From Booklist
Like O'Casey and Synge before him, John B. Keane, currently one of the most popular writers being produced at Dublin's Abbey Theater, shows an Ireland far removed from the romantic Emerald Isle of travel articles. Keane's Irish live in the hardscrabble world of provincial rural Ireland, where life is difficult and money is always scarce. The three plays that make up this collection present different facets of this brutal setting. In Sive, Keane shows us a young woman, "the flower of the parish," crushed by her materialistic family. In The Field, which was made into a successful movie starring Richard Harris, we see the lengths a local bully of a farmer will go to get a small piece of land he needs. And in Big Maggie, we meet a mother so cynically calculating and cold she makes Brecht's Mother Courage seem like Mother Teresa. All three plays are written with the grace and fine ear for the Irish dialect that we expect of the island's finest writers. Jack Helbig
