DUCKING out of a rehearsal last week, Jimmy Murphy hooked up with me in a little watering hole on Marlborough Street, where he was looking fit and well: the short, fuzzy felt haircut carpeting the bullet head; the sharp, direct eyes loitering behind a pair of shades. It was only when we'd sat down, with him dodging and weaving in the seat, and sucking alarmingly on cigarettes, that I realised he was nervous as a cat.
It was very different from the last time I barneyed with him during the Olympia run of Brothers Of The Brush - in the early days of its extraordinary success. Basking in the new found vindication, his open scepticism of the luvvy theatre world bespoke a kind of goodhumoured subtext of "paws off pal, I'm intellectual property".
Certainly, few enough of the Abbey play wrights share his kind of background in the flats in Islandbridge, Dublin, where he lived until, after his parents' separation, he moved to Ballyfermot. After failing the Inter, he left school and moved on to an apprenticeship in painting and decorating, doing his City and Guilds exams in Bolton Street.
In the intervening years there were several stints in London working on building sites, yet all the while there was the knuckle headed determination to write. "I used to come home from the site bollox tired and write in the evenings, from notes made during the day. Actually, by bizarre coincidence, I ended up painting the dressing rooms of the Abbey one time."
Finally, around 1990, he decided to give himself a couple of years "on the scratcher", and then, after the Abbey gave him a workshop with the first draft of Brothers of The Brush, an extra year. "At the end of that, I began to think I'd been kidding meself, it was leading me astray.
But Brothers hit the jackpot. By a stroke of luck, it was shoved into the Peacock for the Theatre Festival slot of 1993, and instantly established him among a tranche of Irish playwrights whose work transfers triumphantly to London ("Michael Billington gave me a stunning writeup"), New York, Glasgow, Edinburgh, London and San Francisco. Brothers has been translated into German and Welsh.
A hard act to follow, it is a blackly hilarious play, growling with societal rage yet somehow lacking any trace of didacticism - so well balanced are the raw power struggles between the house painters, holed up, renovating a basement. With their trade overtaken by "the instructions on the back of the tin", and the lot of them drawing the dole coming up to Christmas, the bambam humour had a hard knocks authentic which still coughed up a picture of keen desperation.
A Picture Of Paradise steps further off the social ladder into the crucifying poverty of homelessness. Set in the courtyard of "Our Lady's Mansions", it is an evening in the life of a family whose belongings have just been turfed over the balcony of the flat where they are squatting, thanks to the residents' committee watchman (Liam Carney). We realise that the mother (Barbara Brennan) has gambled away her husband's lifesavings, propelling him (Paul Bennett) to a lost year in the dosshouse; and frittering away the future of their hapless son (newcomer Michael Hayes). An opportunist down and out (Johnny Murphy) also turns up and befriends the husband down at the men's hostel.
If Brothers fitted into the Passion Machine genre of all male ladsville, Paradise curiously straddles a line of Abbey plays, through Hatchet all the way back to Sean O'Casey's tenements. The generic characters are given a hard contemporary spin - although curiously shy of the social ills of AIDS (as treated recently in Paula Meehan's play for Rough Magic, Mrs Sweeney).
It's a harrowing scenario nonetheless; as queasy to contemplate as the rash on the husband's hand which loses him his job cooking pork chops in a sit down chipper. Again directed by the consummate dramaturg David Byrne, Paradise was heavily workshopped, giving Murphy the impetus for a radical redraft to plough in more psychological depth and key up the dramatic tone. "It has this tragic inevitability, but I tried to bring in more humour and camaraderie, to recognise that there is a quality of life there, however mad that may seem.
The whole point of Paradise could he summarised by the line in the play: "There's lives behind them beards, tragedies under them overcoats". But again Murphy eschews didacticism. "I'm not trying to lecture people. It is a complex thing, and I recognise all the contradictions in myself, where you say to the guy selling The Big Issues that you have one already, when you don't. Or these guys, trying to make a few bob helping you park on a busy street, when the whole city is turning into a car park.
"You throw them 20p but you wonder how they end up that way: whether it's a gradual thing, or whether it's something that happened. Or whether they have psychiatric problems, and just can't cope. So if there's a message at all, it's just to look at these people and think twice."
If his two plays are connected by their focus on the survival instincts of those outside the social system, it is interesting that Murphy's major influences - after Plunkett, Friel and school productions of Juno And The Paycock - are Eugene O'Neill and Miller's Death Of A Salesman. "The whole tragedy of Willie trying to make his big sale overwhelmed me, it was kind of parallel to what I was doing as a writer."
Now 35, and living in Inchicore, Dublin, with his wife, Mary, and his children, Chloe (3 1/2) and seven month Oisin, he may have scored a major success with his first performed play, but he's still the new kid on the block of timeless cement that is the Abbey. It became evident in the boyish curiosity and enthusiasm of his conversation once he loosened up: raving about the joys of having kids', sci fi time travel plots, barstool politics.
Afterwards, as I unlocked my bike, my eye was drawn anew to the little clutch of regulars drinking on the steps of the derelict building (the Samaritans building), right opposite the front door of the Abbey.
