Word: dubliners
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...small, rural hamlet in Northern Ireland. As a teenager he was torn between a passion for boxing and a love of theater. The world of Chekhov won out in the early '70s, when Neeson joined Belfast's repertory Lyric Players and then graduated to the renowned Abbey Theater in Dublin. There he first tackled drama that dealt with his country's fractious history--in his words, "a lot of Sean O'Casey." (The apolitical Neeson, however, still knew almost nothing about Collins when he came to the role...
...does have a great subject. For it was Collins who, in the aftermath of the disastrous Easter Rising of 1916, which proved the hopelessness of open confrontation with Britain's occupying army, virtually invented urban guerrilla warfare, in effect writing the Ur-text on hit-and-run terrorism on Dublin's jostling streets. His work influenced generations of rebels everywhere. Then, having brought the British to their knees--and to the bargaining table--Collins in 1921 helped to negotiate the peace settlement that established the Irish Free State but failed to win full independence for his country and acquiesced...
...other setting--sprawling, crisscrossed with relationships, randomly cruel and beautiful--better suits the novel's strengths. Certainly, masterpieces have been written about smaller communities, but the correspondence between city and novelist is unique, and so it is that we refer to Dickens' London, Balzac's Paris, Joyce's Dublin...
According to Patrick Lee, Grafton Street is a street in Dublin, Ireland that is very similar to Harvard Square...
...Beckett play may aspire to silence, yet its characters can't shut up. The women, reminiscent of Beckett's Dublin youth, chatter on about postnuclear sunlight (Happy Days) or adulterous affairs (Play)--what's Gaelic for yenta? The men ponder the efficacy of torture (Rough for Theatre II, What Where), the memory of a mother's last days (Krapp's Last Tape, Footfalls). Their dialogue often sounds like bumper stickers for the clinically depressed: "Can there be misery loftier than mine?" asks Hamm in Endgame. But it is also savagely, and savingly, comic. As Beckett knew, all hope is comic...