The Collected Plays: Dermot Healy. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.The Collected Plays: Dermot Healy

Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as an award-winning novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy’s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, including a critically-acclaimed adaptation of García Lorca’s

Blood Wedding

in 1989. All of these plays are published here for the first time. One of the most striking features of Healy’s dramatic works is their spirit of community collaboration and their strong social conscience. His first play,

Here and There

and

Going to America

(1985), was performed by members of the Sligo Dole Q Company; Metagama (2004) was written for Theatre Hebrides on the Isle of Lewis;

Serious

(2005) was written in collaboration with (and performed by) prisoners from Castlerea Prison;

A Night at the Disco

(2006) was written in collaboration with the teachers and students of St Mary’s Secondary School in Ballina. These community-based productions were interspersed with more professional commissions, including Mr Staines, performed by Pan Pan Theatre Company at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Dublin in 1999, and

Men to the Right

,

Women to the Left

, first performed at The Abbey Theatre in 2005 by the Clones Drama Group.

Although the settings of Healy’s plays are often local and regional by design, their reach is always international and universal. With the publication of this volume, Healy’s contribution to drama seems certain to flourish amongst practitioners and scholars alike, and

The Collected Plays

will be of great interest to all devotees of contemporary Irish theatre.

Dermot Healy (1947-2014) grew up in Cavan near the border with Northern Ireland. Following stints in London and Belfast, Healy settled in Ballyconnell, Co. Sligo, where he founded and edited the journal Force 10. His debut collection, Banished Misfortune and Other Stories (1982), was followed by four novels and an acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home (1996). Healy also wrote five collections of poetry and thirteen stage plays (his Collected Plays will be published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016). Elected to Aosdána in 1986, he was the recipient of two Hennessy Literary Awards, the Tom-Gallon Award, the Encore Award, and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award.

Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (revised edition 2009), general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–7), and co-editor (with Neil Murphy and Ondřej Pilný) of a special “Neglected Irish Fiction” issue of Litteraria Pragensia (2013). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and is currently completing a book on the writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan.

Neil Murphy teaches contemporary literature at NTU, Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010) and of the revised edition of Higgins’s Balcony of Europe (2010). He co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary fiction, Irish writing, and theories of reading, and is currently completing a book on John Banville.