The Plays of Maura Laverty: Liffey Lane, Tolka Row, A Tree in the Crescent [Paperback]

Maura Laverty's three plays, published here for the first time, create a vivid and moving picture of 1950s Dublin, the city's housing crises, class divisions and family struggles. They are an important and refreshing addition to the Irish theatrical canon, and retain their appeal to contemporary readers and researchers.Published here for the first time, Maura Laverty's playsLiffey Lane,Tolka RowandA Tree in the Crescentare 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.Preface

Introduction: Maura Laverty's Dublin Trilogy

Liffey Lane

Tolka Row

A Tree in the Crescent

Bibliography and Further Reading Maura Laverty bore vivid witness to newly independent Ireland in her journalism, broadcasting, cookery writing, novels for adults and children, and in the plays she wrote for the Gate Theatre in the 1950s. In publishing these three plays ló>