Barry Houlihan – författare

Marking the 50th anniversary of one of the world’s leading theatre companies, this book collects six of its most impactful plays together in one volume for the first time. Druid Theatre is Ireland’s leading theatre company. Since their origin in 1975 they have surprised, delighted, and inspired audiences worldwide, touring from their home city of Galway in the west of Ireland to countless other locations nationally and internationally. Under the leadership of Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing, the company has revitalised the Irish dramatic tradition by staging seminal new plays and by breathing life into neglected classics. This anthology celebrates that tradition by gathering together six key plays from Druid’s fifty-year history. Featuring an exciting blend of established and unjustly forgotten playwrights this collection also provides insight into the company’s history. Edited by Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan, and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, each play is accompanied by a short introduction and production images (many of them never published before) from Druid’s archive at the University of Galway. The plays include: The Wood of the Whispering by MJ Molloy Same Old Moon by Geraldine Aron Conversations on a Homecoming by Tom Murphy At the Black Pig’s Dyke by Vincent Woods The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh The Beacon by Nancy Harris The selection of plays allows key themes from Druid’s history to be seen more clearly – to allow readers to understand how the company has so fearlessly charted the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic, the past and the present, and the individual and the wider society. It also presents six plays that are of huge value in their own right: these are original and daring dramas that have shaped and defined a half-century of Irish playwriting.

Marking the 50th anniversary of one of the world’s leading theatre companies, this book collects six of its most impactful plays together in one volume for the first time. Druid Theatre is Ireland’s leading theatre company. Since their origin in 1975 they have surprised, delighted, and inspired audiences worldwide, touring from their home city of Galway in the west of Ireland to countless other locations nationally and internationally. Under the leadership of Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing, the company has revitalised the Irish dramatic tradition by staging seminal new plays and by breathing life into neglected classics. This anthology celebrates that tradition by gathering together six key plays from Druid’s fifty-year history. Featuring an exciting blend of established and unjustly forgotten playwrights this collection also provides insight into the company’s history. Edited by Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan, and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, each play is accompanied by a short introduction and production images (many of them never published before) from Druid’s archive at the University of Galway. The plays include: The Wood of the Whispering by MJ Molloy Same Old Moon by Geraldine Aron Conversations on a Homecoming by Tom Murphy At the Black Pig’s Dyke by Vincent Woods The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh The Beacon by Nancy Harris The selection of plays allows key themes from Druid’s history to be seen more clearly – to allow readers to understand how the company has so fearlessly charted the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic, the past and the present, and the individual and the wider society. It also presents six plays that are of huge value in their own right: these are original and daring dramas that have shaped and defined a half-century of Irish playwriting.

Marking the 50th anniversary of one of the world''s leading theatre companies, this book collects six of its most impactful plays together in one volume for the first time. Druid Theatre is Ireland''s leading theatre company. Since their origin in 1975 they have surprised, delighted, and inspired audiences worldwide, touring from their home city of Galway in the west of Ireland to countless other locations nationally and internationally. Under the leadership of Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing, the company has revitalised the Irish dramatic tradition by staging seminal new plays and by breathing life into neglected classics. This anthology celebrates that tradition by gathering together six key plays from Druid''s fifty-year history. Featuring an exciting blend of established and unjustly forgotten playwrights this collection also provides insight into the company''s history. Edited by Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan, and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, each play is accompanied by a short introduction and production images (many of them never published before) from Druid''s archive at the University of Galway. The plays include: The Wood of the Whispering by MJ Molloy Same Old Moon by Geraldine Aron Conversations on a Homecoming by Tom Murphy At the Black Pig''s Dyke by Vincent Woods The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh The Beacon by Nancy Harris The selection of plays allows key themes from Druid''s history to be seen more clearly – to allow readers to understand how the company has so fearlessly charted the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic, the past and the present, and the individual and the wider society. It also presents six plays that are of huge value in their own right: these are original and daring dramas that have shaped and defined a half-century of Irish playwriting.

Marking the 50th anniversary of one of the world's leading theatre companies, this book collects six of its most impactful plays together in one volume for the first time. Druid Theatre is Ireland's leading theatre company. Since their origin in 1975 they have surprised, delighted, and inspired audiences worldwide, touring from their home city of Galway in the west of Ireland to countless other locations nationally and internationally. Under the leadership of Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing, the company has revitalised the Irish dramatic tradition by staging seminal new plays and by breathing life into neglected classics. This anthology celebrates that tradition by gathering together six key plays from Druid's fifty-year history. Featuring an exciting blend of established and unjustly forgotten playwrights this collection also provides insight into the company's history. Edited by Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan, and M ir ad N Chr in n, each play is accompanied by a short introduction and production images (many of them never published before) from Druid's archive at the University of Galway. The plays include: The Wood of the Whispering by MJ Molloy Same Old Moon by Geraldine Aron Conversations on a Homecoming by Tom Murphy At the Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh The Beacon by Nancy Harris The selection of plays allows key themes from Druid's history to be seen more clearly to allow readers to understand how the company has so fearlessly charted the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic, the past and the present, and the individual and the wider society. It also presents six plays that are of huge value in their own right: these are original and daring dramas that have shaped and defined a half-century of Irish playwriting.

This collection of essays by established McGahern scholars and others interested in his work was put together to assess the writer’s current status some 20 years after his death in 2006. The Companion covers various aspects of McGahern’s oeuvre: the reception of his books among readers and literary critics; his epistolary exchanges with publishers, friends and family, and the adaptations that have been done of a certain number of his works, most recently the film version of his novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2023). It seeks to explain the reasons why, during his career, McGahern became, in the words of Professor Declan Kiberd, ‘the greatest Irish prose writer in English of the latter half of the twentieth century’. The volume draws on the McGahern Archive at University of Galway, including previously unpublished images and material, enabling readers and scholars to engage with the processes and writing of McGahern in new ways. "The words of McGahern were etched onto every page, so we read them as a blind person reads braille. He was a stylist but one whose lines carried the imprint of lived, felt experience. The essays collected here are a worthy tribute to his remarkably European range of thought and feeling; and the multiple backgrounds of the essayists testify to an art in which every word speaks with powerful reticence to the world. Companionable yet also solitary, the writers unerringly and in astonishingly varied ways capture the lonely crowd which moves through his stories". Declan Kiberd, University of Notre Dame

This book presents new insights into the production and reception of Irish drama, its internationalisation and political influences, within a pivotal period of Irish cultural and social change. From the 1950s onwards, Irish theatre engaged audiences within new theatrical forms at venues from the Pike Theatre, the Project Arts Centre, and the Gate Theatre, as well as at Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey. Drawing on newly released and digitised archival records, this book argues for an inclusive historiography reflective of the formative impacts upon modern Irish theatre as recorded within marginalised performance histories. This study examines these works' experimental dramaturgical impacts in terms of production, reception, and archival legacies. The book, framed by the device of ‘archival memory’, serves as a means for scholars and theatre-makers to inter-contextualise existing historiography and to challenge canon formation. It also presents a new social history of Irish theatre told from the fringes of history and reanimated through archival memory.