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Old Man Murphy. Patriarch Patrick Murphy heard that his son in America was running for mayor of his town. Mr. Murphy had done a good deal of campaigning himself, had once shaken the hand of the great Parnell, so he sent a letter to his son "marked Impahrtent on one side and Errgent on the other" and left the old sod to electioneer for his offspring. His son's wife was not happy to welcome the old man. She had social aspirations, had changed the family name to Murfree when they moved out of the Patch.
When Mr. Murphy (Arthur Sinclair of Mr. Gilhooley) arrives in the U. S. things begin humming. He embarrasses his daughter-in-law by attacking the English butler with a shoe, consorts with the shanty Irish in the Patch. He is delighted to attend a bountiful wake where "they were carrying the food away in bags, whiskey flowed like water and everybody was praying like the Twelve Apostles." Mr. Murphy, whose voice another character describes as sounding "like His Holiness himself over the radio," succeeds in rounding up the Irish vote for his son, straightening out the affairs of his Americanized descendants, getting his pretty granddaughter married to a boy of good Hibernian stock.
Arthur Sinclair should get a great deal of fun out of the part of spry Old Man Murphy, shouting insults at other actors in a rich brogue, taking his coat half off to fight imaginary enemies, leaping on chairs to deliver political orations. His gross cartoon of an aged playboy of the western world comes off admirably, although the walls of Dublin's hallowed Abbey Theatre, where Mr. Sinclair used to perform mystic Synge dramas and nationalistic plays with the Irish Players, probably trembled when he accepted this role in rough-&-tumble farce.