Warmth and wit in Michael's show about love and survival

Soft and warm and with perfect diction, this is a voice you could listen to all day. That was true when Michael Murphy was delivering the news bulletins on RTÉ and it’ll be even more true when he takes to the stage of the Town Hall Theatre this Saturday night, accompanied by other current and former RTÉ faces, Eamonn Lawlor, Eileen Dunne, Emer O’Kelly and Ciana Campbell.

In an event entitled Stories, Poetry and Dreams, Michael and his guests will read from his books, At Five in the Afternoon, The House of Pure Being, and his poetry collection, The Republic of Love. These books contain reflections on friendship, family, love and sex, including Michael’s illness with prostate cancer in 2008 and incidents from his childhood, among them a beating from his father at the age of four that the former newsreader has never forgotten.

Michael is very matter-of-fact as he discusses these events and explains the evolution of this show, which sold out last weekend in Dún Laoghaire’s Pavilion Theatre.

“I’d written the books. I’m a broadcast journalist and all the books were meant to be spoken aloud,” he says.

Michael, Eamonn Lawlor, Emer O’Kelly and Eileen Dunne are all friends and meet for lunch regularly, he explains. All were delighted to take part when he suggested the show. Meanwhile, Ciana Campbell, who had also worked with Michael in RTÉ, had left the station years ago, but they re-established contact last year when Michael was reading at the Ennis Book Festival. Ciana lives in Ennis and is involved in running the festival.

Michael likens Stories, Poetry and Dreams to an opera “with sometimes four voices together and sometimes two of us”.

Eileen Dunne does a solo piece recalling that beating Michael received from his father, after which the child left home and moved in with his grandmother, who lived next door.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.