Woman And Scarecrow

THE STORY: A passionate woman--mother of eight children and wife to a remorseful husband--now facing death, looks back over her life and asks what could have been. Pathos and bitter humor mix in this powerful play from one of Ireland's leading dramat

A woman - gaunt and ill, haggard after giving birth eight times - faces death. What was life? What was love? What else could have been? Full of mordant, bitter humour, this is a passionate threnody from one of Ireland's leading playwrights.Woman and Scarecrow premieres at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2006.

Set in the mysterious landscape of the bogs of rural Ireland, Carr's lyrical and timeless play tells the story of Hester Swane, an Irish traveller with a deep and unearthly connection to her land. Tormented by the memory of a mother who deserted her, Hester is once again betrayed, this time by the father of her child, the man she loves. On the brink of despair, she embarks on a terrible journey of vengeance as the secrets of her tangled history are revealed. 'A piece of poetic realism steeped in the past... Carr has an extraordinary ability to move between the mythic and the real.' Guardian 'A great play... a great work of poetry... the word should soon carry across both sides of the Atlantic.' Independent By the Bog of Cats premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1998. It was revived at Wyndham's Theatre, London, in November 2004.

Provides an historical overview of women's mythmaking and thus their contributions to, and an alternative genealogy of, modern Irish theatre.

This two-volume edited collection illuminates the valuable counter-canon of Irish women's playwriting with forty-two essays written by leading and emerging Irish theatre scholars and practitioners. Covering three hundred years of Irish theatre history from 1716 to 2016, it is the most comprehensive study of plays written by Irish women to date. These short essays provide both a valuable introduction and innovative analysis of key playtexts, bringing renewed attention to scripts and writers that continue to be under-represented in theatre criticism and performance. Volume Two contains chapters focused on plays by sixteen Irish women playwrights produced between 1992 and 2016, highlighting the explosion of new work by contemporary writers. The plays in this volume explore women's experiences at the intersections of class, sexuality, disability, and ethnicity, pushing at the boundaries of how we define not only Irish theatre, but Irish identity more broadly.

0nce upon a time, there was a little old lady who was not afraid of anything! But one autumn night, while walking in the woods, the little old lady heard . . . CLOMP, CLOMP, SHAKE, SHAKE, CLAP, CLAP. And the little old lady who was not afraid of anything had the scare of her life!

This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar Wilde's importance to Ireland's theatrical canon is equal to that of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. The study examines key areas of the Wildean aesthetic: his aestheticizing of experience via language and self-conscious performance; the notion of the dandy in Wildean texts and how such a figure is engaged with in today's dramas; and how his contribution to the concept of a ‘verbal theatre’ has influenced his dramatic successors. It is of particular pertinence to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Irish drama and Irish literature, and for those interested in the work of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness. okokpoj

New York Times bestselling adult author of The Bear and the Nightingale makes her middle grade debut with a creepy, spellbinding ghost story destined to become a classic. After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie only finds solace in books. So when she happens upon a crazed woman at the river threatening to throw a book into the water, Ollie doesn't think—she just acts, stealing the book and running away. As she begins to read the slender volume, Ollie discovers a chilling story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who both loved her, and a peculiar deal made with "the smiling man," a sinister specter who grants your most tightly held wish, but only for the ultimate price. Ollie is captivated by the tale until her school trip the next day to Smoke Hollow, a local farm with a haunting history all its own. There she stumbles upon the graves of the very people she's been reading about. Could it be the story about the smiling man is true? Ollie doesn't have too long to think about the answer to that. On the way home, the school bus breaks down, sending their teacher back to the farm for help. But the strange bus driver has some advice for the kids left behind in his care: "Best get moving. At nightfall they'll come for the rest of you." Nightfall is, indeed, fast descending when Ollie's previously broken digital wristwatch, a keepsake reminder of better times, begins a startling countdown and delivers a terrifying message: RUN. Only Ollie and two of her classmates heed the bus driver's warning. As the trio head out into the woods—bordered by a field of scarecrows that seem to be watching them—the bus driver has just one final piece of advice for Ollie and her friends: "Avoid large places. Keep to small." And with that, a deliciously creepy and hair-raising adventure begins.