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The present work is a composite biography that provides a forum to most of those who have been associated with the Abbey Theatre from the beginning to the present time: actresses, actors, playwrights, men of letters, producers, directors, stage carpenters, house electricians, and supporters of the theatre. It is hoped that the method used in this book will give a different impression from that of previous histories of the Theatre, and on balance probably a truer one.
Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on Sunday There's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am. Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do. Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023. 'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage 'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review 'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times
You’re six years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s “done something stupid.” She finds it hard to be happy. So you start to make a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for. 1. Ice cream. 2. Kung Fu movies. 3. Burning things. 4. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose. 5. Construction cranes. 6. Me. You leave it on her pillow. You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling. Soon, the list will take on a life of its own. A play about depression and the lengths we will go to for those we love.
Sometimes a person needs to create an act that destroys the world because the world is broken. The virus has ravaged Thebes. Millions are dead and the economy has tanked. Vaccinations have been administered and the Festival of Liberty is imminent. Things are finally about to change. The countdown is on but leader Creon and his quarantined niece, the self-identifying X'ntigone, have unfinished business before the celebrations can commence. What happens when old-world order meets a radical new world vision? In this thrilling meditation on Sophocles' timeless Greek tragedy, political expediency meets the voice of a generation who want to tear down the power structures that have ill-served a crumbling state. Darren Murphy's X'ntigone is a fresh and vital discourse for our times, when even truth has been sacrificed at the altar of political gain and avarice.
In Hugh Leonard's Love in the Title, a woman's visit to the Irish countryside leads to a surreal meeting with her own mother as a thirty-year-old in 1964 and her grandmother as a twenty-year-old in 1932. The frank exchanges that mark this meeting allow the women to remain in and represent their times, yet still communicate with each other. The next play, Frank McGuinness's Dolly West's Kitchen is set a small house in Donegal, 1944, a meeting place where two American GI's, a British Army captain and the fiercely nationalistic West family share meals and talk of love, war and betrayal. Finally, The Muesli Belt by Jimmie Murphy examines the ramifications of renewal and relocation in the urban centers of western Ireland, as a greedy property developer bent on buying up everything in sight to build high-rent flats and chic eateries throws locals into dispair.
'The worst slums in Europe. That's where Dublin came from. Out of the shit and into the world.' Life long Dublin docker Patrick has passed away surrounded by his beloved wife Esther, his son and his grandchildren. As they remember his life, Esther recounts a tale they are yet to hear. In Our Veins follows their family through 100 years of Dublin, from the notorious madams of the Monto to love in the dark tenements. This is the story of a Dublin City that no longer exists, where it came from and the people that helped build it.
Emma O'Donovan is eighteen, beautiful, and fearless. It's the beginning of summer in a quiet Irish town and tonight she and her friends have dressed to impress. Everyone is at the party, and all eyes are on Emma. The next morning Emma's parents discover her collapsed on the doorstop of their home, unconscious. She is disheveled, bleeding, and disoriented, looking as if she had been dumped there. To her distress, Emma can't remember what happened the night before. All she knows is that none of her friends will respond to her texts. At school, people turn away from her and whisper under their breath. Her mind may be a blank as far as the events of the previous evening, but someone has posted photos of it on Facebook under a fake account, "Easy Emma"--photos she will never be able to forget. As the photos go viral and a criminal investigation is launched, the community is thrown into tumult. The media descends, neighbors chose sides, and people from all over the world want to talk about her story. Everyone has something to say about Emma. Asking For It is a powerful story about the devastating effects of rape and public shaming, told through the awful experience of a young woman whose life is changed forever by an act of violence.
Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre demonstrates how the literary archetype of the clash between fathers and sons and the subsequent depiction of anti-oedipal figures become a major concern for the playwrights writing in a specific and crucial moment of Irish history (1904-1938). The father can be conceived both as a historical / political metaphor as well as a real father in a specific historical and social context. The classical models employed as theoretical tools to nuance the argument--Laius and Oedipus, Ulysses and Telemachus, Aeneas and Anchises, Priam and Hector, Hector and Astyanax--are challenged by the Christian example of Abraham and Isaac, subversively adjusted by Yeats to provide a tragic reading of post-colonial Ireland. All of these pairings provide archetypes for the understanding of complex personal and familial dynamics. The book takes into consideration not only the most famous figures of the Irish National Theatre--as W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, Augusta Gregory, and Sean O?Casey?but also overlooked authors such as T.C. Murray, Padraic Colum, Paul Vincent Carroll, Lennox Robinson, Denis Johnston, George Shiels, St. John Ervine, Teresa Deevy. Many commentators have written about the playwrights of the Abbey Theatre, mainly focusing on politics, social classes, Irish identity, cultural issues, and linguistic aspects: no thorough analysis of the clash between generations has been published so far. Those who have tackled the issue have devoted their attention to a single author, or to a single aspect; this study aims to demonstrate that the repeated occurrence of anti-oedipal figures and of the archetype of the clash between fathers and sons?a clear manifestation of the need of emancipation from oppressive authorities and of change in Irish society?must be read as a common phenomenon and as a shared concern. The book is written for people interested in Irish studies, post-colonial studies, and theatre studies.
A classic title in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy - the first volume It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend Baba are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world; of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin - where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world. 'She is one of our bravest and best novelists' Irish Times 'O'Brien rises like a lark in the clear air, she sings as she flies' Literary Review 'One of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world' New York Times Book Review