The Urban Plays of the Early Abbey Theatre PDF Download

Author: Elizabeth Mannion
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815653042
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Ireland’s Abbey Theatre was founded in 1904. Under the guidance of W. B. Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory it became instrumental to the success of many of the leading Irish playwrights and actors of the early twentieth century. Conventional wisdom holds that the playwright Sean O’Casey was the first to offer a new vision of Irish authenticity in the people and struggles of inner-city Dublin in his groundbreaking trilogy The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, and Juno and the Paycock. Challenging this view, Mannion argues that there was an established tradition of urban plays within the Abbey repertoire that has long been overlooked by critics. She seeks to restore attention to a lesser-known corpus of Irish urban plays, specifically those that appeared at the Abbey Theatre from the theatre’s founding until 1951, when the original theatre was destroyed by fire. Mannion illustrates distinct patterns within this Abbey urban genre and considers in particular themes of poverty, gender, and class. She provides historical context for the plays and considers the figures who helped shape the Abbey and this urban subset of plays. With detailed analysis of box office records and extensive appendixes of cast members and production schedules, this book offers a rich source of archival material as well as a fascinating revision to the story of this celebrated institution.

Author: Marina Carr
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571389198
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Book Description
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

Author: Michel Tremblay
Publisher: Nick Hern Books
ISBN: 9781848427440
Category : Female friendship
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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Book Description
Green Shield Stamps, a million of them, and Ger Lawless has won them all. It's Ballymun, it's 1974, and she has fifteen friends round for a stamp-sticking party. Over one fateful night, fifteen determined women bring you into their lives in this funny and furious new version of Michel Tremblay's fêted Québécoise comedy, Les Belles-Soeurs.

Author: Stephen Watt
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253214195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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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. On the occasion of the centenary of the first professional production of the Irish Literary Theatre, the contributors to this volume investigate contemporary Irish drama's aesthetic features and socio-political commitments and re-read the plays produced earlier in the century. Although these essayists cover a wide range of topics, from the productions and objectives of the Abbey Theatre's first rivals to mid-century theatre festivals, to plays about the "Troubles" in the North, they all reassess the oppositions so commonplace in critical discussions of Irish drama: nationalism vs. internationalism, high vs. low culture, urban experience vs. rural or peasant life. A Century of Irish Drama includes essays on such figures as W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, J. M. Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Christina Read, Martin McDonagh, and many more. Stephen Watt is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, and author of Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage, Joyce, O'Casey, and the Irish Popular Theatre, and essays on Irish and Irish-American culture. He has also written extensively on higher education, most recently Academic Keywords: A Devil's Dictionary for Higher Education (with Cary Nelson). Eileen M. Morgan is a lecturer in English and Irish Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is currently working on Sean O'Faolain's biographies of De Valera and on Edna O'Brien's 1990s trilogy, and is preparing a book-length study on the influence of radio in Ireland. Shakir Mustafa is a Visiting Instructor in the English department at Indiana University. His work has appeared in such journals as New Hibernia Review and The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, and he is now translating Arabic short stories into English. Drama and Performance Studies--Timothy Wiles, general editor

Author: Edna O'Brien
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780228015
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
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

Author: Sean O'Casey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ireland
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
The play examines the powerful force of political idealism and the lives of those swept up in its tide. It is the final play in Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy.

Author: Lee Coffey
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780573116407
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
'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.

Author: David Ireland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350096717
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Would you mind if I asked you a troubling question? Jay is the Oscar-winning actor taking the lead in a new play that connects with his Irish roots. Leigh is the ambitious director who will do anything to get noticed. Ruth is the Northern Irish playwright whose voice must be heard. The stage is set for great success, but when the three meet to discuss the play's challenges and provocations, a line is crossed and the heated discussion quickly escalates to a violent climax. Exploring consent, abuses of power and the confusions of cultural identity, Ulster American is confrontational, brutally funny and not for the faint of heart. David Ireland's recent plays include Cyprus Avenue which won the James Tait Black Award 2017 and Best Play at the Irish Times Theatre Awards 2017. This edition is published to coincide with the world premiere at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in summer 2018.

Author: Eileen Kearney
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652925
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Irish women dramatists have long faced an uphill challenge in getting the recognition and audience of their male counterparts. There are more female playwrights now than ever before, but they are often ignored by mainstream theatres. Kearney and Headrick strive to shift the spotlight with Irish Women Dramatists. The plays collected in this volume represent a cross-section of the excellent dramatic output of Irish women writing in the twentieth century. In addition to the scripts and biographical introductions, the anthology includes a detailed, critical, annotated essay addressing the development of the Irish theatre throughout this time period, and the place women have artistically carved out for themselves in a traditionally male-dominated theatre industry and dramatic canon. One of the few collections of plays by Irish women, this volume contextualizes the political and sociological climate in which these playwrights developed. As theatre practitioners—actors and directors—as well as scholars, Kearney and Headrick have devoted years of research to discovering and rediscovering the contributions these women have made—and continue to make—in the Irish and world theatre scenes.

Author: Louise O'Neill
Publisher: Quercus
ISBN: 1681445360
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
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.