One of the most famous lines in theatre is just two words long: “A handbag?” It comes early in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a masterpiece of comic wordplay and barbed social satire. (For review of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Gaiety, see here.) And yet the line isn’t particularly funny,… read more +

The first week of the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1964 was largely a bleak affair. Reviews in the English papers were mostly negative, and Irish theatre faced “a scramble to survive”, warned the playwright Eugene McCabe.