Overview

Published here for the first time, Maura Laverty’s plays Liffey Lane, Tolka Row and A Tree in the Crescent are rooted in 1950s Dublin, its territories and enclaves. Teeming with the lives of the poor, the ambitious, the trapped and the struggling, the plays are moving, funny and vividly alive. They capture the capital in a state of transformation – reaching for modernisation while still enmired in stagnant class divisions, poor housing and narrow social values. Key to all three plays are questions of home, the lives of women and girls, and the impact of conservative government policies and church attitudes. Already a public figure in Irish life, and an influencer before her time through her fiction, cookery books and broadcasting, Laverty’s plays met with huge success when staged in 1951 and 1952 by Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre Company at Dublin’s Gaiety and Gate Theatres and on tour. Laverty’s trilogy is a significant and long-awaited part of the twentieth-century Irish theatrical canon. This volume presents the Trilogy, including a preface by Christopher Fitz-Simon, who knew and worked with Laverty. The editors’ introduction contextualises Laverty’s work and considers the theatrical values of the plays.

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9781802077919

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Reviews

‘Maura Laverty bore vivid witness to newly independent Ireland in her journalism, broadcasting, cookery writing, novels for adults and children, and in the plays she wrote for the Gate Theatre in the 1950s. In publishing these three plays and providing valuable editorial commentary on them, Cathy Leeney and Deirdre McFeely have resurrected one brilliant writer’s perceptions of the problems, challenges, joys and sorrows of Dublin life in a decade of slow-burning social change.’ Caitriona Clear, Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish and European History, University of Galway ‘Maura Laverty’s Dublin Trilogy was hugely popular when it premiered in Ireland in the 1950s. This landmark publication explains why, making these important plays available to a new generation of readers and theatre producers – while also providing a fascinating and comprehensive introductory essay that places these works in their social and theatrical contexts. The book’s overall impact is to retrieve the work of a writer who was celebrated in her own time, and who deserves to be better known in the present.’ Patrick Lonergan, Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, University of Galway

Author Information

Cathy Leeney, formerly Lecturer in Drama at University College Dublin, is the author of Irish Women Playwrights 1900 to 1939 (2010) and has published widely on Irish theatre, women playwrights and gender in performance. Deirdre McFeely is a former Adjunct Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on Maura Laverty’s plays and is the author of Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage (2012).

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