MAJOR STAGE PRODUCTIONS
ON THE BEACH
Stage adaptation of Nevil Shute’s 1950s end of the world novel
For Sydney Theatre Company. Directed by Tony-nominated and visionary director Kip Williams (The Picture of Dorian Gray).
A brief war and devastating was has wiped out the Northern Hemisphere. A toxic cloud spreads south. Melbourne stands as the last surviving outposts of civilisation.
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Shute's 1957 novel anticipates the climate catastrophe and the enduring brinkmanship of global conflict. This stage adaptation features a cast of twelve in an inventive staging by designer Michael Hankin, weaving seaside romance with the tension of a submarine voyage as humanity awaits its final hours.
"Australian Theatre at its finest"
“Five Stars. STC breathes fresh relevance into this Melbourne-set tale of love and dignity in the face of certain doom”
Time Out
"Tommy Murphy and director Kip Williams have produced something both more poignant and more life-affirming from the dry bones of the original.”
It's hard to imagine leaving the theatre without holding your own loved ones a little closer.”
“…an achingly beautiful depiction of the end of the world”.
“Murphy’s script, which blends lines from the book with a deeper and more nuanced exploration of character, is gripping.”
For Belvoir Street Theatre. Directed by Eamon Flack.
With inventive theatricality and meticulous research, this epic drama sees three generations of the Packer family and their rivals, the Murdochs, battle for power and paternal love.
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Packer & Sons was extended twice due to popular demand and holds the record for Belvoir's highest-selling production.
Winner: Australian Council National Award for Theatre
"The two acts of Tommy Murphy's new play about a famous Australian media dynasty, Packer & Sons, present a brilliant examination of mirror images; a Rorschach test of scenarios replayed across half a century, consisting of media deals anxiously forged to stay ahead of technology, political bias and influence, and merciless lessons in raising young barons."
“These are gift roles for these two fine actors - Howard as Sir Frank and older Kerry; McConville as the young Kerry and James. They give brilliant virtuoso performances”.
The Australian
"It's not only schadenfreude. It's just great theatre.”
“…a genuinely magical bit of theatre…”
Time Out
“...great lines and throat-gripping moments”
Sydney Morning Herald
“Packer & Sons is a classy achievement… entertaining and funny as well as revealing and profound. Recommended without reservation.”
Stage Noise
HOLDING THE MAN
Based on the memoir by Timothy Conigrave
Winner, Best Play, NSW Premier's Literary Awards
Winner, Best Play, Australian Writers' Guild Award (AWGIE)
Winner, Best New Play, Aussietheatre.com Online Awards
Winner, Philip Parsons Young Playwrights Award
Published by Currency Press and Nick Hern Books
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Conigrave's memoir, published in 1995, is one of the first, and still one of the most emotionally potent, portrayals of living and dying through the AIDS crisis. Murphy's play had an equally profound impact: in the twelve months following its 2006 premiere at Sydney's Griffin Theatre, it transferred to the Sydney Opera House with repeated outings across Australia leading to a critically acclaimed season in London's West End before becoming an award-winning feature film. The play is regularly produced around the world in professional and community productions, including San Francisco, Chicago, Florence, Aukland and frequently in the UK, where in 2026 a UK community production won the F.M. Cubbon Trophy for Best Play. A new production opened at Belvoir in 2023.
The story has the enduring quality of a theatrical fairytale: two soulmates find each other, rather improbably, at an all-boys school run by Jesuits in 1970s Melbourne. They weather prejudice and the hurt of young love, then a racing clock of illness. The play is adored for its humour and frankness, and its celebration of a life well lived in the theatre.
The original production was commissioned and directed by David Berthold at Griffin with Tony winner Brian Thomson designing and Micka Agosta on costume.
"...unflinching, devastating, moving and funny... I laughed, and I wept... ONE OF THE BEST SHOWS OF THE YEAR."
Sydney Morning Herald
"...funny and moving in roughly equal measure, bawdy, playful and inventively staged... 10/10... a classic."
The Sun-Herald
"...wickedly funny scenes... are interspersed with charmingly tender scenes of young love..."
The Australian
"...Holding The Man is something of an impossible miracle. It's a brilliant play that delights and entertains, teasing you from the distractions of life's cruelties only to slug a full-force hit to your heart..."
Sydney Stage Online
"[The play] had to be extended even before opening night..."
Sydney Star Observer
"...the drama is personal, the personal is political, and everything is eminently theatrical... Murphy's 'Man' holds the stage very well."
San Francisco Chronicle
"If you have the chance to see Holding the Man, you have to."
SX News
"It's also horny and funny and full of joy. It's as much about the gift of love and life as the injustice of losing it."
The Guardian, on the 2023 revival
West End reviews:
"A portrait of a gay relationship in Australia from the 1970s to the 1990s is the brass-tacks description, but this fresh, frank and funny drama is much more — above all, a wrenchingly moving love story I defy anyone with a pulse not to relate to."
London Evening Standard
"Using touches of physical theatre, puppetry and what must be exhausting emotion night after night, Holding The Man creates a visually spectacular play which... reaches a perfect equilibrium of laughter and inevitable tears."
Official London Theatre Guide
"...this lively Australian drama has other ideas... [It] takes a horribly familiar trajectory, and turns it into something persuasive and illuminating. No small achievement."
The Times
"...as John struggles for life... something remarkable happens in the theatre: you suddenly realise that the whole audience is holding its breath for him."
Financial Times
STRANGERS IN BETWEEN
Originally directed by David Berthold for Griffin Theatre Company, Sydney, and subsequently by Adam Spreadbury-Maher on the West End, London.
Winner, Best Play, NSW Premier's Literary Awards
Published by Currency Press and Nick Hern Books
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Shane, sixteen and scared, has fled his family in regional Goulburn for the glitz and grit of Sydney's Kings Cross. Adrift and naïve, he meets two strangers: the ultra-urban Will, who offers brotherhood, sex, and something unexpected, and Peter, an older gay man quietly grappling with his own mother's imminent death. Attempting to build a surrogate family in the city, Shane confuses the two — the older lover he worships morphs into the brother he fears — as he struggles to reconcile himself with events from his past. With raucous humour, raw tenderness, and an exceptional ear for dialogue, Strangers in Between is a coming-of-age story about friendship across generations, chosen family, and finding your way home when home is the last place you can return to.
"The best new Australian play since Michael Gow's Away. I loved it. Go see it."
SX News
"Full of laughs... a charming and often exhilarating experience." Sunday Telegraph
"Bitter and sweet and replete with raw emotion... entertaining and forceful."
Sydney Morning Herald
"One of the funniest sex scenes you're likely to see on a stage... an exceptional gift for dialogue which sets the writing apart. Not to be missed."
Drum Media
"...there's an honesty and openness to Murphy's writing that is irresistibly heart-warming, an appeal which, I imagine, is pretty much universal."
Sun Herald
On the London premiere:
"Tommy Murphy's Strangers in Between is one of the most beautifully written, achingly honest, and devastating insights into the life of a person growing up in a world that refuses to understand who that person truly is... It is wrapped in love, acceptance and understanding. Absolutely unmissable."
Live Theatre UK
"Murphy unspools his dramatic premise neatly and with minimal contrivance... what really hooks us into the people on stage is the cast's three-dimensional grasp of character and their expertise with the rhythms of Murphy's dialogue... Sex, meanwhile, is treated with humorous candour. The key to understanding Murphy's men is about much more than what they do in bed."
The Times, ★★★★
"...wise and witty coming-of-age play about facing fears, about friendships forged across the generations, and about making your own surrogate family. The tone combines the sharp and the sweet, the charmingly funny, the slightly rose-tinted, and the completely explicit."
The Independent
On the Melbourne revival:
"While the world has turned since Strangers in Between was written, this production doesn't feel like a period piece. It's a gay coming-of-age story so funny and tender and wild, and so beautifully acted, that anyone might recognise and connect with it." — The Age
GWEN IN PURGATORY
Co-produced by Company B Belvoir and La Boite Theatre Company. Directed by Neil Armfield.
Winner: Western Australia Premier's Book Award, Scripts
Winner:Richard Burton Prize
An existential comedy featuring an African missionary in the backwaters of Australian suburbia, Gwen in Purgatory follows a brood of ordinary souls battling along in a changing world, wringing out the last drops of their matriarch's faith.
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Gwen is 90. She woke up this morning to discover that purgatory is sitting alone in a new house in a new subdivision on the edge of town, trying to work out if the remote in her hand operates the TV, the air-con, or the fan-forced oven. But the kids are coming round and Father Ezekiel is on his way to bless the house, so the beginning of the end is looking up.
"Tommy Murphy's new play is as deft and pungent a comedy as you are likely to see this year or any other... We'll see Gwen again in years to come — it already feels like a classic."
Sydney Morning Herald
"Tommy Murphy's new play is terrific — a funny and warm family comedy-drama full of recognition for anyone who has a multigeneration family."
The Australian
"I can't think of another playwright who's a keener, more insightful observer of Australian suburban life... Gwen in Purgatory is a play for and about all of us. It is warm, funny, sad, tragic, poignant, moving and unsettling. Just like our lives."
Crikey
"Hilarious observations that ring dark and true... [Murphy] has a keen sense of comedy but can suddenly silence the laughter with a sharp twist of the heart."
Sunday Telegraph
"Hilarious… The tension and insidious passive aggression will leave you gasping. Highly recommended."
Sun Herald
"Full of laughs but also extremely emotional, Gwen in Purgatory is the best play to hit a Sydney stage this year."
The Daily Telegraph
"Nothing short of superb… Murphy captures the essence and language of the family unit so well that it is difficult at times to remember this is only a play. If you have seen nothing else this year then I encourage you to get out and see Gwen in Purgatory… Five stars."
ABC Local Radio Brisbane
"Gwen in Purgatory is destined to become an Australian classic… This is a subtly brilliant piece of theatre that superficially looks like a lot of fun, but has such an emotional undercurrent you cannot help but fall in love with this family."
ArtsHub
BLOOD WEDDING
A new version, after Federico García Lorca
For Royal & Derngate, as part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Directed by Laurie Sansom.
Produced for the London Olympics, this reworking of Lorca's bloody tale follows a country bride who flees her wedding. After an eerie chase through the woodland, the two rival grooms kill one another. Lorca took the story from a newspaper report. Celebrating Lorca's dark comedy and surrealism, the play was performed in repertory with The Bacchae as part of the Royal & Derngate's Festival of Chaos.
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“…a powerful poetic charge…”
Sunday Express
“Tommy Murphy’s admirable new adaptation honours both the poetic and the dramatic qualities of Lorca’s play”
Daily Telegraph
"It takes a confident director to let a 1930 Lorca play open with a scene that could almost be from Alan Bennett, then progress through haunting folksong harmonies and erotic energy to a savage end, and set it in a Spain returned to primitive rural ways by the collapse of the eurozone. Not to mention casting a character the author describes as 'Little Girl' as a balding middle-aged man (Robert Benfield) in a cotton frock and ankle socks, as if Grayson Perry had decided not to bother with the wig. But it works. Brilliantly, in this adaptation by Tommy Murphy."
SATURN’S RETURN
For Sydney Theatre Company. Directed by David Berthold.
Saturn's Return explores the anxieties and identity crisis of a generation via a couple whose seemingly stable life is upended, forcing them to question their relationship, their future, and their sense of self. The play blends naturalism with surrealism to examine themes of identity and fidelity in a time of immense choice.
The play premiered at Wharf 2 in 2008 and was elevated to the main stage season the following year by Sydney Theatre Company's incoming artistic directors, Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton, who wrote in the season brochure that Tommy is "A bewitching playwright of startling originality."
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"…it's hard to think of another writer who portrays the world from the Gen Y perspective as poignantly as [Murphy] does in Saturn's Return… beautifully written and festooned with looping connections…"
Sun Herald
"Growing up, or not, is the point celebrated, delayed, mythologised and avoided in this psychologically deft and satisfying work. It's a fantastical drama about a very real moment."
Sydney Morning Herald
"In refusing to deny the theatre's potential for metaphor, [Murphy] renders it a site of infinite possibilities."
The Australian
MARK COLVIN’S KIDNEY
For Belvoir St Theatre. Directed by David Berthold, with set design by Michael Hankin.
Mary-Ellen Field is a successful Australian business consultant in London — until she's accused of betraying her clients' secrets to the press. Her life comes crashing down, and she starts to wonder if she's losing her mind. Then it emerges that her phone was illegally tapped by reporters, and she sets out on a campaign to restore her reputation. But along the way, her ideas of redemption change — she's been contacted by a journalist on the other side of the world, and his story puts everything into a new perspective.
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“Out of this sprawling story Tommy Murphy has created a play as tight as a drum. It seethes with conflicting emotions, yet never develops the slightest hint of suds frothing at its edges. Sarah Peirse and John Howard breathe warmth and complexity into Field and Colvin, masking their fears, vulnerabilities and blind fury behind walls of strength, humour and stoicism. When those walls do crack, Murphy strips his characters of their articulateness, and makes us suffer what is left unsaid."
Sydney Morning Herald
"This play is about, well, Mark Colvin's kidney, but it is a kidney that once belonged to Mary-Ellen Field, and the story of how she came to give it to him is the human side of Tommy Murphy's involving docudrama."
The Australian
"Tommy Murphy's new play is incredible... a fabulously entertaining night in the theatre that ought to be filmed — and meanwhile, will make you laugh, gasp and probably shed tears."
Stage Noise
TROY’S HOUSE
Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS), 1999
Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP), Sydney, 1999
Tamarama Rock Surfers, Sydney, 2000
Queanbeyan Bicentennial Centre, 2000
La Mama, Melbourne, 2005
Written and directed by Tommy Murphy while studying at the University of Sydney, Troy's House is a love story set at the end of the millennium. The original production transferred four times including to the Old Fitz.
The play came to the attention of ATYP Artistic Director, David Berthold when he caught it at the Sydney University Cellar Theatre. Berthold would go on to direct Strangers in Between, Holding the Man, Mark Colvin's Kidney, and Saturn's Return.
“What makes Troy's House enormously enjoyable is its irreverent satire, with a thread of subtextual seriousness in terms of class analysis…”
The Age
“Comic insight and flair… A brash new theatrical voice.”
Sydney Morning Herald
“I loved it. …Required viewing for anyone under 25 or anyone, like me, who wishes they could do it all again.”
Sun Herald
PACKER & SONS
"Shattering and beautiful. The best new play of the decade."
— The Guardian ★★★★★"A triumph of storytelling. The audience was completely spellbound."
— Evening Standard ★★★★