Cathy Leeney

Deirdre McFeely

Published here for the first time, Maura Laverty's plays Liffey Lane, Tolka Row and A Tree in the Crescent form a lively and moving trilogy about Dublin in the 1950s- its housing crises, its class divisions, and its family struggles for a secure future. Laverty, a successful novelist, cookery writer, journalist and broadcaster, working with Hilton Edwards and Michael mac Liammoir, saw her plays attract packed audiences at the Gaiety Theatre. Laverty's trilogy is the missing piece of the twentieth-century Irish theatrical canon. It captures a key turning point in the development of the young Republic, with Ireland on the cusp of modernisation and Dublin in a state of transformation, its population on the move from the city centre to public housing schemes in new suburbs such as Cabra, Crumlin and Marino. Newperspectives can be glimpsed in Laverty's proto-feminist centring of the lives and concerns of women and girls, and in her politically radical insights into class inequalities. The volume has a foreword by Christopher FitzSimon, who knew and worked with Laverty, and an introduction by the editors, Deirdre McFeely and Cathy Leeney, which outlines Laverty's life and context and considers the theatrical value of her plays.

Liffey Lane, Tolka Row, a Tree in the Crescent

The Plays of Maura Laverty

Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is the first book to examine the plays of five fascinating and creative women, placing their work for theatre in co-relation to suggest a parallel tradition that reframes the development of Irish theatre into the present day. How these playwrights dramatize violence and its impacts in political, social, and personal life is a central concern of this book. Augusta Gregory, Eva Gore-Booth, Dorothy Macardle, Mary Manning, and Teresa Deevy re-model theatrical form, re-structuring action and narrative, and exploring closure as a way of disrupting audience expectation. Their plays create stage spaces and images that expose relationships of power and authority, and invite the audience to see the performance not as illusion, but as framed by the conventions and limits of theatrical representation. Irish Women Playwrights 1900-1939 is suitable for courses in Irish theatre, women in theatre, gender and performance, dramaturgy, and Irish drama in the twentieth century as well as for those interested in women's work in theatre and in Irish theatre in the twentieth century.

Gender & Violence on Stage

Irish Women Playwrights, 1900-1939

These plays make a rich, funny, moving, and theatrically exhilarating collection. In a diversity of stories, styles, and settings they re-define the limits of Irish theatre for the new century. These playwrights create an Irish theatre looking out to the world around it, re-inventing our sense of the past, our connections with others, and our unsettled present. They have all been seen, heard, and acclaimed by Irish and British audiences in recent years. Now coming to you in print, some bearing major awards.

Six New Plays by Irish Women

Seen and Heard

Anna McMullan

"This is the first collection of articles to be published on the theatre of Marina Carr, a major contemporary Irish playwright whose work is highly acclaimed in Ireland and internationally for its poetic energy and its remarkable theatrical imagination." "These essays examine Carr's highly original voice, and place her plays in the context of current theatre in Ireland and abroad. They raise lively debate on contemporary representation of 'Irishness' on the stage, on the current state of Irish theatre, on the impact of female authorship on the canon of Irish theatre, and on Carr's portrayal of characters who are fundamentally at odds with the world around them."--BOOK JACKET.

Cathy Leeney

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