Clare Murphy on The Liar King, Storytelling, Power and the Uses of Laughter
By Tilly Marshall
At a moment when public life feels warped by distortion, spin and strongmen, storytelling can seem both suspect and indispensable. It can distort as much as it reveals, seduce as much as it clarifies. For storyteller Clare Murphy, that tension sits at the heart of The Liar King, her new show at The Wardrobe Theatre, adapted from exiled Syrian writer Rafik Schami’s Damascus Nights.
Set in Syria and circling a king who clings to power through lies, The Liar King blends folklore, satire and political unease. Murphy first made the piece in 2012, at the height of the Syrian uprisings, when protest had not yet hardened into war. Bringing it back now feels less like a return than a reframing.
“We are living in very, very strange times,” she says. “The world felt strange a decade ago, but now it feels even more so. Of all the shows I have in repertoire, this one wanted to come back out.”
The original impulse came from a feeling of helplessness. “We can protest, we can shout, we can try to bring about legal change, but artists have such little power in some ways,” she says.
The remark is less defeatist than it sounds. For Murphy, art’s power lies precisely in its indirection. “I was so frustrated watching what was happening that I thought, well, I’ll just make a story about it.”
Murphy is careful about what it means to adapt material rooted in another culture. She is not Syrian, she points out, but an Irish woman working in oral tradition. What matters to her is not reproducing Syria naturalistically, but approaching the material with respect and understanding how folklore travels.
“I’ll never be able to tell this story the way a Syrian would tell it,” she says. “But folklore travels. The stories you find in Syrian folklore are often similar to Greek or Irish folklore because they moved along trade routes, with merchants and travellers. So for me, it’s less about reproducing the landscape of Syria exactly and more about holding the architecture of power with as much respect as I can.”
That distinction matters. Murphy is not interested in flattening Syria into metaphor, nor in treating folklore as decorative timelessness. What draws her to the form is its ability to carry unbearable material without overwhelming the audience.
“If you go to an exhibition of war photography, after a while you can’t keep looking,” she says. “There’s a brutalisation that happens. We need to look, and we need not to look away, but the psyche can only take so much. Folklore and metaphor allow us to wrestle with heartbreaking stuff in a way the body can sustain.”
In her hands, folklore is not retreat or escape. It is a side door. “Really great art lets you go in sideways,” she says. “You’re entertained, your imagination is activated, and then suddenly something opens up and you can comprehend the horror more fully than if someone had just come straight at you with facts.”
She laughs, but not entirely jokingly, when she describes the effect. “I’m a drug dealer,” she says. “I’m activating the pharmacy inside people’s heads.”
That sense of storytelling as an embodied exchange runs through her description of live performance. Murphy’s stage work is famously stripped back, but she rejects the idea that this leaves her alone carrying the whole burden.
“When you start telling a story without props or mediums, the audience’s imagination starts constructing the imagery very quickly. It’s our oldest technology. If I do my job well, the world becomes three-dimensional and we all see it and feel it together.”
That shared act of building the world is what distinguishes storytelling from more fixed forms. Murphy relishes the freedom of liveness, but she is equally clear that freedom does not mean fidelity to every inherited detail.
“I feel a huge responsibility. To the audience, to the story, to the event. Does this bit still need to exist now? People think if a story is ancient you can’t change it, but they’ve always been adapted to serve the needs of the world they’re in.”
That question feels central not just to The Liar King but to Murphy’s wider practice. She is interested in how stories survive, but also in what they train us to accept. Which is why a “liar king” feels less like a folkloric curiosity than a contemporary figure.
Humour, she says, is part of that political work. “There’s a long history of satire in Ireland as a way of dismantling power. And people like Musk and Trump hate being laughed at. They can’t handle mockery. It is a real power.”
The challenge is balance. Murphy says she no longer uses humour relentlessly, but parses it out more carefully so an audience can experience delight, shock and weight without being bludgeoned by any one register. Her hope is that The Liar King remains playful while leaving behind “a sort of generative empathy” for Syria and for people living under systems of distortion and control.
“I don’t want to prescribe what people should feel,” she says. “Different people take different things. But I want them to have some feeling of wonder, some kind of catharsis, some sense of being moved.”
Asked what story she thinks everyone should read, Murphy immediately names Damascus Nights. “It’s a delight,” she says. “The premise is that a man goes silent and his friends have seven nights to tell him seven stories to make him speak again. Rafik Schami is one of the few oral storytellers I’ve read who can make fiction flow like orality. It’s gorgeous.”
What Murphy returns to is the usefulness of story. Not as distraction, and not as propaganda, but as a form capable of carrying contradiction, tenderness and resistance at once. In an age of information overload, that begins to sound less like ornament and more like necessity.
The Liar King runs at The Wardrobe Theatre, Bristol, 1- 4 April 2026.
Photography credit: Paul Blakemore
