Patrick Lonergan - Böcker

Globalization is transforming theatre everywhere. As writers seek to exploit new opportunities to produce their work internationally, audiences are seeing the world and the stage differently. This groundbreaking study explores these developments, placing them in the context of the transformation of Ireland since the early 1990s.

Globalization is transforming theatre everywhere. As writers seek to exploit new opportunities to produce their work internationally, audiences are seeing the world and the stage differently. This groundbreaking study explores these developments, placing them in the context of the transformation of Ireland since the early 1990s.

The Lonesome West was first presented as a Druid Theatre company and Royal Court co-production in the summer of 1997. 'The play combines manic energy and physical violence in a way that is both hilarious and viscerally exciting' Daily Telegraph Valene and Coleman, two brothers living alone in their father's house after his recent death, find it impossible to exist without massive and violent disputes over the most mundane and innocent of topics. Only father Welsh, the local young priest, is prepared to try to reconcile the two before their petty squabblings spiral into vicious and bloody carnage.

A guide to all of the plays of Martin Crimp. For a decade, Martin Crimp has been in the vanguard of new writing for the British stage. His main stage plays include Dealing with Clair, The Treatment, Attempts on Her Life, The Country, and Cruel and Tender, with his 1997 masterpiece, Attempts on Her Life, arguably being one of the best plays of the past quarter century. By the author of the landmark study of contemporary British drama, In-Yer-Face Theatre, this is the first study of Martin Crimp's work for stage and radio. Arguing that Crimp is one of the most acute satirists of contemporary British society, Aleks Sierz provides an accessible and fascinating account of the playwright's work. As well as an account of each of Crimp's plays and an analysis of his oeuvre, the volume includes a wide-ranging interview with Crimp himself and interviews with all the key directors responsible for staging his work, including Sam Walters, Katie Mitchell, James Mcdonald and Lindsay Posner.

This Element argues that the climate emergency requires a new approach to the study of theatre history - a suggestion that is developed through an analysis of the practice of theatrical revival during the Anthropocene era. Staging old plays in new ways can make visible ecological or environmental features that might have previously gone unnoticed: features which, in some cases, might not have been consciously included by the original authors or makers of a work, but which will be detectable to audiences nevertheless. These links are explored through case studies from the contemporary Irish theatre - including revivals of plays by Shakespeare, Lady Gregory, and Samuel Beckett, as performed by such major Irish companies as Rough Magic, Druid Theatre, and Company SJ. The Element ultimately shows how theatre can contribute to debates about the Anthropocene, and offers new pathways for theatre practice and criticism.

Sarah Ruhl is one of the most highly-acclaimed and frequently-produced American playwrights of the 21st century. Author of eighteen plays and the essay collection 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, she has won a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award, been nominated for a Tony Award for In the Next Room or the vibrator play and twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for The Clean House and In the Next Room. Ruhl is a writer unafraid of the soul. She writes not about “this or that issue,” but “about being,” creating plays that ask “big questions about death, love, and how we should treat each other in this lifetime.” In this volume, Amy Muse situates Ruhl as an artist-thinker and organizes her work around its artistic and ethical concerns. Through a finely-grained account of each play, readers are guided through Ruhl’s early influences, the themes of intimacy, transcendence, and communion, and her inventive stagecraft to dramatize “moments of being” onstage. Enriched by essays from scholars Jill Stevenson, Thomas Butler, and Christina Dokou, an interview with directors Sarah Rasmussen and Hayley Finn, and a chronology of Ruhl’s life and work, this is a companionable guide for students of American drama and theatre studies.Amy Muse specializes in dramatic literature and performance studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she is Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department. She is the author of “Sarah Ruhl’s Sex Ed for Grownups” (Text & Presentation 2013) and essays on Romantic drama, intimate theatre, female Hamlets, and travel in Romantic Circles, Romanticism: The Journal of Romantic Culture & Criticism, Frontiers, and other journals. METHUEN DRAMA CRITICAL COMPANIONSSeries Editors: Patrick Lonergan (National University of Ireland, Galway)and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. (Loyola Marymount University, USA)

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 2018The Theatre of Eugene O'Neill offers a new comprehensive overview of O'Neill's career and plays in the context of the American theatre. Organised thematically, it considers his modernist intervention in the theatre, offers readers detailed analysis of the plays, and assesses the recent resurgence in his reputation and new approaches to staging his work. It includes a study of all his major plays—The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten and Desire Under the Elms—besides numerous other full length and one act dramas.Eugene O’Neill is generally credited with inventing modern American drama, in a time of cultural ferment and lively artistic and intellectual change. Yet O’Neill’s theatrical instincts were always shaped by American stage traditions that were inextricable from his sense of himself and his own national culture. This study shows that his theatrical modernism represents not so much a break from these traditions as a reinvention of their scope and significance in the context of international stage modernism, offering an image of national culture and character that opens new possibilities for the stage while remaining rooted in its past.Kurt Eisen traces O'Neill's modernism throughout the dramatists's work: his attempts to break from the themes, plots, and moral conventions of the traditional melodramatic theatre; his experiments in stagecraft and theme, and their connection to traditional theatre and his European modernist contemporaries; the turn toward direct and indirect self-representation; and his critique of the family and of American 'pipe dreams' and the allure of success. The volume additionally features four contributed essays providing further critical perspectives on O'Neill's work, alongside a chronology of the writer's life and times.

Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group - which includes Arabs, Armenians, Iranians, Jews, and Turks - and religions that include the Baha'i faith, Christianity, Chaldean, Druze, Ishik Alevism, Judaism, Islam, Mandaeism, Samaratin, Shabakism, Yazidi, and Zoroastrianism - the rich and paradoxical nature of the term 'Middle Eastern' is interrogated through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora. Featuring a clear introduction and examination of the context and the various push and pull factors that have contributed to the mass migrations to North America - including the so-called “Great Migration” of 1890-1915, the Armenian Genocide, the European Holocaust, the two world wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and other social and political conflicts. With chapters devoted to Arab American, Israeli American, Iranian American and Turkish American theatre, Middle Eastern American Theatre traces the history and examines the work of key artists and directors including Heather Raffo, Yussef El Guindi, Jamil Khoury, Mona Mansour, Danny Bryck, Ken Kaissar, Ari Roth, Torange Yeghiazarian, Reza Abdoh, Sedef Ecer, Torange Yeghiazarian, of Golden Thread Productions, and Jamil Khoury, of Silk Road Rising. The volume provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of millions of Middle Eastern Americans, and how they have contributed to American theatre today.

Celebrating the work of one of Ireland’s most daring theatre companies, this anthology gathers five plays by established and emerging playwrights. They include vibrant new adaptations of the world classics Peer Gynt and Phaedra alongside vital new dramas that explore issues of urgent contemporary concern, such as sex and sexuality, emigration and climate change. With contributions from Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch, Arthur Riordan, Sonya Kelly, Morna Regan, and Shane Mac an Bhaird – as well as a foreword from Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright - this book is an exciting snapshot of contemporary Irish playwriting. The book operates as a showcase of outstanding new Irish playwriting, blending work by established and emerging playwrights, and also acts as a celebration of one of Ireland’s most important theatre companies. And it includes new plays that demonstrate Rough Magic’s consistent willingness to push the boundaries of Irish theatre, both formally and thematically, in plays that cover such topics as sex and sexuality, emigration and climate change.This edition contains a foreword by Anne Enright, Booker prize winner and Laureate of Irish Fiction.

Celebrating the work of one of Ireland’s most daring theatre companies, this anthology gathers five plays by established and emerging playwrights. They include vibrant new adaptations of the world classics Peer Gynt and Phaedra alongside vital new dramas that explore issues of urgent contemporary concern, such as sex and sexuality, emigration and climate change. With contributions from Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch, Arthur Riordan, Sonya Kelly, Morna Regan, and Shane Mac an Bhaird – as well as a foreword from Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright - this book is an exciting snapshot of contemporary Irish playwriting. The book operates as a showcase of outstanding new Irish playwriting, blending work by established and emerging playwrights, and also acts as a celebration of one of Ireland’s most important theatre companies. And it includes new plays that demonstrate Rough Magic’s consistent willingness to push the boundaries of Irish theatre, both formally and thematically, in plays that cover such topics as sex and sexuality, emigration and climate change.This edition contains a foreword by Anne Enright, Booker prize winner and Laureate of Irish Fiction.

The spellbinding premiere of The Weir at the Royal Court in 1997 was the first of many works to bring Conor McPherson to the attention of the theatre-going public. Acclaimed plays followed, including Shining City, The Seafarer, The Night Alive and Girl from the North Country, garnering international acclaim and being regularly produced around the globe. McPherson has also had significant successes as a theatre director, film director and screenwriter, most notably, with his award-winning screenplay for I Went Down.This companion offers a detailed and engaging critical analysis of the plays and films of Conor McPherson. It considers issues of gender and class disparity, violence and wealth in the cultural and political contexts in whichthe work is written and performed, as well as the inclusion of song, sound, the supernatural, religious and pagan festive sensibilities through which initial genre perceptions are nudged elsewhere, towards the unconscious andineffable. Supplemented by a number of contributed critical and performance perspectives, including an interview with Conor McPherson, this is a book to be read by theatre audiences, performance-makers and students who wish to explore, contextualize and situate McPherson’s provocative, exquisite and generation-defining writings and performances.

Middle Eastern American Theatre explores the burgeoning Middle Eastern American theatre movement with a focus on Arab American, Jewish American, Armenian American, Iranian American, and Turkish American theatres, playwrights, directors, and actors. By exploring the rich religious and cultural heritage of this diverse group - which includes Arabs, Armenians, Iranians, Jews, and Turks - and religions that include the Baha'i faith, Christianity, Chaldean, Druze, Ishik Alevism, Judaism, Islam, Mandaeism, Samaratin, Shabakism, Yazidi, and Zoroastrianism - the rich and paradoxical nature of the term 'Middle Eastern' is interrogated through the dramas written and performed by those in the Diaspora. Featuring a clear introduction and examination of the context and the various push and pull factors that have contributed to the mass migrations to North America - including the so-called “Great Migration” of 1890-1915, the Armenian Genocide, the European Holocaust, the two world wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and other social and political conflicts. With chapters devoted to Arab American, Israeli American, Iranian American and Turkish American theatre, Middle Eastern American Theatre traces the history and examines the work of key artists and directors including Heather Raffo, Yussef El Guindi, Jamil Khoury, Mona Mansour, Danny Bryck, Ken Kaissar, Ari Roth, Torange Yeghiazarian, Reza Abdoh, Sedef Ecer, Torange Yeghiazarian, of Golden Thread Productions, and Jamil Khoury, of Silk Road Rising. The volume provides readers with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of millions of Middle Eastern Americans, and how they have contributed to American theatre today.

Simon Stephens is one of Europe’s pre-eminent living playwrights. Since the beginning of his career in 1998, Stephens’s award-winning plays have been translated into over twenty languages, been produced on four continents, and continue to feature prominently in the repertoires of European theatre. His original works have garnered numerous awards, with his stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time winning seven Olivier Awards and enjoying acclaim on Broadway.In the first book to provide a critical account of Stephens’s work, Jacqueline Bolton draws upon the playwright’s unpublished personal archives, as well as original interviews with directors and actors, to advance detailed analyses of his original plays and their productions, examine contemporary approaches to playwriting, and deliver insights into broader debates regarding text, performance and authorship. Caridad Svich addresses Stephens’s theatrical output between 2014 and 2019, and essays from Mireia Aragay and James Hudson provide additional perspectives on international productions and the playwright’s adaptive practices. Andrew Haydon’s edited interviews with six of Stephens’s key collaborators – Marianne Elliott, Sarah Frankcom, Sean Holmes, Ramin Gray, Katie Mitchell and Carrie Cracknell – further illuminate the work from a director’s viewpoint.The Theatre of Simon Stephens situates the playwright’s oeuvre within his embrace of aesthetics and working relations encountered in European theatre cultures, focusing in particular upon shifting attitudes towards the function of the playwright, the relationship between playwrights and directors, and the role of the audience in live performance.The Companion serves as a lively and engaging study of one of the most restlessly creative and important dramatists of our generation.

In this volume, Lee Brewer Jones examines Paula Vogel as both a playwright and renowned teacher, analyzing texts and early reviews of Vogel’s major plays—including Indecent, Desdemona, How I Learned to Drive, and The Baltimore Waltz—before turning attention to her influence upon other major American playwrights, including Sarah Ruhl, Lynn Nottage, and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Chapters explore Vogel’s plays in chronological order, consider her early influences and offer detailed accounts of her work in performance. Enriched by an interview with Lynn Nottage and essays from scholars Ana Fernández-Caparrós and Amy Muse, this is a vibrant exploration of Paula Vogel as a major American playwright.By the time Paula Vogel made her Broadway debut with her 2017 Rebecca Taichman collaboration Indecent, she was already an accomplished playwright, with a Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive (1998) and two Obie Awards. She had also enjoyed a brilliant career as a professor at Brown and Yale with students such as Sarah Ruhl, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant winner, Pulitzer Prize winners Nilo Cruz, Quiara Alegría Hudes, and the only woman to win two Pulitzers for Drama, Lynn Nottage. Vogel’s theatre draws upon Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky and uses devices such as “defamiliarization” and “negative empathy” to challenge conventional definitions of protagonists and antagonists.

In the first book-length study of Annie Baker, one of the most critically acclaimed playwrights in the United States today and winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Amy Muse analyzes Baker’s plays and other work. These include The Flick, John, The Antipodes, the Shirley Vermont plays, and her adaptation of Uncle Vanya. Muse illuminates their intellectual and ethical themes and issues by contextualizing them with the other works of theatre, art, theology, and psychology that Baker read while writing them.Through close discussions of Baker’s work, this book immerses readers in her use of everyday language, her themes of loneliness, desire, empathy, and storytelling, and her innovations with stage time. Enriched by a foreword from Baker’s former professor, playwright Mac Wellman, as well as essays by four scholars, Thomas Butler, Jeanmarie Higgins, Katherine Weiss, and Harrison Schmidt, this is a companionable guide for students of American literature and theatre studies, which deepens their knowledge and appreciation of Baker’s dramatic invention.Muse argues that Baker is finely attuned to the language of the everyday: imperfect, halting, marked with unexpressed desires, banalities, and silence. Called “antitheatrical,” these plays draw us back to the essence of theatre: space, time, and story, sitting with others in real time, witnessing the dramatic in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Baker’s revolution for the stage has been to slow it down and bring us all into the mystery and pleasure of attention.

In the first book-length study of Annie Baker, one of the most critically acclaimed playwrights in the United States today and winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur “genius” grant, Amy Muse analyzes Baker’s plays and other work. These include The Flick, John, The Antipodes, the Shirley Vermont plays, and her adaptation of Uncle Vanya. Muse illuminates their intellectual and ethical themes and issues by contextualizing them with the other works of theatre, art, theology, and psychology that Baker read while writing them.Through close discussions of Baker’s work, this book immerses readers in her use of everyday language, her themes of loneliness, desire, empathy, and storytelling, and her innovations with stage time. Enriched by a foreword from Baker’s former professor, playwright Mac Wellman, as well as essays by four scholars, Thomas Butler, Jeanmarie Higgins, Katherine Weiss, and Harrison Schmidt, this is a companionable guide for students of American literature and theatre studies, which deepens their knowledge and appreciation of Baker’s dramatic invention.Muse argues that Baker is finely attuned to the language of the everyday: imperfect, halting, marked with unexpressed desires, banalities, and silence. Called “antitheatrical,” these plays draw us back to the essence of theatre: space, time, and story, sitting with others in real time, witnessing the dramatic in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Baker’s revolution for the stage has been to slow it down and bring us all into the mystery and pleasure of attention.

Verse drama is not a dead form, but very much alive on the contemporary stage. Drawing on plays from throughout the English-speaking world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Caribbean, Staging the Lyric seeks to explain the 21st-century resurgence of Anglophone verse drama, tracing it back to an experimental impulse that is present in the modernist verse drama of a century ago.Covering major writers including Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Sayers, Djuna Barnes, and Ntozake Shange, it also encompasses lesser known and more recent poets and playwrights. This modern verse drama differs from its ancient and Elizabethan antecedents as it is understood not as a genre in its own right, but as a hybrid of the lyric and the dramatic. Both modernist and contemporary writers take advantage of this hybridity as fertile ground for experimentation. While they differ in their ideology and form, this book contends that they are united by exploring the relationship between lyric and dramatic elements on stage and what these two different modes afford. To demonstrate this continuity, it traces a genealogy from contemporary plays by Joanna Laurens, Joyelle McSweeney, and David Grieg back to W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, to reveal that the tensions that animate verse drama have stayed the same, even as the strategies for staging them have evolved.The book is divided into three sections—‘Voice,’ ‘Words,’ and ‘Time’—each treating one feature that has been used to define the lyric. Within these sections, the chapters compare contemporary plays with modernist ones that experiment with the same point of tension between the lyric and the dramatic.

Verse drama is not a dead form, but very much alive on the contemporary stage. Drawing on plays from throughout the English-speaking world, including the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Caribbean, Staging the Lyric seeks to explain the 21st-century resurgence of Anglophone verse drama, tracing it back to an experimental impulse that is present in the modernist verse drama of a century ago.Covering major writers including Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett, Dorothy Sayers, Djuna Barnes, and Ntozake Shange, it also encompasses lesser known and more recent poets and playwrights. This modern verse drama differs from its ancient and Elizabethan antecedents as it is understood not as a genre in its own right, but as a hybrid of the lyric and the dramatic. Both modernist and contemporary writers take advantage of this hybridity as fertile ground for experimentation. While they differ in their ideology and form, this book contends that they are united by exploring the relationship between lyric and dramatic elements on stage and what these two different modes afford. To demonstrate this continuity, it traces a genealogy from contemporary plays by Joanna Laurens, Joyelle McSweeney, and David Grieg back to W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, to reveal that the tensions that animate verse drama have stayed the same, even as the strategies for staging them have evolved.The book is divided into three sections—‘Voice,’ ‘Words,’ and ‘Time’—each treating one feature that has been used to define the lyric. Within these sections, the chapters compare contemporary plays with modernist ones that experiment with the same point of tension between the lyric and the dramatic.

How does theatre, one of the most ancient and physical arts, relate to the modern, dynamic technology that is social media? How have changes in the use of social media affected the theatre? How does social media itself operate as a performance space?Used daily by many, social media has become one of the main mediums through which we present and perform our lives. In this concise study of the revealing relationship between theatre and social media, Patrick Lonergan considers social media as a performance space, analyses how theatre-makers' engagement with social media on and off stage affects elements of theatrical composition and reception, and explores the practical and conceptual implications of audiences interacting with professional productions through social media.Exploring case studies from Shakespearean performance to Broadway musicals, this revised edition explores new approaches to social media and theatre, asking how new platforms can influence, and even create, theatre productions.

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.

Introduced by Patrick Lonergan, The Methuen Drama Anthology of Irish Plays brings together five major works from the Irish dramatic canon of the last sixty years in one outstanding collection. Behan's The Hostage, depicting the capture and death of a British soldier by the IRA, was first produced by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop in 1958 and was declared 'a masterpiece' by The Times. Murphy's Bailegangaire (1985) portrays a senile old woman's recitation of an epic tale to her two granddaughters who struggle to free themselves from her and exorcise the past. Reid's The Belle of the Belfast City, winner of the George Devine Award in 1986, examines the tensions present in three generations of women in a Belfast-Protestant family during the week of an anti-Anglo-Irish rally. Sebastian Barry's The Steward of Christendom won the London Critics' Circle Award for Best Play 1995 and was heralded by the Guardian as 'an authentic masterpiece'. McDonagh's 1996 play The Cripple of Inishmaan is a strange comic tale in the great tradition of Irish storytelling. McDonagh was awarded the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.

'There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore...Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point...a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots in the last century' Guardian 'A brave satire...Swiftianly savage and parodic...with explicit brutal actino and lines which sing with grace and wit' Observer Who knocked Mad Padraic's cat over on a lonely road on the island of Inishmore and was it an accident? He'll want to know when he gets back from a stint of torture and chip-shop bombing in Northern Ireland: he loves his cat more than life itself. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a brilliant satire on terrorism, a powerful corrective to the beautification of violence in contemporary culture, and a hilarious farce. It premiered at the RSC's The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in May 2001. Commentary and notes by Patrick Lonergan

This Student Edition features expert and helpful annotation, including a scene-by-scene summary, a detailed commentary on the dramatic, social and political context, and on the themes, characters, language and structure of the play, as well a list of suggested reading and questions for further study and a review of performance history. The Lonesome West was first presented as a Druid Theatre company and Royal Court co-production in the summer of 1997, and is the final part of McDonagh's Leenane trilogy. This edition explores the play's substantial themes and textured controversy, which make it such a popular choice to study: the Catholic Church is exposed as irrelevant and powerless and the characters have a dangerously skewed sense of morality. The text is full of McDonagh's characteristic combination of farce, aggression and wit. The plot follows two brothers, Valene and Coleman, living alone in their father's house after his recent death. They find it impossible to exist without massive and violent disputes over the most mundane and innocent of topics.Only Father Welsh, the local young priest, is prepared to try to reconcile the two before their petty squabblings spiral into vicious and bloody carnage. Martin McDonagh is the most controversial Irish dramatist working today, with his explorations of Irish national identity which look at the darker side of provincial life. His bleak but blackly comic portrayal of modern, rural Ireland courts debate with its dark farce, caricatures of violence and barbarism and an exaggerated, poeticised dialect of Hiberno-English.

Martin McDonagh is one of the world's most popular dramatists. This is a highly readable and illuminating analysis of his career to date that will appeal to the legions of fans of his stage plays and the films Six Shooter and In Bruges. As a resource for students and practitioners it is unrivalled, providing an authoritative and enquiring approach to his work that moves beyond the tired discussions of national identity to offer a comprehensive critical exploration. Patrick Lonergan provides a detailed analysis of each of his plays and films, their original staging, critical reception, and the connections within and between the Leenane Trilogy, the Aran Islands plays and more recent work. It includes an interview with Garry Hynes, artistic director of Druid Theatre Company, and offers four critical essays on key features of McDonagh's work by leading international scholars: Joan Dean, Eamonn Jordan, Jose Lanters and Karen O'Brien. A series of further resources including a chronology, glossary, notes on McDonagh's use of language and a list of further reading makes this the perfect companion to one of the most exciting dramatists writing today.

David Greig has been described as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation' (Daily Telegraph) and 'one of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around' (Guardian). Since he began writing for theatre in the early nineties, his work has been both copious and remarkably varied, defying neat generalisations or attempts to pigeon-hole his work. Besides his original plays, he has adapated classics, is co-founder of the Suspect Culture Theatre Group and is currently Dramaturge for the National Theatre of Scotland. This Critical Companion provides an analytical survey of his work, from his early plays such as Europe and The Architect through to more recent works Damascus, Dunsinane and Ramallah; it also considers the plays produced with Suspect Culture and his work for young audiences. As such it is the first book to provide a critical account of the full variety of his work and will appeal to students and fans of contemporary British theatre.Clare Wallace provides a detailed analysis of a broad selection of plays and their productions, reviews current discourses about his work and offers a framework for enquiry. The Companion features an interview with David Greig and a further three essays by leading academics offering a variety of critical perspectives.

Martin McDonagh is one of the world's most popular dramatists. This is a highly readable and illuminating account of his career to date that will appeal to the legions of fans of his work for the stage and of his films Six Shooter and In Bruges. As a resource for students and practitioners it is unrivalled, providing an authoritative and enquiring approach to his work that moves beyond the tired discussions of national identity to offer a comprehensive critical exploration. Lonergan provides a detailed analysis of each of his plays and films, their original staging, critical reception, and the connections within and between the Leenane Trilogy, the Aran Islands plays and more recent work. It includes interviews with directors, designers and actors associated with his work and material from Druid Theatre Company, the RSC and the National Theatre relating to the original productions. It offers four critical essays on key features of McDonagh's work by leading international scholars and a series of further resources including a chronology, glossary, notes on McDonagh's use of language and a list of further reading.

British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why, presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped the work that followed. Rebecca D’Monte examines how the emphasis upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the neglect of much of the century’s earlier drama, positioning the book as part of the current debate about the relationship between war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography.In a comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers:- the Edwardian theatre;- the theatre of the First World War, including propaganda and musicals;-the interwar years, the rise of commercial theatre and influence of Modernism;- the theatre of the Second World War and post-war period.Essays from leading scholars Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further critical perspectives on the period’s theatre and demonstrate its relevance to the drama of today.For anyone studying 20th-century British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.

British theatre from 1900 to 1950 has been subject to radical re-evaluation with plays from the period setting theatres alight and gaining critical acclaim once again; this book explains why, presenting a comprehensive survey of the theatre and how it shaped the work that followed. Rebecca D’Monte examines how the emphasis upon the working class, 'angry' drama from the 1950s has led to the neglect of much of the century’s earlier drama, positioning the book as part of the current debate about the relationship between war and culture, the middlebrow, and historiography.In a comprehensive survey of the period, the book considers:- the Edwardian theatre;- the theatre of the First World War, including propaganda and musicals;-the interwar years, the rise of commercial theatre and influence of Modernism;- the theatre of the Second World War and post-war period.Essays from leading scholars Penny Farfan, Steve Nicholson and Claire Cochrane give further critical perspectives on the period’s theatre and demonstrate its relevance to the drama of today.For anyone studying 20th-century British Drama this will prove one of the foundational texts.