Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Beauty in a Broken Place | 2004 | Colm Tóibín | Buy |
Beauty in a Broken Place is Toibin’s contribution to drama. The play revisits the riots that erupted at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1907 when audiences reacted angrily to J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. Toibin uses the historical event to explore questions about art, national identity, and the power of theater to provoke.
The play reflects Toibin’s wider interest in Irish cultural history. He later edited a book about Synge and has written extensively about the relationship between writers and the communities they come from.