The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Irish Plays: 'This Is Just This. This Is Not Real. It's Just Money'

(Paperback)

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HEROIN by Grace Dyas, Trade by Mark OHalloran, The Art of Swimming by Lynda Radley, Pineapple by Phillip McMahon, IAlice Iby Amy Conroy, The Big Deal edited by Una McKevitt, Oedipus Loves You by Simon Doyle & Gavin Quinn, The Year of Magical Wanking by Neil Watkins Edited and introduced by Thomas Conway This anthology comprises eight new plays by Irish playwrights premired between the years 2006 and 2011. These playwrights ride, however, in no slipstream of the identifiably Irish play. Here, the enterprise of playwriting itself is being re-imagined. Here, above all else, is a commitment to becoming in the theatre. For all that, each play is concerned with what is unfinished business in Ireland. How astonishing, then, that these plays should revolve for the most part around identity and, in particular, sexual identity. How identity comes into play, how we open up the field of play, how we raise into collective experience the exercise of that play the urgency in the playwriting would appear to lie precisely here. We can read from the historical moment from a narrative emphasizing an economic bubble and its hangover into these plays. Or we can take these playwrights at their word and observe lives lived at the contour of identities in the making. It is for us as readers, just as we have as theatre-goers frequently scandalized, enthralled, shamed, appalled, unburdened, tickled pink to decide.

Author Bio

Thomas Conway works as a director, dramaturge, lecturer and journalist. He has worked with Druid, Pan Pan, Fabulous Beast, Idle Motion, Cups and Crowns and Barabbas, among others. He was recently appointed Druid Director-in-Residence at NUI Galway, having taught contemporary theatre practices there for the previous four years.