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.

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