’ve already been involved on a consultative basis in terms of three and am directing Bailegangaire. And I am beginning to see that just as there is a Theatre of Cruelty, an Absurdist Theatre, there seems to be a consistency and cohesion in what I’ve done, in searching for a Theatre of Emotionalism – without sentimentality.”

It is now forty years since Tom Murphy presented his first full-length play, A Whistle in The Dark - a positively vengeful work about exile as experienced by an Irish family who have been uprooted and now live in Coventry, England. The Gigli Concert, too, is a play about exile, telling the tale of JPW King, an Englishman dispatched to Dublin to practice “Dynamatolgy” which offers a form of spiritual healing to the wounded soul. In Bailegangaire on the other hand, the source of “exile” is the past, where one of Murphy’s greatest creations, Mommo, is an old woman relating the tale of a laughing competition and how the town of Bailengaingaire – a town without laughter – came by its name.

Ben Barnes, Artistic Director of the Abbey, has this to say about the series of plays chosen for what the Abbey itself calls a “celebration” which gives audiences an opportunity to experience the unique, troubling, subversive but always compassionate voice” of Tom Murphy.

“What is remarkable in this writing is the ceaseless quest to express the pain and the joy of the human condition in drama of startling originality,” says Ben. “Experimentation with form in many of the plays has also ensured that the work of this restless writer continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in theatre.”

Murphy himself, of course, knows that whenever those ‘Lifetime Achievement’ are handed out in the world of literature or cinema the subtext can be “your best days are past” or even “prepare yourself for the grave, buddy” but he’s buying none of this.

“I have another play under my belt and an idea, or two for other things!” he says, laughing. “Somebody asked me the other day ‘are you going to retire and I said ‘for what?’ It’s a crazy idea. I was watching a television programme last year about

people climbing mountains. And they were driven and couldn’t do anything but climb their mountains. They’d left families at home worrying about them, and so on, but they still had to climb those mountains. I feel pretty much the same way about

playwriting.”

3 Plays runs at the Gate Theatre until November 17th. A Whistle In The Dark and The Gigli Concert run at the Peacock and Abbey respectively until October 27th. And Bailegangaire is being staged at the Abbey until December 1st