This is the sort of book one ends up buying even if that £10 had been destined for a visit to the supermarket. Among the six new Irish plays included are Patrick McCabe's Frank Pig Says Hello, Enda Kelly's Disco Pigs and Donal O'Kelly's Bat The Father, Rabbit the Son. Theatre is an art of action and gesture as well as words, and all of these plays reflect the new dynamic in Irish theatre in which the traditional moods and frustrations are being highlighted through a fast and furious and particularly violent vision. Daragh Carville's first play, Language Roulette, certainly shows that some of Ireland's younger playwrights are actually trying to write speech as spoken.
True, many of the laughs in these tough, brash plays have the effect of walking on broken glass, but most of the playwrights featured are succeeding in writing plays rooted in the old obsessions of repression, flight and vicious fantasies which reflect the real world in which such dramas are enacted. Harsh, provocative and representative of a new school, these are jagged plays which are hard to ignore and difficult to forget.
