Playboys of the GPO
Colm Tóibín, 18 April 1996
Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation
by Declan Kiberd.
Cape, 719 pp., £20, November 1995,0 224 04197 5 Show More
by Declan Kiberd.
Cape, 719 pp., £20, November 1995,
“... play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and coloniser will play, the masks ... ”