Customer Reviews (1)

Nice book, though some odd choices of play
This book gathers together some half-dozen plays presented by Ireland's Abbey Theatre in the early 90s.The title is somewhat misleading, as all of the plays were presented at the Peacock, the Abbey's new writing stage. Its main purpose is to make the plays available to readers and potentialproducers, and in this it succeeds admirably, although there are a coupleof notable plays from the period that didn't get included, presumablybecause they were already available elsewhere.(This makes the volumesomewhat unrepresentative.) The plays themselves are of varying quality. Michael Harding's "Hubert Murray's Widow" is an interesting,darkly funny tragicomedy (or comitragedy) about a dead gunman and theevents surrounding, and after, his death; Donal O'Kelly's "Asylum!Asylum!" is a characteristically angry piece about the treatment of anAfrican refugee, written some time before the number of refugees in Irelandskyrocketed, and thus anticipating a major current social issue.TomMacIntyre's "Sheep's Milk on the Boil" is an impenetrable scrapof whimsy, and Niall Williams' "A Little Like Paradise" is asentimental mood piece about the West, the kind of play that has since beenstamped into a bloody pulp by the erratic genius of Martin McDonagh.NeilDonnelly's "The Duty Master" is dull but worthy, a portrait of anIrishman teaching in an English public school, and about as exciting as itsounds. There are some excellent production shots, but one is not toldwhich actor played which role and thus identifying what scene is beingdepicted is not easy.Plus, the American editor suffers from atoo-misty-eyed appreciation of Irish drama and the respective qualities ofthe plays, and tries to hard to fit them into the familiar canon.But auseful book, especially for those that want to put the plays on. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Slim volume, excellent pictures
As far as contemporary pictures goes, this book is fabulous. It shows costumes from diverse times and regions, and even mentions the Festival dancers, etc., and not just An Coimisuin (excuse my spelling if it isincorrect). As I mentioned in the title, the pages are few, but the size ofthe book is reflected in its price (LOW!). The content in terms of text isok; nothing was obviously inaccurate (unlike the arthur flynn ID book),and, even though the volume is brief, the text is fairly comprehensive. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A rebuttal
As an amateur dancer in Kansas City, MO, I can say that this book and Pat Murphy's "Toss the Feathers" are the two most well-thumbed reference texts in my dance class.I've been trying to get my own copy all year, but it's been on back-order since last St. Patrick's Day.If the reviewer from 12/22/00 has a better suggestion for reference material, I'm all ears.I hope to travel to Ireland within the next couple of years. When I do, I'd like to be able to ceili with other Irish locals like I know what I'm doing.

yikes...
as a competition irish dancer, i thought this book stunk.but i'm sure it was good from anyone elses point of view.i thought that more dances should be shown for the more advanced student...and if anyone knows of an advanced level irish dance book, let me know

Instruction Manual
A guide to Ceili, set and country dancing.Includes instructions for over 50 dances; such as, Aran set, Castle set, Four hand reel, Eight Hand Jig, Plain Polka set. ... Read more

Product Description
Dancing at the crossroads used to be young people´s opportunity to meet and enjoy themselves on mild summer evenings in the countryside in Ireland until this practice was banned by law, the Public Dance Halls Act in 1935. Now a key metaphor in Irish cultural and political life, ´dancing at the crossroads´ also crystallizes the argument of this book: Irish dance, from Riverdance (the commercial show) and competitive dancing to dance theatre, conveys that Ireland is to be found in a crossroads situation with a firm base in a distinctly Irish tradition which is also becoming a prominent part of European modernity. ... Read more

Book Description
This book traces a significant shift in 20th century Irish theatre from the largely national plays produced in Dublin to a more expansive international art form. Confirmed by the recent success outside of Ireland of the "third wave" of Irish playwrights writing in the 1990s, the new Irish drama has encouraged critics to reconsider both the early national theatre and the dramatic tradition it fostered. ... Read more

Book Description
Chris Morash's widely-praised account of Irish Theatre traces an often forgotten history leading up to the Irish Literary Revival. He follows that history to the present by creating a picture of the cultural contexts which produced the playwrights responsible for making Irish theatre's worldwide historical and contemporary reputation. This book is an essential guide to the history and performance of Irish theatre.Hb ISBN (2002): 0-521-64117-9 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good overview
A book like this has been long waited for. There is much here that is new to me and the fact that Irish theatre has such long roots is interesting. This is a good overview on Irish theatre but it is heavy at times and difficult to read. That is why I give it four stars and not five. ... Read more

Book Description
The essays in this collection cover the entire range of Irish drama, from the late nineteenth-century melodramas (anticipating the rise of the Abbey Theatre) to the contemporary Dublin of theater festivals.In addition to studies of individual playwrights, the collection includes an examination of the relationship between the theater and its political context as reflected through its ideology, staging and programming.Including a complete chronology and bibliography, this collection will be an important introduction to one of the world's most vibrant theater cultures. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A useful guide to what's been going in Irish theatre lately
Okay.I am slightly biased in my review of this book, for reasons which will become clear later on.First off, it should be said that it looks great; glossy and well-manufactured, on acid-free paper, it will last a good long while (though don't put it in your windowsill - I put my copy of the first volume there and it's paled noticeably.)

Judy Friel's short essay on Patrick Mason's tenure as artistic director of Ireland's national theatre is very good about Mason's sense of historical mission.He opened the theatre up to younger writers and actors, giving lucrative and welcome jobs to the many talented people that had arisen from the fringe theatre scene that exploded in Dublin in the early 90s.He also brought plays such as "Angels in America" to an audience that might never otherwise have seen them.(Not many saw "Angels" - scared off by the rumour of Gay People On Stage, they stayed away in droves and it bombed, which was a shame as it was a fine production, albeit only of Part 1.)

Michael Harding is an Abbey regular and "Sour Grapes" is his jaundiced look at the modern priesthood.Not entirely unexpectedly, he finds it riddled with cynicism, abuse of power and faithlessness.The play was intensely topical, because at the time it went on, the country was swamped with revelations (sic) about sexual abuse in the clergy.I find Harding's tone a bit dour and depressed, but there's no doubting the power of the piece, and it certainly reflects a changing attitude in Ireland towards the Catholic church.

Thomas Kilroy's "The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde" is an elegant meditation on the marriage of Oscar and Constance.It's a bit of a shadowplay, highly stylised, with masked puppetteers manipulating all the bit parts - the only speaking characters are Ozzie, his lady wife and his nemesis Lord Alfred Douglas, a handsome devil but by all accounts a truly appalling human being.(A recent biographer thought differently, but then said biographer was only 21 when the biography in question was published, so me may forgive him his youthful...well, ignorance.)Kilroy's conclusion is that Constance was a woman well and truly wronged, and it's hard to argue with that, although I don't know if this piece has the richness and conviction of some of his earlier work.

Alex Johnston's "Melonfarmer" is a sprawling monster of a piece that goes on much too long, but then it's a first play.(That's no excuse, mind.)I think the author spends a little too much time showing off his neat ear for the evasions and ellipses of youthful speech patterns, but there's a basic emotional honesty and a certain beady-eyed unsentimentality that readers may find refreshing.It has some moments of completely bizarre humour and an extremely nasty scene involving a bullet in the foot, both of which were thoroughly up my artistic street.If this writer worked a bit more on his stagecraft, he could get somewhere.I liked it a lot, but then, like I said at the top, I'm biased, cause - I wrote it.

Lastly, Marina Carr's "By the Bog of Cats" is a truly weird, slightly kitschy attempt to rewrite the Medea story as a domestic tragedy set in the Irish Midlands.This would be a great idea, except that Carr goes on to mess it up with a lot of musty sub-Yeatsian symbolism (black swans, ghosts, bogs) and a plot that is so plotted that you only really need to see the first scene to guess how it's all going to work out.But then, this kind of thing is just not for me.Carr is one of Ireland's leading playwrights, but the ends to which she uses her great gifts are getting increasingly obscure to me.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to have one of the writers review the book.All of these plays are eminently stageable, but I'll bet there's not a theatre out there that would want to do every one of them - except the Abbey, bless it.

Useful for producers, directors,students--and great reading!
NEW PLAYS FROM THE ABBEY THEATRE, Vol. 2, 1996-1998 is a welcome offering from editors Judy Friel and Sanford Sternlicht and from Syracuse University Press. Ms. Friel is a native of Derry, an alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin, and currently the literary manager of Ireland's National Theatre. Mr. Sternlicht is a professor of English at Syracuse University who also teaches Modern Irish Drama each summer at Trinity College. He has written extensively about English and Irish writers, and has many works in print, including A READER'S GUIDE TO MODERN IRISH DRAMA.

In NEW PLAYS... Vol. 2, the editors have provided a brief but informative introduction to modern Irish theatre. Ms. Friel gives an account of the revitalization of the National Theatre of Ireland in the 1990's by its artistic director, Patrick Mason, who examined the direction of the institution and returned it to its roots (those established by earlier Irish writers such as Yeats, J.M. Synge, and Lady Gregory), focusing on the responsibility of the Abbey Theatre to its Irish playwrights, who(to quote Yeats),
"bring to the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of Ireland."

The book contains complete plays by four of Ireland's greatest modern playwrights - in this volume they are Michael Harding (SOUR GRAPES),Thomas Kilroy (THE SECRET FALL OF CONSTANCE WILDE), Alex Johnston (MELONFARMERS), and Marina Carr (BY THE BOG OF CATS). Mr. Sternlicht provides concise biographical information on each playwright as well as a brief overview of each of their plays. The copyright and contact information for performance rights is listed on the last page.

SOUR GRAPES (Harding) is a fascinating but very sad play about pedophilia, homosexuality and the abuse of power in a Roman Catholic seminary setting, and how it drives a young seminarian to suicide. The young man's case is defended by a sympathetic priest, but the priest, not adept at investigation on a good day, is thwarted by all the other priests in the play including the Bishop and the Canon. The reader is forced to think about the effects of enforced celibacy, and the unholy attitudes/actions of most of the clergy are upsetting. The play jumps around a good deal in a sort of Joycean style. Its realism is jarring(but not surprising, as Harding is a former Catholic preist). The plays powerful statements leaves this reader feeling rather beaten down and exhausted. It certainly speaks to modern issues.

THE SECRET FALL OF CONSTANCE WILDE (Kilroy), written by one of Ireland's most distinguished writers is a sensitive historicalaccounting of the tragic downfall of Oscar Wilde and his wife, Constance. She is brought out from beneath the shadow of her famous and brilliant husband, and the play clearly elucidates her grief -- over her own past (suggestions of abuse at the hands of her father); over her loss of Oscar to his lover, the cruel and unstable Lord Alfred Douglas; over Oscar's very public prison sentence and her own fall in society's eyes; over her own torment at keeping their own two children away from Oscar, who desperately wants contact with them. She died at age 40, a broken shell, and Oscar followed her in death two years after. The play is presented with a chorus of attendants, Greek-style, and with some scenes including puppetry and some Kabuki effects, as in Noh theatre. It is relentlessly honest in its portrayal of the love triangle, the ambiguities of sexual identity, and the pain caused when families are broken. It is a sad but very moving work.

MELONFARMER (Johnston) is not at all about melon farmers. It is a cinema-verite look at 1990's life in urban Ireland for eight young adults, all trying to find their way in our faster-than-light, information-drenched world. They are negotiating as best they can the new sexuality, the loosening hold of the Church and the old traditional values .. and getting by in life as best they can, which sometimes means just getting by. Sean Spencer, the central character, a would-be comedian, gradually descends into drink and depression. The play is fast-paced, and has moments of hilarity. The opening had me laughing out loud. The play is tragicomic, like life. Playwright Alex Johnston is the grandson of the O'Casey-era Denis Johnston,
and his talent shines through every scene. As in the other plays presented in this book, the realism is gritty and in-your-face.
It stays with you. As Sternlicht states, it's a revelation to a middle-class, middle aged reader such as myself. [Note: the script presented is the 1997 original version for the Peacock Theatre. It has since been revised for a 2000 production, and the latter is the definitive version, per the playwright.]

Last, but not least at all, is BY THE BOG OF CATS (Carr). Ms. Carr is Ireland's leading woman playwright, and a most successful one. After reading her play, I am not surprised. Its power was so strong as to be assaulting. I was horrified by the plot and the bloodiness, but mesmerized despite myself, and I quite literally could not put it down without finishing it.
I can only imagine how powerful this would be on stage, after having it jump off the page at me from a book! It gives you chills. I don't want to give the story away. I will say that it is as strong as a Greek tragedy, and is written that way. But the characters are so real!

This is a most welcome addition to the study of Irish theatre. ... Read more

Book Description
The correlation between the sensibility and the environment of an artist has been pivotal to critical debate for centuries and will continue to be so as long as the creative impulse and its expression remains an inexorable fact of life. This book makes its own peculiar contribution to the debate in the context of a comparative study of the theater of W.B. Yeats and Wole Soyinka, prominent artists from quite different environments and time frames, with reference to their major plays. It argues that when faced with particularized national experiences, both artists adopted similar as well as contrasting approaches to expressing their reaction.

Both turned to theater, adjudged the most revolutionary form of communication known because of its psychical as well as visual audience affective properties, to express an ontological and universal vision of the individual, who is projected as a tragic figure in the dance of life. Yeats and Soyinka immerse themselves in the complex traditional matrix of their respective societies but marry this matrix with Western theatrical thought and conventions dating from ancient Greece. Myth is the language of expression in these plays, with ritual providing the structural framework for the dance of transition, which invariably creates opportunities for a re-evaluation of values essential for the continuity of life.

The composite that emerges from the integration of disparate traditions is at once highly nationalistic and universal, endorsing the idea of a contiguity of worlds taken to its logical conclusion in our present Age of Information. ... Read more

Book Description
1903. After spending a great deal of time in the countryside of Ireland, Yeats began to forget the true countenance of country life. The old tales were still alive for him, but with new, strange, half unreal life, as if in a wizard's glass. His head was so full of fables that he no longer has the knowledge and emotion to write. Then Lady Gregory brought him along to see her friends in the cottages and to talk to old wise men on Slieve Echtage. Thus he began to write again with the true Irish spirit, this play being one written especially for the Irish theatre. ... Read more

Book Description
1912. This work is the First Series. It contains the three Irish tragedies entitled: Grania, Kincora and Devorgilla. ... Read more

Book Description
Employing previously unexamined archival material, Paige Reynolds reconstructs five large-scale public events in early twentieth-century Irish culture: the riotous premiere of J. M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1907; the events of Dublin Suffrage Week, including the Irish premiere of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, in 1913; the funeral processions of the playwright and Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney in 1920; the sporting and arts competitions of the Tailteann Games in 1924; and the organized protests accompanying the premiere of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars in 1926. The book provides attentive readings of the literature and theatre famously produced in tandem with these events, as well as introducing surprising texts that made valuable contributions to Irish national theatre. This detailed study revises pessimistic explanations of twentieth-century mass politics and crowd dynamics by introducing a more sympathetic account of national communities and national sentiment. ... Read more