From the late 1940s, until shortly before his death in 2007, John Devitt was one of Dublin's most avid and discerning theatre-goers. For John, attending the theatre was something more than an evening out: it was a passion, a commitment, almost a vocation. A born raconteur, John could talk about productions from the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s as if he had just stepped out of the theatre, fresh from the experience that meant so much to him. This book is much more than a record of the oral history of Dublin theatre-going that his memories contained - it is a glimpse into a life that was witty, argumentative, and vigorous, but never dull.

‘Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf … you incarnate insult to the English language: I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba’

Pygmalion both delighted and scandalized its first audiences in 1914. A brilliantly witty reworking of the classical tale of the sculptor Pygmalion, who falls in love with his perfect female statue, it is also a barbed attack on the British class system and a statement of Shaw’s feminist views. In Shaw’s hands, the phoneticist Henry Higgins is the Pygmalion figure who believes he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a cockney flower girl, into a duchess at ease in polite society. The one thing he overlooks is that his ‘creation’ has a mind of her own.

This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence, with an illuminating introduction by Nicholas Grene, discussing the language and politics of the play. Included in this volume is Shaw’s preface, as well as his ‘sequel’ written for the first publication in 1916, to rebut public demand for a more conventionally romantic ending.

The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour. In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitati

The world of Macbeth, with its absolutes of good and evil, seems very remote from the shifting perspectives of Antony and Cleopatra, or the psychological and political realities of Coriolanus. Yet all three plays share similar thematic concerns and preoccupations: the relation of power to legitimating authority, for instance, or of male and female roles in the imagination of (male) heroic endeavour.;In this acclaimed study, Nicholas Grene shows how all nine plays written in Shakespeare's main tragic period display this combination of strikingly different milieu balanced by thematic interrelationships. Taking the English history play as his starting point, he argues that Shakespeare established two different modes of imagining: the one mythic and visionary, the other sceptical and analytic. In the tragic plays that followed, themes and situations are dramatised, alternately, in sacred and secular worlds. A chapter is devoted to each tragedy, but with a continuing awareness of companion plays: the analysis of Julius Caesar informing that of Hamlet, discussion of Troilus and Cressida counterpointed by the critique of Othello and the treatment of King Lear growing out from the limitati

A collection of essays presenting an "insider" view of the Irish poetic tradition. It brings together some of the best-known poets and critics writing in Ireland today, exploring the multiple traditions and influences within Anglo-Irish poetry from the 19th century to the present.

Tom Murphy shot to fame with the London production of A Whistle in the Dark in 1961, establishing him as the outstanding Irish playwright of his generation. The international success of DruidMurphy, the 2012-13 staging of three of his major plays by the Druid Theatre Company, served to underline his continuing appeal and importance. This is the first full scale academic study devoted to his theatre, providing an overview of all his work, with a detailed reading of his most significant texts. His powerful and searchingly honest engagement with Irish history and society is reflected in the violent Whistle in the Dark, the epic Famine (1968), the often hilarious Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and the darkly Chekhovian The House (2000). Folklore and myth figure more prominently in the spiritual drama of The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), the Faustian Gigli Concert (1983) and the women's stories of Bailegangaire (1985). The range and reach of Murphy's theatre is demonstrated in this informed reading, supported by key interviews with the playwright himself and his most important theatrical and critical interpreters.

Tom Murphy shot to fame with the London production of A Whistle in the Dark in 1961, establishing him as the outstanding Irish playwright of his generation. The international success of DruidMurphy, the 2012-13 staging of three of his major plays by the Druid Theatre Company, served to underline his continuing appeal and importance. This is the first full scale academic study devoted to his theatre, providing an overview of all his work, with a detailed reading of his most significant texts. His powerful and searchingly honest engagement with Irish history and society is reflected in the violent Whistle in the Dark, the epic Famine (1968), the often hilarious Conversations on a Homecoming (1985) and the darkly Chekhovian The House (2000). Folklore and myth figure more prominently in the spiritual drama of The Sanctuary Lamp (1975), the Faustian Gigli Concert (1983) and the women's stories of Bailegangaire (1985). The range and reach of Murphy's theatre is demonstrated in this informed reading, supported by key interviews with the playwright himself and his most important theatrical and critical interpreters.

'Nothing Quite Like It' by Nicholas Grene tells the story of an unusual childhood. With his mixed background, he provides the sharp-eyed and affectionate perspective of an outsider on his experiences of childhood and adolescence.

A detailed critical study of the leading Indian novelist in English and a key figure in the development of a distinctive postcolonial literature. This study covers all of Narayan's work, offering an accessible introduction to his life and fiction with detailed analyses of the major novels. Although the chapters take the reader through the successive phases of his career, they are organised on a thematic rather than a chronological basis to allow a focus on the most significant critical issues his work raises. So, while the introduction sketches the outline of his life, the first chapter explores how his own background was developed into the fictional South Indian small town of Malgudi, the setting for almost all his work. The second chapter deals with the controversial issue of Narayan's politics, and the common criticism of his writing as insufficiently politically engaged. The central chapter of the book focuses on the submerged fables that animate some of his key novels, including his best known, The Guide. The fourth chapter considers Narayan's attitudes toward modernity as reflected in his essays and his fiction. Finally, there is an analysis of Narayan as storyteller and the special styles he devised to tell his elliptical, subtle and understated tales.

'...the analysis of individual plays is measured and illuminating. The book will be of interest to all Shavians, to students, and to the many general readers who value Shaw's unsentimental idealism.' British Book News '...Grene's study makes a valuable contribution to a still-developing subject ... His analysis of the plays is well-informed and perceptive, and he is always alert to the exigencies of theatrical performance.' Times Higher Education Supplement

"There are two things necessary to salvation ...money and gunpowder" Major Barbara, Bernard Shaw's story of the conversion contest between the arms manufacturer Andrew Undershaft and his daughter, the Salvation Army Major, is a provocative dramatization of the relationship between money, power, and moral purpose. A landmark in the history of British theatre when first produced at the Royal Court in 1905, it remains strikingly relevant today, when recent history has repeatedly highlighted the power of the arms industry in shaping government policy, and globalization has accentuated the political and ethical issues of social welfare and international capital raised by the play. This edition includes Shaw's definitive text and provides the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of the play to date. A lengthy Introduction traces the history of the text from manuscript drafts to the famous 1941 wartime film version starring Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison and on to modern stagings. It reveals Major Barbara as one of Shaw's most exciting and challenging plays for actors, directors, and readers.

As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created their own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in Endgame, Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog. Grene analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic spaces to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the naturalistic environment in modern drama.

As a serious drama set in an ordinary middle-class home, Ibsen's A Doll's House established a new politics of the interior that was to have a lasting impact upon twentieth-century drama. In this innovative study, Nicholas Grene traces the changing forms of the home on the stage through nine of the greatest of modern plays and playwrights. From Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard through to Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, domestic spaces and personal crises have been employed to express wider social conditions and themes of class, gender and family. In the later twentieth century and beyond, the most radically experimental dramatists created their own challenging theatrical interiors, including Beckett in Endgame, Pinter in The Homecoming and Parks in Topdog/Underdog. Grene analyses the full significance of these versions of domestic spaces to offer fresh insights into the portrayal of the naturalistic environment in modern drama.

Nicholas Grene explores Yeats's poetic codes of practice, the key words and habits of speech that shape the reading experience of his poetry. Where previous studies have sought to decode his work, expounding its symbolic meanings by references to Yeats's occult beliefs, philosophical ideas or political ideology, the focus here is on his poetic technique, its typical forms and their implications for the understanding of the poems. Grene is concerned with the distinctive stylistic signatures of the Collected Poems: the use of dates and place names within individual poems; the handling of demonstratives and of grammatical tense and mood; certain nodal Yeatsian words ("dream," "bitter," "sweet") and images (birds and beasts); dialogue and monologue as the voices of his dramatic lyrics. The aim throughout is to illustrate the shifting and unstable movement between lived reality and transcendental thought in Yeats, the embodied quality of his poetry between a phenomenal world of sight and an imagined world of vision.

Shakespeare's Serial History Plays provides a re-reading of the two sequences of English history plays, Henry VI-Richard III and Richard II-Henry V. Reconsidering the chronicle sources and the staging practices of Shakespeare's time, Grene argues that the history plays were originally designed for serial performance. He charts the cultural and theatrical conditions that led to serial productions of the histories, in Europe as well as in the English-speaking world, and looks at their original creation in the 1590s and at modern productions or adaptations, from famous stagings such as the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1960s Wars of the Roses through to the present day. Grene focuses on the issues raised by the plays' seriality: the imagination of war, the emergence of character, and the uses of prophecies and curses through the first four; techniques of retrospection, hybrid dramatic forms, and questions of irony and agency in the second.

Murphy Plays: 5 brings together four of the authors recent works: The Wake, Too Late for Logic, The House, and Alice Trilogy. The Wake recounts the story of a woman, returning from the USA to her home town in Ireland. As her family learn of her years as a prostitute, she finds the drewam of her homecoming turning into a nightmare. A homecoming play that is haunting yet fiercely comic. Too Late for Logic: "A major new play...these scenes are beautifully imagined, ache with feeling, and flower into incidents of piercing sadness or absurd laughter" (The Times) The House: "The most compelling indictment of emigration ever committed to the stage" (Irish Times) Alice Trilogy dramatises three stages in Alice's life: 1980, in the afternoon murk of her attic, is Alice losing her grip on reality? 1995, she has summoned a lost love to meet her by the gasworks wall. 2005, at the airport: if the worst has happened, why is it bearable?

This study provides a re-reading of the two sequences of English history plays, Henry VI-Richard III and Richard II-Henry V. Reconsidering the chronicle sources and the staging practices of Shakespeare's time, Grene argues that the history plays were originally designed for serial performance. The book looks at their original creation in the 1590s and at modern serial productions or adaptations, such as the famous Royal Shakespeare Company's 1960s Wars of the Roses and others.

The Politics of Irish Drama analyzes some twenty-five of the best-known Irish plays from those of Dion Boucicault to Sebastian Barry, including works by Shaw, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Beckett. The book looks at political contexts for these plays and, in arguing for the outward-directed nature of dramatic representation of Ireland, shows Irish drama to be an international as much as national phenomenon.

The Politics of Irish Drama analyzes some twenty-five of the best-known Irish plays from those of Dion Boucicault to Sebastian Barry, including works by Shaw, Yeats, Lady Gregory and Beckett. The book looks at political contexts for these plays and, in arguing for the outward-directed nature of dramatic representation of Ireland, shows Irish drama to be an international as much as national phenomenon.