Christopher Murray's immensely well-received history of wentieth Century Irish Drama (Manchester UP 1997), appearing with the sub-title 'Mirror Up to Nature', departs from reasoned post-colonial premises to give a succinct account of its subject, supplied at every turn by apt facts, illuminating commentary, and apposite quotations from the secondary literature-including an extraordinary range of sources that take twenty pages to list, but which the author plays upon like piano keys with the touch of a critical master. If Dr. Murray were not so prolific in literary criticism this might be looked upon as something like a life's work. Instead it is a synopsis of a generation of dramatic scholarship-his own and others-and unquestionably the book that will hold the field for some time to come.
The text is characterised by that descriptive clarity which he always brings to his theatrical subject-matter making it a superlative tool for teaching and research. Besides the essential virtue of condensation, there is a vigilance that few contemporary critics can compete with and at times the text seems like a patchwork of citations from all the important sources: authors, reviewers, critics. It is also instilled with a passionate conviction of the place of Irish drama in the regeneration of the Irish nation: 'As the century draws to a close and with it one hundred years of native Irish theatre, the enabling mirror on the other side of dream shines brightly still.' (p.246). There are words amid that peroration which could not easily be swallowed had the whole argument not lent a convincing force to them in such a way as to demonstrate that this writing enables national consciousness in its own way also.
At the last issue Dr. Murray handed over the editorial reins of the Irish University Review to his UCD colleague Anthony Roche, whose offering in the same field-Contemporary Irish Drama: From Beckett to McGuinness (Gill & Macmillan 1995) - took a narrower compass and proceeded by more impressionistic methods. An Oxford University Press-commissioned history of the Abbey Theatre from Robert Welch, together with a history of the older Irish theatre of the pre-revival period from Chris Morash for Cambridge University Press, will bring the shelf of current dramatic surveys to perfect plenitude - at least until the playwright overbalance them with new and startling dramatic departures.