Drama
Fishamble Firsts: An Anthology of First Plays by New Playwrights
Jim Culleton (ed)
'Without Fishamble, Irish theatre would be anaemic' Brian Friel
'Fishamble puts electricity into the national grid of dreams' Sebastian Barry
Cell
Paula Meehan
We are all prisoners in one way or another; Prisoners of our families, our class, our own fears and dreams, our actions. Three women of different ages from Dublin's inner city, imprisoned for drug offences, have made a world of sorts for themselves, one with its own desperate rules and conventions. But their world within a world collapses when an apparently naive country worman, found guilty of murder is sent to share their cell.
Cell was short-listed for best new play in the 1999 Irish Times Theatre Awards.
Long Black Coat
Long Black Coat, John Waters' remarkable first play (writeen in association with its director, David Byrne) explores the relationship between a father and son, who-on the eve of a possible nuclear war-hole themselves up in a primitive fall-out shelter, built to the specifications of a surreal 1960s Irish Government Civil Defence booklet.
Observatory
Daragh Carville
Daragh Carville's play Observatory is set at the Armagh Observatory and Museum for Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in both 1799 and 1999. Historian Jon McKenna, hired to compile a computerised catalogue of the Observatory archives, finds his life becoming entangled with that of Nicola McLoughlin, assistant astronomer at the Observatory. Together they work to uncover the two-hundred-year-old story of astonomer Archibald Hamilton and his assistant ROber Hogg-man of science, man of God, and revolutionary.
A Dublin Bloom
In 1994 the Dublin novelist and playwright Dermot Bolger was commissioned to adapt the novel Ulysses for the stage as the centrepiece of Philadelphia's celebration of the 90th Bloomsday. A Dublin Bloom is the text of that commission, a dramatic dream-like recreation of Mr. Bloom's journey through that most significant Dublin day.
The Passion of Jerome
Jerome Furlong is a successful businessman, whose life has been carefully constructed from layer upon layer of lies. That is until, in the squalid flat is using to have an affair, he is suddenly confronted with a manifestation of the supernatural beyond both his comprehension and contol.
Judas of the Gallarus
Kerry, April 1923-the tail end of the Irish Civil war-and deserter Jock McPeak from Glasgow wants to get our of Ireland. IRA man Duv brings him to Paddo's Gallarus, a clifftop stone cell, to hide while waiting for a boat to take him home. But is there any boat? Jock's night of waiting takes a significant turn with the visit of Noreen, a local schoolteacher. A night of tragi-comic passion unravels, as Jock is plunged into a masque of deceit, seduction, intrigue and betrayal.
A Radical Guide to Macbeth & Hamlet
In this provocative but scholarly guide to two Shakespearean tragedies on the Leaving Cert course, Finan O'Toole-Ireland's foremost theatre critic-shows how Macbeth and Hamlet have been made unintelligible to modern students by being filtered through outdated concepts that have nothing to do with what Bard wrote, and often everything to do with keeping the world safe for conservative values.
