Customer Reviews

New Plays from the Abbey Theatre 1993-1995 (v. 1)

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This book gathers together some half-dozen plays presented by Ireland's Abbey Theatre in the early 90s. The title is somewhat misleading, as all of the plays were presented at the Peacock, the Abbey's new writing stage. Its main purpose is to make the plays available to readers and potential producers, and in this it succeeds admirably, although there are a couple of notable plays from the period that didn't get included, presumably because they were already available elsewhere. (This makes the volume somewhat unrepresentative.) The plays themselves are of varying quality. Michael Harding's "Hubert Murray's Widow" is an interesting, darkly funny tragicomedy (or comitragedy) about a dead gunman and the events surrounding, and after, his death; Donal O'Kelly's "Asylum! Asylum!" is a characteristically angry piece about the treatment of an African refugee, written some time before the number of refugees in Ireland skyrocketed, and thus anticipating a major current social issue. Tom MacIntyre's "Sheep's Milk on the Boil" is an impenetrable scrap of whimsy, and Niall Williams' "A Little Like Paradise" is a sentimental mood piece about the West, the kind of play that has since been stamped into a bloody pulp by the erratic genius of Martin McDonagh. Neil Donnelly's "The Duty Master" is dull but worthy, a portrait of an Irishman teaching in an English public school, and about as exciting as it sounds. There are some excellent production shots, but one is not told which actor played which role and thus identifying what scene is being depicted is not easy. Plus, the American editor suffers from a too-misty-eyed appreciation of Irish drama and the respective qualities of the plays, and tries to hard to fit them into the familiar canon. But a useful book, especially for those that want to put the plays on.