A startling collection of plays by playwrights working in the north and south of Ireland, all of which have been groundbreaking events in contemporary Irish theatre
At The Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods depicts a group of mummers in the borderland between North and South, blending their rituals of death with the all-too-modern assassins going about their awful task; in Hard To Believe by Conall Morrison an army intelligence agent for the British invokes his Protestant preacher grandfather and his turncoat father who married a Catholic and thereafter denied his background; in Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh two friends bonded in their fantasies and shared baby-talk face into Cork city on their seventeenth birthday; Frank Pig Says Hello by Patrick McCabe (Winner of the 1997 George Devine Award) is about the sullen meanness of a village community towards an innocently simple young man; in Language Roulette by Daragh Carville a group of young people in Belfast come together for a reunion and the underlying atmosphere is anger and revenge; Bat The Father, Rabbit The Son by Donal O'Kelly is a powerful personal story about the reversal of a father-son relationship where the son is envious of the father's unambitious expressiveness.
Foreword by the award-winning Irish playwright, Sebastian Barry
Author Biography:
Vincent Woods was born in Co. Leitrim in 1960. His plays include At The Black Pig's Dyke (Druid Theatre Company,1992); Song of the Yellow Bluern (Druid 1994), and On the Way Out (Skehana Theatre Company, 2002). His work has been staged in Ireland, the US, England, Canada and Australia and has been translated into French, German and Irish. He worked as a journalist and broadcaster before becoming a full-time writer. He adapted Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara for stage and has written a version of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi; two plays for children: The Brown Man and The Donkey Prince; and radio plays, including The Leitrim Hotel and The Gospels of Aughuinore. Daragh Carville was born in Armagh in 1969. His plays include Language Roulette (1996), Observatory (1999) and Family Plot (2005). Work as a screenwriter includes Middletown (2006) and Cherrybomb (2009). He has won the Stewart Parker Award and the Meyer-Whitworth Prize. This Other City is Daragh’s first play published by Oberon. Previous productions have been put on at the Tinderbox in Dublin. Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright, born in Dublin and living in London. Winner of the 1997 Stewart Parker and the George Devine Awards, he won the 2006 Abbey Theatre Writer in Association Award and the 2010 Obie Award for playwriting. Productions of his plays at the Edinburgh Festival have won four Edinburgh Fringe First Awards, two Critic's Awards and a Herald Archangel Award (2008), and most recently, a Tony for his book of the musical Once. Donal O'Kelly is a writer and actor. His solo plays include the award-winning Catalpa (Edinburgh Fringe First, London Time Out Critics' Choice, Best Event Melbourne International Festival), Bat the Father Rabbit The Son (Best Writer and Best Actor nominations Irish Theatre Awards), and Jimmy Joyced! (Best Actor nomination Irish Theatre Awards). Other plays include The Cambria, Running Beast, The Dogs, Hughie On The Wires, Trickledown Town, The Business of Blood, Farawayan, Asylum! Asylum!, Mamie Sighs, Judas of the Gallarus, and The Hand. He was a founder and until 2003 a director of Calypso Productions, and is an associate director of the peace and justice organisation Afri. Patrick McCabe was born in Ireland in 1955. His novels include Music on Clinton Street, Carn, The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto. The latter two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Butcher Boy won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize in 1992 and was made into a film, directed by Neil Jordan, in 1997. The film Breakfast on Pluto, also directed by and co-written with Neil Jordan, was released in 2006 to great acclaim. His play, Frank Pig Says Hello, was published by Methuen Drama in Far From the Land: New Irish Plays in 1998. Patrick McCabe lives in his home town of Clones, County Monaghan. Born in County Armagh in 1966, Conall Morrison is a Dublin-based director and writer. As a director, he has worked extensively for companies such as the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, Storytellers Theatre Company, Dublin and Bickerstaffe Theatre Company, Kilkenny. He has also worked at the Royal National Theatre, London. Plays include Rough Justice, Green, Orange and Pink, and Hard to Believe. Adapatations include Antigone, Ghosts, Tarry Flynn, and The Bacchae of Baghdad.
