This collection of short plays begins with Joyce at Last, which was performed in Dublin and in the Henrik Ibsen Museum, Oslo - an appropriate venue, given James Joyce’s admiration for Ibsen’s work. The play is set in Paris where Joyce is making arrangements to travel to neutral Zurich just before World War II. His great work is behind him and, possibly for the first time, he reflects on his family, especially his children, Lucia and Giorgio, whose lives seem to be blighted. Could he have been a better parent? The fruits of his reminiscences come as a shock, a final epiphany.

Many of the other plays were inspired by paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland and were performed in one of the public spaces of that institution. Audiences were impressed by the fusion of the dramatic and purely visual.

The six plays following Joyce at Last deal with the following themes: a single mom captured by ISIL, a woman who fights to save her marriage, a sad recluse who hides away but still tries to help people from ‘inside’ a computer, a father who, because of a guilty secret, dreads his daughter’s upcoming wedding, a dog which has been given the gift of awareness, and a conversation between Frederick William Burton and George Eliot.

The other six plays are lighter in tone, and they range from a married couple with acute sexual problems, to a human clone who is expected to donate his heart; from a would-be writer who lives with his characters, to a vulture fund which has evicted the cousin of a mafia don; from elaborate sexual role-play, to confusion in the non-binary community of LGBT.

The humour in these plays is ‘greyish-black’, and comes close to the bone of PC-ness; it is not for the faint-hearted.

It is possibly the ekphrastic plays in this collection - those based on paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland - that are the key to why the texts here are so compelling. An idea, once sparked to life here, goes where its own logic takes it, to great effect.
- Peter FitzGerald