Brian Friel

Since its creation in 1980 by actor Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) and playwright Brian Friel (Translation, Dancing at Lughnasa), Northern Ireland's Field Day Theatre Company has brought challenging drama to the entire island, "from Coleraine to Kerry." With the addition to the board of directors of poets and critics such as Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, and Seamus Deane, Field Day ventured into the realm of the more explicitly political with a controversial pamphlet series. Acting Between the Lines is a fascinating study of one of the most important developments in contemporary Irish culture.

This collection examines the role played by theatre in colonial societies and studies post-colonial drama. The contributors are a mix of scholars and practitioners of theatre.

The Politics of Irish Drama analyzes some twenty-five of the best-known Irish plays from those of Dion Boucicault to Sebastian Barry, including works by Shaw, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Beckett. The book looks at political contexts for these plays and, in arguing for the outward-directed nature of dramatic representation of Ireland, shows Irish drama to be an international as much as national phenomenon.

Irish playwrights such as Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw, and John Millington Synge have made enormous contributions to world drama. This reference provides detailed entries for 32 Irish playwrights active from 1880 to 1995. Each entry includes a biographical sketch, a summary of productions, a critical assessment of the dramatist's work, and extensive bibliographical information. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography.

This reference provides alphabetically arranged entries for more than 70 modern Irish writers. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of the author's major works and themes, an overview of the writer's critical reception, and a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. An opening essay surveys the critical response to Irish literature after 1885, and an extensive bibliography concludes the volume.

Since its creation in 1980 by actor Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) and playwright Brian Friel (Translation, Dancing at Lughnasa), Northern Ireland's Field Day Theatre Company has brought challenging drama to the entire island, "from Coleraine to Kerry." With the addition to the board of directors of poets and critics such as Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, and Seamus Deane, Field Day ventured into the realm of the more explicitly political with a controversial pamphlet series. Acting Between the Lines is a fascinating study of one of the most important developments in contemporary Irish culture.

A century ago this year, productions of W. B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen and Edward Martyn's The Heather Field inaugurated the Irish Literary Theatre, which was to take its name from its home in Abbey Street, Dublin. Despite riot, fire, and critical controversy, the Abbey Theatre has housed Ireland's National Theatre ever since: at once the catalyst and focus for the almost unprecedented renaissance of drama witnessed by Ireland in the twentieth century. This is the first history of the Abbey to discuss the plays and the personalities in their underlying historical and political context, to give due weight to the theatre's work in Irish, and to take stock of its artistic and financial development up to the present. The research for the book draws extensively on archive sources, especially the manuscript holdings on the Abbey at the National Library of Ireland. Many outstanding plays are examined, with detailed analysis of their form and their affective and emotional content; and persistent themes in the Abbey's output are identified - visions of an ideal community; the revival of Irish; the hunger for land and money; the restrictions of a society undergoing profound change. But these are integrated with accounts of the Abbey's people, from Yeats, Martyn, and Lady Gregory, whose brainchild it was, to the actors, playwrights, directors, and managers who have followed - among them the Fays, Synge, O'Casey, Murray, Robinson, Shiels, Johnston, Murphy, Molloy, Friel, McGuiness, Deevy, Carr, and many others. The role of directors and policy-makers, and the struggle for financial security, subsidy, and new-style 'partnerships', is discussed as a crucial part of the theatre's continuing evolution.