The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre is a small English touring company of players. It arrives in a provincial Irish town, sometime in the early 1940s during the turmoil of World War II.

MADAME MACADAM TRAVEL THEATR (Methuen New Theatrescript)

Education & Teaching

Kilroy, Thomas

Schools & Teaching

Heinemann

The death and resurrection of Mr. Roche: A comedy in three acts

FABER

The big chapel

Literature & Fiction

Literary

(3 Queen Sq., WC1N 3AU), Faber and Faber Ltd

The Big Chapel was shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize and winner of 1971 the Guardian Fiction Prize. It is a novel about a man, a family and a town. Basing his work upon a notorious clerical scandal of Victorian Ireland, Thomas Kilroy has written an anatomy of religious violence that remains relevant. In scenes that range from the private and lyrical to the panorama of a whole community in convulsion he draws upon a deep knowledge of the history and folklore of nineteenth-century Ireland. While there is a great deal of humour in The Big Chapel it is, finally, a work of grave tragic proportions. It is the characters however that remain longest in the memory. Father Lannigan, the anguished demagogue, the man haunted by the implications of his own revolution. Emerine Scully, a man unable to choose, at a time when all men are faced by choice. And Horace Percy Butler, landlord and amateur scientist, a comic, tragic character who is quite unlike anyone else in Irish fiction. The novel is punctuated with extracts from Butler's journal which is itself a remarkable tour de force.

The Big Chapel

Faber and Faber

Turtle Island Books

According to Thomas Kilroy, his captivating memoir materialized in response to a cataract operation in 2006, shocking his memory into being and imparting him with a uniquely tactile and sensuous perception of his own past. Over the Backyard Wall describes a coming of age embodied by escape, self-discovery and a struggle to contend with the rigid culture of a small Irish town in Co. Kilkenny during WWII, with parents representing both sides of the civil war conflict of the 1920s. He describes encounters with fellow Kilkenny artists Tony O'Malley and Hubert Butler, and writers such as Flannery O'Connor during his tour of the southern US states in the 1950s. In keeping with Kilroy's previous works, Over the Backyard Wall utilizes the silences of the past to liberate the imagination, making use of social and political history to reinvigorate the shard-like nature of his own narrative memory.

Over The Backyard Wall: A Memoir Book

Biographies & Memoirs

Memoirs

The Lilliput Press

The Seagull

Arts & Photography

Performing Arts

GALLERY BOOKS

The seagull: After Chekhov (Gallery books)

Dufour Editions

Double cross (Gallery books)

Gallery Press

A luminous drama about Wilde's wife's struggle for redemption. The play traces the hidden life of Constance Wilde. Her story explores the gender and sexuality of people who "belonged to the future," and untangles the shifting lines in the complex relationship between her, her husband, and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Through a drama of magical transformations and mysterious, masked figures, set against the back-ground of one of the most notorious cases in British legal history, Kilroy divines the cost of the characters' conduct, Oscar's plea for salvation in Constance's eyes, and her heroic exertion to reclaim a state of grace.

Secret Fall of Constance Wilde

History & Criticism

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Books by Kilroy, Thomas