You can paint your placards 'til the cows come home, but until you have marched through this town in five inch heels and fishnets, you will never know what it is to truly be a faggot on the front line. Told against the backdrop of Dublin's burgeoning gay rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s and the contemporary LGBTQ+ community of today, Once Before I Go charts the close friendship of Lynn, Daithi, and the luminous Bernard, and sits on the exhilarating edge between comedy, tragedy and melodrama. Exploring the fragile yet resilient bonds of Irish queer lives across three decades in Dublin, London and Paris, the play steps between the early days of the AIDS crisis and today's LGBTQ+ community, living in an era of marriage equality, gender self-determination, and untransmittable HIV. At once political, joyous and heart-breaking, Once Before I Go honours the fabulous people we lost along the way, and celebrates those who fight on. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Dublin's Gate Theatre in October 2021.

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.

Michael hasn't been home in almost twenty years. Having been kicked out of the seminary and exiled from his family home, he found himself in London, by accident rather than design. But now, the death of his mother sees him back in the small town where he grew up. The place that chewed him up and spat him out. Reunited with his two brothers, their partners and the local clergy, there are questions that want answering and old scores that need laying to rest. Where do you find home, when your family and faith have abandoned you? An Irish funeral brings out the best and worst in people, and a long night of truths lies ahead.