"Stewart Parker was a playwright whose sense of history and elegance of wit and feeling were unusual in the British Theatre" (Observer)
 This volume includes four plays: Spokesong 'A dazzling play that combines warmth of sentiment with great emotional strength and intellectual playfulness ... a gorgeously rich play' (New York Post); Catchpenny Twist: 'The most appealing thing about Parker's work is the ease with which he blends lunatic humour with a gritty sense of reality. He's done it before in Spokesong and he does it again in this hard, ribald and hilarious little play' (Sunday Times); Nightshade: 'A rare delight ... A mixture of experiment, inventiveness, wit, sheer theatricality, obscure motifs and elements that are deeply moving ... It is a highly complex play; there is no story that is told in sequence, no meaning that can be easily grasped. But as theatre it is superb' (Hibernia); Pratt's Fall: 'A delicate, unusual and rather beautiful vehicle ... a fascinating and delightful entertainment ... Parker's chosen approach is to tackle serious themes - often related to the experience of his native Northern Ireland - through a kind of lyrical comedy, deceptively lightweight, fast-moving, and slightly surreal' (Sunday Standard)

Parker Plays: 1: Spokesong; Catchpenny Twist; Nightshade; Pratt's Fall (Contemporary Dramatists)

Parker, Stewart

Humor & Entertainment

Methuen Drama

"Stewart Parker was a playwright whose sense of history and elegance of wit and feeling were unusual in the British Theatre" (Observer)
 This volume includes three of Stewart Parker's most striking plays - Northern Star: 'Only an Irishman could have written something like this: a freewheeling, lunatic sense of invention is harnessed to a cultivated, literary imagination and stoked up by moral outrage. It is a captivating play' (Sunday Times); Heavenly Bodies: 'The colourful, rather Balzacian story of Boucicault ...An undoubted talent for pungent dialogue' (The Times); Pentecost: 'One of the most stimulating, most satisfying, most touching, most illuminating in years of Irish theatre. A total theatrical experience' (Irish Times)

Parker Plays: 2: Northern Star; Heavenly Bodies; Pentecost (Contemporary Dramatists)

Cast: 4M, 2F. Set in and around a bicycle shop in Belfast, this wise and humorous play concerns Frank, the current operator of the shop started by his grandfather. Frank believes that all the world's problems can be solved if people simply switch to bicycles for transportation. Like Brendan Behan and Bertolt Brecht, Parker uses songs to comment on the action. All are original except "Bicycle Built for Two," sung by Frank to his girlfriend Daisy. The bicycle and the shop become an ingenious metaphor for the problems in Northern Ireland and, indirectly, about the problems of modern civilization.

Spokesong

Kennedy, Jimmy

Reference

Concord Theatricals

Catchpenny twist: A charade in two acts

Literature & Fiction

Literary

French

Very good clean copy in brown card wraps, small crease to top edge.

Catchpenny Twist

Poetry

The Gallery Press

Paddy Dies

Summer Palace Press

The first serious study of Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus. This book exposes the reality behind the myth of 'Europe's last Dictatorship'.

The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus

History

Europe

Trafford Publishing

Dressed for the Deep

lulu.com

Revised and updated edition for 2011. This book examines the reality of the social and political situation in Belarus. Belarus is placed within its correct historical context and the myth of 'Europe's last dictatorship' is exposed.

The Last Soviet Republic. Revised Edition

In a great Irish tradition of autobiographical fiction that includes James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Parker's poignant novel depicts events surrounding the amputation of his left leg as a nineteen-year-old university student. Masterful vignettes present the callow protagonist's life before, during and after this ordeal. Belfast, drear locus of rain and despond, contributes to the heaviness at the novel's heart, as its characters strive to rise above the pervasive melancholy of the city and find some human happiness that they can share. Tosh, Parker's alter-ego, is drifting through life before his cancer diagnosis, plagued by the twin 'cankers' of a puzzling pain in the leg and a crippling loneliness. The amputation forces him into a more authentic relationship with life, which 'Starts with the wound. Ends with the kiss. For the lucky ones.' This remarkable, posthumously edited work, largely written in the early 1970s, prefigures the skills Parker would demonstrate in his plays: plainspoken and stoical in tone, the emotion seeps through a membrane of numb reserve. The writing is impressionistically vivid, the descriptions of pain and discomfort wholly authoritative. Hopdance is a beautiful, sincere, personal testament by a true artist, a wondrous 'lost treasure' of literature now presented to its reading public.

Hopdance

The Lilliput Press

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