1 – 4 April
The packed Wardrobe Theatre on Wednesday night told its own story. Clare Murphy’s The Liar King, first made in 2012 in the light of the Arab Spring, has returned to a moment hungry for it. Murphy knows this. She steps out, thanks the room and establishes the terms of the evening. ‘in times of bad kings…’ the authority of the storyteller sharpens.
Adapted from Rafik Schami’s Damascus Nights, The Liar King is set in Syria and framed around a ruler who offers gold to anyone able to tell him a lie he has never heard before. It is an elegant premise, one that opens quickly onto larger questions of who may speak near power, what truth can survive there, and why story so often becomes the form truth must take when direct speech is too dangerous.
That tension is there from the beginning. We land in contemporary Syria. A Guardian journalist, searching for someone willing to speak, finds only one old woman prepared to do so. She asks: do you know the story of the Wolf and the Lamb? The whole evening turns on that question.
Murphy makes the old machinery of oral storytelling feel fully alive. The show is built from embedded tales, reversals and nested acts of telling, but never feels dutiful or antique. Fools sit at kings’ feet, girls tell stories to stay alive, monsters wait in caves, and again and again the piece worries at the border between lie and story, between speech that flatters power and speech that slips past it. The king wants novelty, a lie he has not yet heard. What he gets, slowly and against his will, is truth.
The room was rapt. Murphy beckons active listening. ‘Words blossom only in the listener’s ear,’ we are told, and the line lands as method. One person speaks, and a whole room helps bring the story into being. She moves fluidly between narrator, character and host, using minute changes of pace, posture and cadence to alter scale and time. With one chair and low, near-candlelit lighting, she makes very little feel like plenty. Crucially, she is very funny. The wit is dry and well judged, and the laughter becomes part of the show’s rhythm, keeping us close.
What she conjures is strange and exact: bird-of-paradise princesses, riddling monsters, and wandering troubadours. Yet for all its fantastical riches, The Liar King never loosens its hold on power. Murphy treats oral storytelling not as heritage display but as a living way of thinking. In a culture fixated on novelty and speed, there is relief in a form that knows repetition and retelling are not failures of invention but routes to wisdom.
By the time the Wolf and the Lamb come back, the story has altered because our understanding of it has altered. The Lamb lives not by its innocence or right, but by indulgence. That is the cold logic of arbitrary power. What first came to us through the old woman’s voice now stands as the show’s governing truth. Where fear rules, truth may have to arrive as a stowaway, through parable or riddle.
Clare Murphy is extraordinary. She makes a bare stage feel populous, ancient and alive. What she creates here is not just an absorbing hour of storytelling, but a reminder of why stories survive bad rulers in the first place. They mock them. They unmask them. They outlast them.
★★★★★. Tilly Marshall, 2 April 2026
Photography credit: Paul Blakemore
