"I AM of Ireland… come dance with me in Ireland,” declared Erin’s greatest poet, WB Yeats. It is hard to overestimate the significance of Yeats to the development of modern Ireland. The Sligo poet was the artistic father of the Irish Literary Revival, and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, which put Irish creativity at the centre stage of the emergent cultural Nationalism in the late 19th century.

ANYONE reading this has either seen or heard of the film Reservoir Dogs. The classic mob movie features a gang of criminals stuck in a room waiting for information that never arrives which leads to increasing tension and a grand crescendo of operatic violence. What fewer people know is Quentin Tarantino’s gangster classic is simply Samuel Beckett’s Absurdist Play Waiting for Godot reimagined in a mobster setting.

IN TERMS of Irish revolutionaries, we tend to think of James Connolly and Padraig Pearse manning the barricades of the GPO

IRISH playwrights have always played a central role in shaping the nation’s sense of itself