Winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 1997. 'Carr's harrowing play has the scale and anguish of myth, and the immediacy of a contemporary anecdote.' Independent on Sunday There's a wolf tooth growin in me heart and it's turnin me from everywan and everthin I am. Portia Coughlan lives life in monstrous limbo, haunted by a yearning for her spectral twin brother lying at the bottom of the Belmont river, unable to find any love for her wealthy husband and children, seeking solace in soulless affairs, deeply afraid of what she might do. Portia Coughlan premiered on the Abbey Theatre's Peacock Stage, Dublin, in April 1996 and transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May that year. It was revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, in October 2023. 'Taut and haunting, funny and sad . . . Carr plays with time and place to resonant, ultimately devastating effect.' The Stage 'One of the most important Irish plays of the twentieth century.' Arts Review 'Marina Carr goes to a deep place that has not just to do with society now but that touches an inner tragedy of existence. The female quality of her writing comes through not only in the way she writes about women, it's in the physicality in her writing. She is right in there with the cycles of life, with the blood and the dirt.' Joyce McMillan, New York Times

Emma O'Donovan is eighteen, beautiful, and fearless. It's the beginning of summer in a quiet Irish town and tonight she and her friends have dressed to impress. Everyone is at the party, and all eyes are on Emma. The next morning Emma's parents discover her collapsed on the doorstop of their home, unconscious. She is disheveled, bleeding, and disoriented, looking as if she had been dumped there. To her distress, Emma can't remember what happened the night before. All she knows is that none of her friends will respond to her texts. At school, people turn away from her and whisper under their breath. Her mind may be a blank as far as the events of the previous evening, but someone has posted photos of it on Facebook under a fake account, "Easy Emma"--photos she will never be able to forget. As the photos go viral and a criminal investigation is launched, the community is thrown into tumult. The media descends, neighbors chose sides, and people from all over the world want to talk about her story. Everyone has something to say about Emma. Asking For It is a powerful story about the devastating effects of rape and public shaming, told through the awful experience of a young woman whose life is changed forever by an act of violence.

Sometimes a person needs to create an act that destroys the world because the world is broken. The virus has ravaged Thebes. Millions are dead and the economy has tanked. Vaccinations have been administered and the Festival of Liberty is imminent. Things are finally about to change. The countdown is on but leader Creon and his quarantined niece, the self-identifying X'ntigone, have unfinished business before the celebrations can commence. What happens when old-world order meets a radical new world vision? In this thrilling meditation on Sophocles' timeless Greek tragedy, political expediency meets the voice of a generation who want to tear down the power structures that have ill-served a crumbling state. Darren Murphy's X'ntigone is a fresh and vital discourse for our times, when even truth has been sacrificed at the altar of political gain and avarice.

Publisher Description

You’re six years old. Mum’s in hospital. Dad says she’s “done something stupid.” She finds it hard to be happy. So you start to make a list of everything that’s brilliant about the world. Everything that’s worth living for. 1. Ice cream. 2. Kung Fu movies. 3. Burning things. 4. Laughing so hard you shoot milk out your nose. 5. Construction cranes. 6. Me. You leave it on her pillow. You know she’s read it because she’s corrected your spelling. Soon, the list will take on a life of its own. A play about depression and the lengths we will go to for those we love.

A classic title in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy - the first volume It is the early 1960s in a country village in Ireland. Caithleen Brady and her attractive friend Baba are on the verge of womanhood and dreaming of spreading their wings in a wider world; of discovering love and luxury and liquor and above all, fun. With bawdy innocence, shrewd for all their inexperience, the girls romp their way through convent school to the bright lights of Dublin - where Caithleen finds that suave, idealised lovers rarely survive the real world. 'She is one of our bravest and best novelists' Irish Times 'O'Brien rises like a lark in the clear air, she sings as she flies' Literary Review 'One of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world' New York Times Book Review

Will truth out? Set over one evening, Rathmines Road by Deirdre Kinahan is a play that rages in a tiny room. Fraught, funny and ferocious, it testifies to the pain of carrying the memory of sexual assault throughout a lifetime. A play about secret trauma and public revelation, Rathmines Road bristles with tension and interrogates catharsis to ask: when and how do we take responsibility? The play premiered at the Abbey Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival 2018, previewing at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, in a co-production between Fishamble and the Abbey Theatre.

"The archival material presented here is important and well-researched, Frazier's writing is lucid and dignified, and the story that unfolds is also exceedingly funny. The comedy is not laid on, it is all there in the material itself. Frazier is simply the first to bring it out."--Malcolm Brown, author of The Politics of Irish Literature

Lads, when it comes to your time for pickin' women, you're not going to have my kind of luck. The best one is taken. All Julia and John want is to live their lives with their two sons, on their own terms. But despite their hopes, the outside world and its racism puts paid to their plans. A world premiere of a new play from Rosaleen McDonagh, this tender, complex and beautiful love story examines how external circumstances pull us apart, when all we really want is to be together. This edition was published to coincide with the world premiere at Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in August 2021