Parker Plays: 2: Northern Star; Heavenly Bodies; Pentecost

(Paperback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

"Stewart Parker was a playwright whose sense of history and elegance of wit and feeling were unusual in the British Theatre" (Observer)

This volume includes three of Stewart Parker's most striking plays - Northern Star: 'Only an Irishman could have written something like this: a freewheeling, lunatic sense of invention is harnessed to a cultivated, literary imagination and stoked up by moral outrage. It is a captivating play' (Sunday Times); Heavenly Bodies: 'The colourful, rather Balzacian story of Boucicault ...An undoubted talent for pungent dialogue' (The Times); Pentecost: 'One of the most stimulating, most satisfying, most touching, most illuminating in years of Irish theatre. A total theatrical experience' (Irish Times)

Reviews

"Stewart Parker was a playwright whose sense of history and elegance of wit and feeling were unusual in the British Theatre." --Observer

Author Bio

Stewart Parker was born in Belfast in 1941. During the early sixties at Queen's University he was active in a group of young writers which included Seamus Heaney and Bernard Mac Laverty. His first stage play Spokesong (1975) won him the 1976 Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright Award and his TV drama I'm a Dreamer, Montreal (1979) won the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. His stage plays include Catchpenny Twist (1977), Nightshade (1980), Pratt's Fall (1983), Northern Star (1984), Heavenly Bodies (1986) and Pentecost (1987), which won the Harvey's Irish Theatre Award. He died in London in 1988. The Stewart Parker Trust Awards, established in his memory, are awarded each year to encourage new Irish writing for the theatre.