New Plays From The Abbey Theatre

Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on Sunday There's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am. Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do. Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023. 'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage 'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review 'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times

This handsomely-bound anthology contains four new plays from Ireland's Abbey Theatre: Michael Harding's Sour Grapes, Thomas Kilroy's The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, Alex Johnston's Melonfarmer, and By the Bog of Cats by Marina Carr. Friel (National Theatre of Ireland) and Sternlicht (English, Syracuse U.) also present background information on the National Theatre of Ireland, the plays, and the playwrights. c. Book News Inc.

This anthology invites readers to experience five of the best new plays produced since 1993 in Ireland's famous Abbey Theatre.

Lads, when it comes to your time for pickin' women, you're not going to have my kind of luck. The best one is taken. All Julia and John want is to live their lives with their two sons, on their own terms. But despite their hopes, the outside world and its racism puts paid to their plans. A world premiere of a new play from Rosaleen McDonagh, this tender, complex and beautiful love story examines how external circumstances pull us apart, when all we really want is to be together. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in August 2021

Will truth out? Set over one evening, Rathmines Road by Deirdre Kinahan is a play that rages in a tiny room. Fraught, funny and ferocious, it testifies to the pain of carrying the memory of sexual assault throughout a lifetime. A play about secret trauma and public revelation, Rathmines Road bristles with tension and interrogates catharsis to ask: when and how do we take responsibility? The play premiered at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival 2018, previewing at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, in a co-production between Fishamble and the Abbey Theatre.

Sometimes a person needs to create an act that destroys the world because the world is broken. The virus has ravaged Thebes. Millions are dead and the economy has tanked. Vaccinations have been administered and the Festival of Liberty is imminent. Things are finally about to change. The countdown is on but leader Creon and his quarantined niece, the self-identifying X'ntigone, have unfinished business before the celebrations can commence. What happens when old-world order meets a radical new world vision? In this thrilling meditation on Sophocles' timeless Greek tragedy, political expediency meets the voice of a generation who want to tear down the power structures that have ill-served a crumbling state. Darren Murphy's X'ntigone is a fresh and vital discourse for our times, when even truth has been sacrificed at the altar of political gain and avarice.

THE STORY: Set on the remote hill of Raftery's farm, this play tells the tale of Red Raftery and his children, Dinah, Sorrel and Ded. Removed from the civilized world of the valley, Red lives by his own rules, where all natural order is inverted, a