Drawing on the archives of libraries in Dublin, New York City, and Boston, Albert J. DeGiacomo assesses T. C. Murray's contribution to the Irish dramatic movement. One of "the Cork realists" of the Abbey Theatre, Murray wrote seventeen plays in one, two, or three acts. A prominent National Teacher and a seemingly apolitical playwright in the Irish Literary Revival, Murray expressed nationalistic aspirations in his peasant tragedies. His characters' drive for self-determination and their religious consciousness mark Murray's dramatic landscape.

Drawing on archives of libraries in Dublin, New York City and Boston, DeGiacomo assesses T.C. Murray's contribution to the Irish dramatic movement. One of the Cork Realists of the Abbey Theatre, Murray wrote 17 plays in one, two or three acts. A prominent national teacher and a seemingly apolitical playwright in the Irish Literary Revival, Murray expressed nationalistic aspirations in his peasant tragedies. His characters' drive for self-determination and their religious consciousness mark Murray's dramatic landscape. Murray reveals his life in volumous correspondence with friends, family members and the glitterati of Dublin. A Roman Catholic, Murray tells his outsider story of the Abbey Theater, ruled by members of the Protestant, Anglo-Irish ascendancy. W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Lennox Robinson fill his world, as do later figures like Ernest Blythe. Murray's association with the amateur dramatic societies reveals yet another dimension of his commitment to Irish drama. This text, largely a work of theater history, spans Murray's life and career from 1878 to 1959, and highlights Murray's plays on Abbey tours of America from 1911 to 1935.

This work comprises a collection of the plays of T.C. Murray. It includes: Autumn Fire; Sovereign Love; Maurice Harte; The Briery Gap; The Pipe in the Fields; and Birthright.

The playwriting career of Thomas Cornelius Murray (1873-1959) started in 1909 with the production of his first play, Wheel of Fortune (which he revised in 1913 and renamed Sovereign Love), at the Cork Little Theatre. His Birthright, produced at the Abbey Theatre in the following year, established him as a writer of stark and tragic realism. His most enduring plays were all written during the next two decades; none of the plays written after 1930 can be compared for quality with his earlier work. The present selection contains Sovereign Love, Birthright, Maurice Harte, The Briery Gap, Autumn Fire, and The Pipe in the Fields. Appendices contain Illumination and Murray's essay ""George Shiels, Brinsley MacNamara, Etc."" A bibliographical checklist of his writings is also included.

In 1928, Hilton Edwards and Micheál mac Liammóir founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which quickly became renowned for producing stylistically and dramaturgically innovative plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. While the Gate’s lasting importance to the history of Irish theater is generally attributed to its introduction of experimental foreign drama to Ireland, Van den Beuken shines a light on the Gate’s productions of several new Irish playwrights, such as Denis Johnston, Mary Manning, David Sears, Robert Collis, and Edward and Christine Longford. Having grown up during an era of political turmoil and bloodshed that led to the creation of an independent yet in many ways bitterly divided Ireland, these dramatists chose to align themselves with an avant-garde theater that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. In examining an extensive corpus of archival resources, Van den Beuken reveals how the Gate Theatre became a site of avant-garde nationalism during Ireland’s tumultuous first post-independence decades.

In Hugh Leonard's Love in the Title, a woman's visit to the Irish countryside leads to a surreal meeting with her own mother as a thirty-year-old in 1964 and her grandmother as a twenty-year-old in 1932. The frank exchanges that mark this meeting allow the women to remain in and represent their times, yet still communicate with each other. The next play, Frank McGuinness's Dolly West's Kitchen is set a small house in Donegal, 1944, a meeting place where two American GI's, a British Army captain and the fiercely nationalistic West family share meals and talk of love, war and betrayal. Finally, The Muesli Belt by Jimmie Murphy examines the ramifications of renewal and relocation in the urban centers of western Ireland, as a greedy property developer bent on buying up everything in sight to build high-rent flats and chic eateries throws locals into dispair.