Review: Marillynn Richtarik: Stewart Parker - A life

Stewart Parker is ofen spoken of as Ireland’s most unjustly neglected dramatist. His first play, Spokesong, was an unexpected hit at the Dublin Teatre Festival in 1975; his last play, Pentecost (1987), is one of the great works about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And in the years between those two productions he wrote several other dramas—all on (ostensibly) different themes, but all unified by a spirit of playful experimentation. Parker’s death from cancer in 1988—at the age of only forty-seven—robbed the Irish theatre of a figure who had already shown greatness, and who obviously had much more to accomplish.