Last year saw Anthony Roche's review of Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness (Gill & Macmillan) and Shaun Richards's, Irish Drama (Manchester UP). This year we greet Christopher Murray's Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to a Nation (Manchester UP). Whether D.E.S. Maxwell will reissue his Modern Irish Drama 1891-1980 (1985) in the face of such rivalry we shall see; certainly his editorial contribution the the Field Day Anthology (1992) suggest his readiness to do so.
Dr. Murray has also contributed the title essay to The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the 'Nineties (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier 1996), a collection edited by Eborhard Bort, treating of the plays of Teresa Deevy (Cathy Leeney), Brian Friel (Robert Garratt), Stewart Parker (Gerald Dawe), Anne Devlin (Brendan McGurk), and Graham Reid (Beata Richter) but also Charabanc (Claudia Harris), Irish Independent Theatre (Anna McMullan), theatre in Shankill and Long Kesh (Tom Magill), and problems of representation in the Northern Irish Troubles (Stuart Marlow).
Play collections have been a growth industry since the appearance of Brendan Kennelly's Landmarks of Irish Drama (Methuen 1988) containing works of Shaw, J, M. Synge, Yeats, O'Casey, Denis Johns- ton, Beckett, and Brendan Behan. An American anthology edited by Coilín D. Owens and Joan N. Radner (Irish Drama 1900-1980 (Washington: CUA 1990) extended the classical range to include Hugh Leonard and Brian Friel, as well as Padraic Fallon and other 'lesser knowns'. In addition to these teaching instruments, there is an exciting wave of contemporary collections: first David Grant's somewhat impudent Crack in the Emerald (Nick Hern Books 1900; new edn. 1994), featuring 'new Irish plays' by Dermot Bolger, Marina Carr, Michael Harding, and Marie Jones, and now Frank McGuinness's homage to his fellow-practitioners in The Dazzling Dark (Faber & Faber 1996), containing a play each by Gina Moxley, Jimmy Murphy, Tom MacIntyre, and Carr again.
Whatever else is found in the next contemporary collection, it is certain that the electrifying new talent of Martin McDonagh will be represented, whether by The Beauty Queen of Leenane, premiered in Galway under the direction of Gary Hynes and regarded by Fintan O'Toole as the calling-card of a new dramatic genius, or by its successor, The Cripple of Inishmaan. First staged at the National Theatre, London, this moving piece demonstrates the profound resonance of the Irish dramatic tradition through its intertextual soundings of Synge's Playboy and Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran-the film whose shooting in 1934 provides its setting. Signficantly or otherwise, English reviewers found the play brutally unfeeling where the cripple was concerned-albeit young Ruairdhi Conroy reminded some of Peter O'Toole's first appearance. The third play in McDonagh's trilogy will be produced by Druid in a month or so.
Other forthcoming events in Irish theatre include a new play from Friel, (Give me Your Answer Do), concerning a novelist's problematic relationship with a handicapped daughter, and Tom Murphy's dramatisation of his 1994 novel as The Wake (1994). Jennifer Johnston, whose The Desert Lullaby was premiered at the Lyric (Belfast) in October, is opening at at the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York with two earlier pieces, The Nightingale and the Lark and The Invisible Man, on 10th April. In the meantime she is reading in London on the March 15th with Colm Tobin, Hugo Hamilton, Roddy Doyle, and Anne Enright. She has just finished a commissioned play for RTÉ and is working on a new novel.