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.

Multiple award-winning Mark O'Halloran is one of Ireland's most celebrated writers. Two play spanning 12 years of work come together in one published edition to coincide with the New York premiere. CONVERSATIONS AFTER SEX You remind me of someone though. I mean you're not like him. Not physically like him. Nowhere near. But there's something there. Your voice or how you hold yourself. Your hands. In a series of unexpected and unguarded conversations after anonymous sexual encounters, a woman discovered men with the same deep need to communicate and connect in the lonely, atomised city. 'A portrayal of grief that is unforgettable in its rawness' - The Guardian TRADE "This is just this. It isn't real. It's money." In a guesthouse in Dublin's north inner city, a vulnerable and confused young rent-boy sits with a middle-aged client. It's not the first time they've met but today the older man has blood on his shirt. A lot has happened since they last met. 'It closes around your heart like a fist' - The Irish Times

Winner of a Scotsman Fringe First Award 2014 In 2000 in Leixlip, co. Kildare, an aunt and 3 sisters boarded themselves into their home and entered into a suicide pact that lasted 40 days. We weren't there. We don't know what they said. This is not their story. Winner of the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best Production (2013), and inspired by a real-life event involving the suicide pact of four women in a small town outside Dublin, Lippy is a play about authorship and the role of the writer.