The Irish Times called Thomas Kilroy "one of the most significant playwrights of modern Ireland", while The Sunday Times has described him as "one of the outstanding living Irish playwrights and, perhaps, the most complete". The winner of numerous honors including a special tribute from the Irish Theatre Awards in 2003, he has written fourteen plays. This appraisal of the works of Thomas Kilroy focuses on the common themes and methodology of his plays, including an unusual alliance between serious theatrical complexity and varied but demanding forms of comedy. A separate chapter is devoted to each play with the exception of The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche and The MacAdam Travelling Theatre, whose complementary themes are discussed together. Reflecting on the essence of theatre, Kilroy's works combine meditations on humanity with references to Irish history, generally using historical reality as a dramatic starting point. Plays discussed include Kilroy originals such as Talbot's Box, The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde and Blake as well as adaptations of well-known works such as The Seagull, Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Henry. Interviews with stage directors (L. Parker, M. Stafford-Clark, P. Mason, A.S. Paul) and the playwright himself contribute to this in-depth analysis of Kilroy's dramatic art. Photographs of staged plays and a list of premieres of Kilroy's works (plays and adaptations) are also included.

The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre is a small English touring company of players. It arrives in a provincial Irish town, sometime in the early 1940s during the turmoil of World War II. This play explores what happens when players and townspeople interact.

Published to coincide with the Abbey Theatre, Dublin's, world premiere, a searing indictment of the extortionate price but on childhood by church and state.

Kilroy shows, as through a prism, episodes in the lives of Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, including their relationship with Ireland and their conceptions of Britain and Germany in World War II. How these antagonists, given a choice by history, distorted their personalities to re-invent themselves becomes a spellbinding examination of the riddle of nationalism.

A luminous drama about Wilde's wife's struggle for redemption. The play traces the hidden life of Constance Wilde. Her story explores the gender and sexuality of people who "belonged to the future," and untangles the shifting lines in the complex relationship between her, her husband, and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Through a drama of magical transformations and mysterious, masked figures, set against the back-ground of one of the most notorious cases in British legal history, Kilroy divines the cost of the characters' conduct, Oscar's plea for salvation in Constance's eyes, and her heroic exertion to reclaim a state of grace.

This book is about the Wildean aesthetic in contemporary Irish drama. Through elucidating a discernible Wildean strand in the plays of Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness, it demonstrates that Oscar Wilde's importance to Ireland's theatrical canon is equal to that of W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge and Samuel Beckett. The study examines key areas of the Wildean aesthetic: his aestheticizing of experience via language and self-conscious performance; the notion of the dandy in Wildean texts and how such a figure is engaged with in today's dramas; and how his contribution to the concept of a ‘verbal theatre’ has influenced his dramatic successors. It is of particular pertinence to academics and postgraduate students in the fields of Irish drama and Irish literature, and for those interested in the work of Oscar Wilde, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Thomas Kilroy, Marina Carr and Frank McGuinness. okokpoj

Essays on contemporary Irish theatre