A Weekend of Irish Drama

Thomas Kilroy, one of Ireland’s most distinguished playwrights, and author Adrian Frazier will present A Weekend of Irish Drama at Washington University Oct. 22 and 23.

At 4 p.m. Friday, Oct 22, Kilroy and Frazier will speak on contemporary Irish drama. At 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 23, both writers will be present for a dramatic reading of Kilroy’s most recently produced play, The Shape of Metal. The reading will be followed by a discussion with director Heidi Vogel, of St. Louis University, and the three-person cast: Sally Eaton, Peggy Kols and Tarah Demant.

Both events — sponsored by the Department of English and Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences — are free and open to the public and take place in Hurst Lounge, Room 201, Duncker Hall, on the northwest corner of Brookings quadrangle. A reception will follow each. For more information, call (314) 935-7130.

Kilroy’s plays include The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche (1968); The O’Neill (1969); Sex and Shakespeare (1976); Talbot’s Box (1973); Double Cross (1986); The Madam MacAdam Travelling Theater (1992); and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997). He also has adapted Chekov’s The Seagull (1981); Ibsen’s Ghosts (1989); and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1996), and published a novel, The Big Chapel (1971), which was short-listed for the Booker Prize.

According to critic Gerald Dawe, Kilroy’s affiliation with the Anglo-Irish tradition of playwrights, from Farquhar to Yeats, Wilde, Shaw and Beckett, and his translations and adaptations have destabilized “received opinion on what one should expect not just from ‘theatre’ but from ‘Irish’ theatre.”

Kilroy describes himself as “fascinated and often appalled by what happens when the intense concentrated hopes, fears and beliefs of the private person are subjected to the fragmenting, diffusionary effects of public life.” The Shape of Metal, for example, explores the conflicted relationship between a brilliant and unyielding sculptor, Nell Jeffrey, and her two daughters: Grace, who left her mother’s studio 30 years before, and the confrontational Judith. Previous works have focused on a gay man victimized by Dublin bachelor toughs; a 19th century workers’ saint; William Joyce (better known as Lord Haw-Haw); and Constance Wilde, wife of Oscar Wilde.

Born in 1943 in Callan, Co. Kilkenny, Kilroy served as play editor at the Abbey Theatre in 1977 and became director of Field Day Theatre Co. in 1988. He is a member of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Irish Academy of Letters, and a former professor of modern English at the University of Ireland, Galway.

Frazier is the author of Beyond the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman, and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990) and George Moore, 1852-1933 (2000). He received his doctorate in English from Washington University in 1979, writing his dissertation on Irish poetry after Yeats, and is currently a member of the theatre faculty at the University of Ireland, Galway.