HEROIN by Grace Dyas, Trade by Mark O'Halloran, The Art of Swimming by Lynda Radley, Pineapple by Phillip McMahon, I ? Alice ? I by Amy Conroy, The Big Deal edited by Una McKevitt, Oedipus Loves You by Simon Doyle & Gavin Quinn, The Year of Magical Wanking by Neil Watkins Edited and introduced by Thomas Conway This anthology comprises eight new plays by Irish playwrights premiered between the years 2006 and 2011. These playwrights ride, however, in no slipstream of the identifiably Irish play. Here, the enterprise of playwriting itself is being re-imagined. Here, above all else, is a commitment to becoming in the theatre. For all that, each play is concerned with what is unfinished business in Ireland. How astonishing, then, that these plays should revolve for the most part around identity and, in particular, sexual identity. How identity comes into play, how we open up the field of play, how we raise into collective experience the exercise of that play - the urgency in the playwriting would appear to lie precisely here. We can read from the historical moment - from a narrative emphasizing an economic bubble and its hangover - into these plays. Or we can take these playwrights at their word and observe lives lived at the contour of identities in the making. It is for us as readers, just as we have as theatre-goers - frequently scandalized, enthralled, shamed, appalled, unburdened, tickled pink - to decide.

Over the period of a year Gavin Quinn visited the private homes of 100 actors and asked them to try and answer the question: Why do you think you became an actor? Each response was filmed and recorded. He then subsequently photographed each of them. The result is this book. This book tells the story of these one hundred actors: one hundred illuminating answers to a simple question. In ONE the actor talks to the reader from the stillness of their portrait within their own environments. The book is one element of a large-scale performance project created and conceived by Pan Pan, involving 100 actors, 100 rooms and 100 audience members in a specially designed structure designed by the sculptor Andrew Clancy. Subtitled Healing with Theatre, this one on one meeting is enabled by an outflow of energy from actor to audience through this intimate setting, so that we become in a sense healed by the experience. In the live performance and the film version of ONE the audience meets the performer one to one, in much the same way as we discover each actor as we turn the pages of this book. Overall, ONE is an arena of creativity where the audience and artist interact, providing a special way for art and performance to be experienced and looked at. It is an aesthetic encounter made concrete for both actor and audience: multifaceted, personal, bodily and intellectually illuminating. This book will appeal to all interested in the theatre, photography and fine books As the total print-run for the publication will be 600 - 26 copies numbered A - Z and 574 other numbered copies - it is envisaged that the book shall sell out quickly.