Published: Yellow House Publishing – 14 June 2026
So I finally did it. I wrote a book. Well, not exactly wrote, perhaps, more like collated, amassed, put together … a selection of my reviews, interviews, features and news stories, covering four decades of theatre in Northern Ireland.
Yellow House Publishing took it on and it has been quite a ride. It was not anything I had ever intended doing, had not Seán Doran, festival curator and director of Arts Over Borders, not given me a nudge to gather together a few items (66 in total) from my vast body of work (over 3,000 pieces) and get them published. “If you don’t”, he said, “they’ll wither on the vine and be lost forever”.
That view was shared by Connal Parr and Chris Thackaberry of Yellow House and theatre director and former Queen’s University Belfast drama lecturer David Grant, who wrote the foreword. David has been a leading member of the theatre sector in Northern Ireland, ever since I first knew him, some 43 years ago. His summing up of the book’s significance has made it all worthwhile:
“Perhaps this book’s greatest importance lies in its first two decades: in the way it captures a picture of work that is at risk of disappearing from view as our understanding of cultural history becomes ever more dependent on artificial intelligence. Anyone who has experimented with these emergent AI platforms will have noticed that they often deny the existence of anything that happened before the 21st century, even when one knows and protests loudly that these things happened, because we lived through them”.
It has had two launches: the first, on 19 June, was a private gathering for friends and family in the glorious surroundings of the Harrison Chambers Hotel in Belfast, where a special, colour-coordinated cocktail The Locksmith was prepared for guests.
The second, on 26 June, was held in the bar-café of Belfast’s Lyric Theatre, Northern Ireland’s leading producing theatre and a venue, which has been a cornerstone of my long career as an arts journalist, critic and, latterly, playwright.
My old friend, the BBC broadcaster and political journalist Mark Carruthers did the honours, asking all the right questions and inviting questions and reminiscences from the audience. He recalled our first meeting, in the Arts Council’s Gallery in the city centre in 1985. He was one of a group of undergraduates from Queen’s University’s Dramsoc, who were about to stage a powerful play about a young woman who had been diagnosed with cancer. He told the assembled gathering that I had taken them seriously – and subsequently wrote a feature about them for the Irish News daily newspaper. A couple of years later, those same young people formed Tinderbox, one of the first independent theatre companies in the region, which is still producing great work to this day.
David Grant and I, together with actors Ruairi Conaghan and Caitriona Hinds, are now working towards a series of In Conversation events at the Seamus Heaney HomePlace (13 September), Aspects Literary Festival (1 October) and the Belfast International Arts Festival (25 October). David and I will chat about the productions, artists, festivals and events that shaped the evolution of Northern Ireland theatre between 1985 and 2025, while Ruairi and Caitriona will read scenes from some of the plays mentioned in the book – Agreement (Owen McCafferty), Trust (Gary Mitchell), Philadelphia, Here I Come! (Brian Friel), Northern Star (Stewart Parker), Lay Up Your Ends (Marie Jones and Martin Lynch), Not I (Samuel Beckett) amongst them.
Meanwhile, the book can be ordered online from the Yellow House Publishing website https://www.yellowhousepublishing.com/shop or from selected bookshops.
The Even Hand 