New collection of Druid plays
17 September 2025
A copy of the book stacked on some other copies of the book. Behind are some show posters.
Druid Theatre 1975-2025
50 Years of New Irish Plays
Marking Druid's 50th anniversary, this new book collects six of the company's most impactful plays together in one volume for the first time.
Druid has revitalised the Irish dramatic tradition by staging seminal new plays and by breathing life into neglected classics. This anthology celebrates that tradition by gathering together six key plays from Druid's fifty-year history.
Featuring an exciting blend of established and unjustly forgotten playwrights, this collection also provides insight into Druid's history.
Edited by Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan, and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, each play is accompanied by a short introduction and production images (many of them never published before) from Druid's archive at the University of Galway.
Published by Methuen Drama, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, the six plays included in the anthology are:
- The Wood of the Whispering by M. J. Molloy
- Same Old Moon by Geraldine Aron
- Conversations on a Homecoming by Tom Murphy
- At the Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods
- The Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh
- The Beacon by Nancy Harris
The selection of plays allows key themes from Druid's history to be seen more clearly – to allow readers to understand how the company has charted the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic, the past and the present, and the individual and the wider society.
It also presents six plays that are of huge value in their own right: these are original and daring dramas that have shaped and defined a half-century of Irish playwriting.
The book is now available to order in a variety of formats. We recommend ordering direct from Methuen or via Galway's wonderful booksellers, Kennys Bookshop or Charlie Byrne's Bookshop.