Mikel Murfi's award-winning play celebrates oddballs and outsiders

NOMINATED for ‘best new play’ at the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2014, Mikel Murfi’s one-man show, The Man in the Woman’s Shoes, is a comedy that celebrates oddballs, eccentrics and the plain daft.

Opening at Cork’s Everyman on March 20, the play is about a cobbler, Pat Farnon, who walks the five miles from his cottage to town to deliver shoes that a local woman, Kitsy Rainey, the manager of the football team, will wear while running along the sidelines of the pitch. Farnon wears the shoes to stretch them for Kitsy. That premise is an excuse for Farnon to encounter all sorts of people on his travels. The play is funny, but has a poignant conceit.

Murfi wrote the play and stars in it, playing about ten characters. It was first performed in 2012, having been commissioned by Sligo County Council Arts Service and the Hawk’s Well Theatre, as part of the Bealtaine Festival. Bealtaine encourages older people to engage with the arts. Murfi visited old-age and retirement groups. He then wrote the play and performed it for those same senior-citizen groups. The play was also performed for one night at the Hawk’s Well. Such was its appeal that Murfi was asked by Bealtaine to tour it last year. He is delighted to be back on the road with it, through his company, Loco & Reckless.