Book Description

Published here for the first time, Maura Laverty’s plays Liffey Lane, Tolka Row and A Tree in the Crescent are rooted in 1950s Dublin, its territories and enclaves. Teeming with the lives of the poor, the ambitious, the trapped and the struggling, the plays are moving, funny and vividly alive. They capture the capital in a state of transformation – reaching for modernisation while still enmired in stagnant class divisions, poor housing and narrow social values. Key to all three plays are questions of home, the lives of women and girls, and the impact of conservative government policies and church attitudes. Already a public figure in Irish life, and an influencer before her time through her fiction, cookery books and broadcasting, Laverty’s plays met with huge success when staged in 1951 and 1952 by Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre Company at Dublin’s Gaiety and Gate Theatres and on tour. Laverty’s trilogy is a significant and long-awaited part of the twentieth-century Irish theatrical canon. This volume presents the Trilogy, including a preface by Christopher Fitz-Simon, who knew and worked with Laverty. The editors’ introduction contextualises Laverty’s work and considers the theatrical values of the plays.