An ambitious, profound and tender work from one of Ireland's leading playwrights.

Grotesque features have been among the chief characteristics of drama in English since the 1990s. This new book examines the varieties of the grotesque in the work of some of the most original playwrights of the last three decades (including Enda Walsh, Philip Ridley, Tim Crouch and Suzan-Lori Parks), focusing in particular on ethical and political issues that arise from the use of the grotesque.

"Misterman first published in the edition bedbound and misterman ... in 2001 ... "

It’s 11:30 a.m. and already it’s ninety-two degrees. At the bottom of a drained swimming pool, four ridiculous men connive, plot, and play for an unwinnable love, even as they face certain death at the hands of her returning husband. A riveting and savage take on the classic Greek myth of Penelope, wife of Odysseus.

It’s eleven o’clock in the morning in a council flat on the Walworth Road in London. In two hours’ time, as is normal, three Irish men will have consumed six cans of Harp, fifteen crackers with spreadable cheese, ten pink biscuit wafers, and one oven-cooked chicken with a strange blue sauce. In two hours’ time, as is normal, five people will have been killed. A remarkable play about what can happen when we become stuck in the stories we tell about our lives. Visceral and tender, The Walworth Farce combines hilarious moments with shocking realism.

This book addresses the notion posed by Thomas Kilroy in his definition of a playwright’s creative process: ‘We write plays, I feel, in order to populate the stage’. It gathers eclectic reflections on contemporary Irish theatre from both Irish theatre practitioners and international academics. The eighteen contributions offer innovative perspectives on Irish theatre since the early 1990s up to the present, testifying to the development of themes explored by emerging and established playwrights as well as to the (r)evolutions in practices and approaches to the stage that have taken place in the last thirty years. This cross-disciplinary collection devotes as much attention to contextual questions and approaches to the stage in practice as it does to the play text in its traditional and revised forms. The essays and interviews encourage dialectic exchange between analytical studies on contemporary Irish theatre and contributions by theatre practitioners.

Disco Pigs is the extraordinary debut play about two warped teenagers that confirmed Enda Walsh's place in the forefront of young Irish dramatists. Pig and Runt are two 17-year-olds who share everything: birthday, language, worldview - and that moment when pop songs and life-changing orgasms flash by and last forever. Also published in this volume is Sucking Dublin, a fierce and uncompromising short play about a group of five individuals tormented by a rape in a claustrophobic, drug-infested Dublin."