Keith Hopper and Neil Murphy (eds.), Dermot Healy, The Collected Plays

Abstract

With Dermot Bolger’s The Lament for Arthur Cleary (1989), the stage world of Connemara kitchens was decisively displaced by a play which was formally radical and broke with the traditional tropes of Irish theatre in presenting a bleak contemporary Dublin scarred by unemployment and heroin addiction. However, five years before Bolger’s iconoclastic breakthrough, Dermot Healy’s first play, Here, and There, and Going to America (1985), broke equally new ground in following the journey of a Sligo...