This first collection by Frank McGuinness contains plays from the 1980s, including his major work of that decade, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, a powerful and profoundly moving study of a group of Ulster Protestant volunteers in the Great War. The book also contains Carthaginians, set in a Derry graveyard in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday killings, Innocence, McGuinness's vigorous drama based on the life of Caravaggio, The Factory Girls and Baglady.
There was once an Englishman, an Irishman and an American - locked up together in a cell in the Middle East. As victims of political action, powerless to initiate change, what can they do, how do they pass the time, and how do they survive? This play investigates.
Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme was revived by the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1994 as part of an acknowledgement of the peace process. The production was subsequently taken to the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 and opened at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Barbican Theatre, London, in March 1996.
Contexts for Frank McGuinness's Drama is the most complete consideration of the playwright yet published, including discussion of his original stage work through Gates of Gold (2002) and highlighting the connections between McGuinness's creativity and the biographical, geographical, social, and literary factors that have shaped his world."
This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar Wilde's importance to Ireland's theatrical canon is equal to that of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. The study examines key areas of the Wildean aesthetic: his aestheticizing of experience via language and self-conscious performance; the notion of the dandy in Wildean texts and how such a figure is engaged with in today's dramas; and how his contribution to the concept of a ‘verbal theatre’ has influenced his dramatic successors. It is of particular pertinence to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Irish drama and Irish literature, and for those interested in the work of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness. okokpoj
The first edited collection of essays about internationally renowned Irish playwright Frank McGuinness focuses on both performance and text. Interpreters come to diverse conclusions, creating a vigorous dialogue that enriches understanding and reflects a strong consensus about the value of McGuinness's complex work. REVIEWS ". . . a fascinating and diverse collection of reactions to the work of Frank McGuinness". Reviewed by : Patrick Mason ". . . Frank McGuinness's drama in its richness and variety calls out for what this collection of essays supplies: A multi-authored volume by both practitioners and academics.....thoughtful, stimulating collection". Reviewed by : Anthony Roche "The diversity of the playwright's work is well matched in the collection by the scale of the different approaches the authors of the essays and talks take...I recommend the book especially to those who McGuinness difficult, but all readers are likely to put it down enriched and with a reformed view of drama and theatre in general" Reviewed by : Maria Kurdi, Drama League Magazine of Ireland, Spring 2004
You used to swing me on our garden gate. In and out, in and out - out and in, me, on top of the gate, safe because I was in your arms, my father's big strong arms. Recalling events that may or may not have happened, people he may or may not have known, an elderly father weaves his life, funny, angry, poignant, as if in a dream.His daughter, perched outside his window, as close as the pandemic allows, responds with conflicting memories. They sing and argue, they broach dangerous ground, their profound love apparent despite themselves, until the visiting hour is up. Written during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020, Frank McGuinness's The Visiting Hour premiered in April 2021 at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in the first online Gate At Home production.
Two volumes from the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness: a major play on love, family, and war as well as stunning translations of two classics Set in Buncrana, County Donegal, Ireland, during World War II, Dolly West's Kitchen is centered on a family struggling to come to terms not only with the effects of war on their country and their family but also with their own inability to respond to one another as situations -- and they themselves -- change. As the characters talk of love, sex, war, the English, de Valera, and the Yanks, Dolly West's Kitchen becomes a deeply moving evocation of the fantasy and the reality that was Ireland in the 1940s, filled with the richness of character and sense of place that have always marked Frank McGuinness's writing. Two volumes from the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness: a major play on love, family, and war as well as stunning translations of two classics Set in Buncrana, County Donegal, Ireland, during World War II, Dolly West's Kitchen is centered on a family struggling to come to terms not only with the effects of war on their country and their family but also with their own inability to respond to one another as situations -- and they themselves -- change. As the characters talk of love, sex, war, the English, de Valera, and the Yanks, Dolly West's Kitchen becomes a deeply moving evocation of the fantasy and the reality that was Ireland in the 1940s, filled with the richness of character and sense of place that have always marked Frank McGuinness's writing.
Frank McGuinness and His Theatre of Paradox is a critical study of one of the most important contemporary Irish dramatists. It offers an overview of the McGuinness's drama from his early plays right up to the recent, Dolly West's Kitchen.
