Parnell haunts the city in James Joyce’s Dubliners. An admonishing ghost, he tantalizes its citizens with the abandoned dreams that follow Ireland’s rejection of their lost leader to  the warnings and strictures of the Roman Catholic Church following his adultery with Katherine O’Shea. James Duffy, at the centre of the story A Painful Case, is one such individual, searching for his sexual, spiritual, and political solace. A devotee of classical music, he meets the married Mrs Emily Sinico at a concert. What develops shakes Duffy to his soul for he recoils from her physical show of affection. They separate. A short while later he reads of her suicide, intoxicated, throwing herself before a train. Throughout the story strange echoes and eerie parallels between the fall of Parnell and the fall of James Duffy deepen the confusion and tragedies of both men, and of the Ireland that shaped their connected fates.

Irish playwrights have a dread of one quality, one that should not be mentioned in front of them: stamina. We seem to lack it in our dramatic genetic code. George Farquhar dies impoverished, leaving two important plays, The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), in his slim volume of works. Clever Sheridan knows he will never better The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) and turns instead to politics, effectively silencing his writerly voice as he did the singing of his wife, Elizabeth - a sad case of cutting off two noses to spite one face. Wilde let himself be martyred by the sexual violence of heterosexual bigotry. Synge died too young, having achieved an extraordinary output. Shaw is the exception that proves the rule. But who would now take that confused master as model? By the 1960s, when Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Hugh Leonard and Thomas Kilroy were establishing themselves as the dominant presences in the future of Irish playwriting, it was already clear that O'Casey's powerful legacy would reside in the Dublin trilogy of the 1920s. The great novels and plays behind him, Beckett was sliding into the reductive banality of Breath (1969). So, the great question posed to the four young dramatists was: How do I go on? In the case of Brian Friel, it was to take stock of his career so far and concentrate on writing exclusively, deliberately, for the Irish stage through the years 1968 to 1971.