New Plays from the Abbey Theatre: Volume Three, 1999-2001

This anthology offers the best new plays from Ireland's Abbey Theatre. In Hugh Leonard's Love in the Title, a woman's visit to the Irish countryside leads to a surreal meeting with her own mother as a 30-year-old in 1964 and her grandmother as a 20-year-old in 1922. The frank exchanges that mark this meeting allow the women to remain in and represent their times, yet still communicate with each other. Frank McGuinness's Dolly West's Kitchen is set in a small house in Donegal, 1944, a meeting place where two American GIs, a British Army captain and the nationalistic West family share meals and talk of love, war and betrayal. Finally, Jimmie Murphy's The Muesli Belt examines the ramifications of renewal and relocation in the urban centres of western Ireland, as a greedy property developer bent on buying up everything in sight to built high-rent flats throws locals into despair.