Life
1955- ; b. 5 July, Dublin, son of an architect and actress Joan O’Hara,
nephew of singer Mary O’Hara; raised Longford Tce., Dun Laoghaire;
ed. Catholic University School, and TCD (Latin and English); travelled
in USA, and lived in Paris, England, Greece and Switzerland, 1977-85;
lives and writes in Dublin; Arts Council Bursary, 1982; elected Aosdána,
1989; first novel, Macker’s Garden (1982) and Strappado
Square (1983), both for children; Elsewhere: The Adventures of
Belemus (1985) for younger readers; The Engine of Owl-Light
(1987) novel; issued poetry collections, The Water Colourist (1983), The
Rhetorical Town (1985), and Fanny Hawkes Goes to the Mainland Forever
(1989); worked as Honorary Fellow in Writing at the University of Iowa (1984); issued an experimental novel, The Engine of Owl-Light (1987);
plays The Pentagonal Dream (Dramer 1986); Boss Grady’s
Boys (Peacock 1989), winner of inaugural BBC/Stewart Parker Award,
concerning the last days of two old brothers, Mick and Josie Kelly (resp.
Eamon Kelly and Jim Norton); Prayers of Sherkin (Peacock 1990),
set in 1890s based on youth and marriage Fanny Hawkes, supposedly his
grandmother, who leaves the island where her Quaker people are settled following the flight of Matt Purdy from industrial Manchester a century earlier;
Ansbacher writer-in-residence at Abbey Theatre, 1990; member Abbey Board,
1990-91; White Woman Street (Peacock and Bush, London 1992), set
in America, and dealing with a great-uncle who went off to join the army,
produced in Manhattan by Daedalus Theatre Co.; The Only True History
of Lizzie Finn (Abbey 1995); Stewardship of Christendom (Royal
Court Upstairs 1995; Gate 1995), the narrative of a former Dublin Metropolitan
Police commissioner, dir. Max Stafford-Clark, in Out- of-Joint Company
début with Donal McCann as Thomas Dunne in the title role, attracting
ovations in London, Dublin and Broadway (NY); winner of Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year Award, 1995; The Only True History of Lizzie
Finn (Abbey, Oct. 1995); Writing Fellow, TCD, 1995-96; Prayers
of Sherkin (Old Vic May 1997); awarded Ewart Biggs Peace Prize for Steward of Christendom, March 1997, judged by Roy Foster and others;
received Ireland Fund Writer’s Award (£10,000), June 1997; Our
Lady of Sligo (1997), concerning a grandmother who died in 1953, premiered
at Cottesloe Theatre, London (July 1997), directed for Out of Joint by
Max Stafford-Clark, with Sinéad Cusack in the title role, Nigel
Terry as Jack, and Catherine Cusack as Joanie; Prayers of Sherkin,
revived at Old Vic, London ( (May-June 1997); winner of Ireland Fund Literary Award, 1997; The Whereabouts of Eneas
McNulty (Feb. 1998), novel of an RIC-man who turns world-traveller
and finally returns to a hostile Ireland; married to Alison (née
Deegan), who appears in BBC television series Casualty; lives in Greystones,
Co. Wicklow with wife and twins; a new play, Our Lady
of Sligo (1998), reconstructing the life of his Sligo grandmother portrayed as Mai O’Hara,
a middle-class tragedy of ‘fuelled by alcohol and despair’, premiered at Cottesloe Th.,
London, dir. Max Stafford-Clark (Out of Joint Co.); issued Annie Dunne
(2002), a novel set in Co. Wicklow, an extract from which appeared
in Dublin Review, No. 5 (Winter 2001-02); trans. The House of
Bernarda Alba, by Federico García Lorca (Abbey, April 2003) and Whistling Psyche, premiered at the Almeida Th., London (May-June 2004), based on a supposed meeting of Dr. Barry and Florence Nightingale, with Kathryn Hunter and Clare Bloom in the respective roles; issued new poems, The Pinkening Boy (2004); gave “Rattlebag” broadcast interview for RTE at Dun Laoghaire Pavilion Theatre, 29 March 2005; issued A Long Long War (2005), a novel about Willie Dunne, the soldier son of Tom Dunne of Steward in the First World War, . DIW
FDA OCIL DIL
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Works
Fiction, Macker’s Garden (Dublin: Co-Op Books 1982);
Time Out of Mind [&] Strappado Square (Dublin:
Wolfhound Press 1983), novellas; Elsewhere, The Adventures of Belemus
(Portlaoise: Brogeen Books; Mountrath: Dolmen 1985; Gerrards Cross:
Colin Smythe 1997), ill. by Raymond Mullan; The Engine of Owl-Light
(Manchester: Carcanet 1987) [rep. Paladin; infra];
The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (London: Picador 1998), 320pp
[infra]., and Do., trans. by Robert
Davreu as Les Tribulations d’Eneas McNulty (Paris:
Plon 1999), 350pp.; Annie Dunne (London: Faber & Faber 2002),
228pp. [infra]; The Pinkening Boy (Dublin: New Island Books: 2004) [q.pp.]
Special editions, The Pinkening Boy (Joe McCann 2004) [85 signed copies; bound by Fine Bindery; copies 1-65 in cloth; copies I-XX in quarter goatskin; simultaneous trade edn. published by New Island Books.
Poetry, The Water-colourist (Mountrath: Dolmen Press 1983) [ltd. signed edn. of 75]; The Rhetorical Town (Mountrath: Dolmen Press 1985); Fanny Hawkes Goes to the Mainland Forever (Dublin: Raven 1989); The Pinkening Boy (Dublin: New Island 2004), 32pp.
Plays, Pentagonal Dream (An Damer 1986) [acted only]; Boss Grady’s Boys (Dublin: Raven Arts Press 1989); Prayers of Sherkin (1990); Plays: One [Prayer of Sherkin and Boss Grady’s Boys] (London: Methuen 1991); Stewardship of Christendom (London: Methuen 1995; 1996), 65pp. [infra]; The Only History of Lizzie Finn; Stewardship of Christendom; White Woman Street [Methuen Drama] (London: Methuen 1995), 181pp; Our Lady of Sligo, foreword by Roy Foster [Methuen Drama] (London: Methuen 1998), 64pp. Complete Plays of Sebastian Barry, foreword by Fintan O’Toole (London: Methuen 1997).
Miscellaneous, ed. & intro., The Inherited Boundaries, Younger Poets of the Republic of Ireland (Mountrath: Dolmen 1986) [incl. Thomas McCarthy, Aidan Carl Mathews, Harry Clifton, Dermot Bolger, Michael O’Loughlin, Matthew Sweeney and Sebastian Barry; infra]; Foreword to John Farleigh, ed., Far from the Land: Contemporary Irish Plays (London: Methuen 1998); Preface to The Essential Jennifer Johnston (London: Review 1999), 435pp.; extract from Annie Dunne (2002), in Dublin Review, No. 5 (Winter 2001-02), pp.90-96.
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Criticism
Reviews, Armita Wallace, ‘The Prodigious Sebastian Barry’, Irish Times
(17 Nov. 1990) [q.p.]; Christopher Murray, “Such a Sense of
Home”: The Poetic Drama of Sebastian Barry’, Colby Quarterly
27 (Dec. 1991), pp. 242-47; Maggie Gee rev. of Prayers
of Sherkin, in Times Literary Supplement, 6 June 1997), p.21
[infra];
Kevin Myers, “Irishman’s Diary”, in The Irish Times (28 June 1997) [infra]; Jim Haughey, ‘Standing in the Gap: Sebastian Barry’s Revisionist Theater’, in Colby Library Quarterly, 34, 4 (1998), pp.290-302; John Lahr, review of sundry plays incl. Sebastian
Barry’s Our Lady of Sligo at the Irish Repertory Theatre,
in New Yorker (8 May 2000) [infra];
John Whitley, ‘Terrible Tales at Bedtime’, Daily Telegraph,
(18 Apr.1998) [infra]; Eileen Battersby, book notice on The Whereabouts of Aeneas McNulty, in The Irish Times (3 April 1999) [infra]; C. L. Dallat, ‘Hiding
Behind the Outskirts’, review of Hinterland (Cottesloe
Th.)., in Times Literary Supplement (22 March 2002), p.19 [infra];
Jody Corcoran, ‘Haughey Fury at Abbey Plan’ [news story], reports
that Sean Haughey has told the Sunday Independent that there was ‘a basis for consideration of legal action’ (Sunday Ind., 10
Feb. 2001); ‘Cheap shots at the private lives of the Haughey family:
Hinterland represents a sad day for our national theatre’, in Sunday
Independent ( 10 Feb. 2002) [infra]; Eileen
Battersby, ‘Poor Drama and Bad Manners’, in (The Irish Times
[Weekend] (9 Feb., 2002) [infra];
Emer Kelly, ‘A Party Line believes impartiality on air: RTE denies
having an agenda’, [review], in Sunday Independent (10 Feb. 2002) [infra];
Emer O’Kelly, ‘Barry’s chilling study of CJ is uneven’, in Sunday Independent (10 Feb. 2002) [infra];
Declan Kiberd, review ofAnnie Dunne, in The Irish Times (18 May 2002), “Weekend”, p.10. [infra]; Ger FitzgGibbon, ‘The
Poetic Theatre of Sebastian Barry’, in Eamonn Jordan, ed., Theatre
Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre (Dublin: Carysfort
Press 2000), pp.224-35; Eamonn Sweeney, ‘Busted flush?’ [Eamonn Sweeney is disappointed with Sebastian Barry’s latest, Annie Dunne]’, in The Guardian (Sat., 29 June 2002) [infra]. See sundry other reviews in Commentary, infra.
Interviews, Matt Wolf, [interview] ‘It’s Ancestor Worship, But of a Dramatic Sort’, in New York Times[‘Theatre’ sect.], (19 Jan. 1997) [infra]; John Cunningham, ‘My Family, the Outcasts’ [interview], in The Guardian ( 25 March 1998), Features Sect., p.14; Helen Meany, ‘Singing across the Gaps’, [interview], in The Irish Times (19 Feb. 1998) [Arts Sect.], p.16; ‘Political Hinterland’, feature-interview with Max Stafford-Clarke, director of Hinterland, in The Irish Times, Weekend (19 Jan. 2002), p.4 [infra];interview, in Lilian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon & Eamonn Jordan, eds., Theatre Talk: Conversations with Irish Theatre Practitioners (Dublin: Carysfort Press 2001), pp.16-28; Angelique Chrisafis, ‘Dramatist tells of “extraordinary” reaction to satirical work about political corruption in Ireland’, The Guardian (Saturday, 8 June 2002) [infra].
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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
(Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects ‘The Tree Alphabet’,
‘The Real Snow’, and ‘The February Town’ from The
Rhetorical Town (1985); biographical note p.1436 characterises him
in terms of ‘coolness of tone and elaborately figured vocabulary.’
Gerald Dawe, ed., The New Younger Irish Poets (Blackstaff 1982; revised 1991), selects ‘Hermaphroditus’; ‘Summer desk’; ‘At a gate of St Stephen’s Green’; ‘Fanny Hawke goes to the mainland forever’; ‘Lines discovered under the foundations of Dublin in a language neither Irish nor English’; ‘Trooper O’Hara at the Indian Wars’ (pp.44-48).
William Trevor, ed., The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford: OUP 1989), cites Barry in the introduction.
The Abbey Theatre (Promotion notice): The House of Bernarda Alba, by Federico García Lorca in a new translation by Sebastian Barry; directed by Martin Drury with Cast incl. Rosaleen Linehan, Olwen Fouéré, Bernadette McKenna, Ruth McCabe, Joan O’Hara, Justine Mitchell, Isabel Claffey Gertrude Montgomery, Emma Colohan, Andrea Irvine, Sile Nugent. Previews: Wednesday 9th-Saturday 12th April; Monday 14th April 8.00pm (Sat matinees 2.30pm).
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Past & Present: Barry chose a passage
from Sir Thomas Browne [Urn Burial] as his epigraph for The
Engine of Owl-light (1987): ‘However, to palliate the shortness
of our Lives, and somewhat to compensate our brief term in this World,
it’s good to know as much as we can of it, and also so far as possibly
in us lieth to hold a Theory of times past, as though we had seen the
same. He who hath thus considered the World, as also how therein things
long past have been answered by things present, how matters in one age
have been acted, over in another, and how there is nothing new under the
sun, may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning,
and to be as old as the World; and if he should still live on, ’twould
be but the same thing.’ (‘No new thing ... &c.’
is from Ecclesiastes the Preacher/OT.) [Note that Benedict Anderson quotes a different passage from Browne - ‘Even the old ambitions had the advatnage of ours, in the attempt of their vainglories [...] whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their Monuments and Mechanicall preservations [..., &c.]’, in Imagined Communities, 1991 Edn., p.147.)
Hinterland (2002) premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 30 Jan. to 23 Feb. in an Out Of Joint/Abbey Theatre/Royal National Theatre co-production with a cast incl. Patrick Malahide, Dearbhla Molloy, Phelim Drew, Kieran Ahern, James Hayes, Anna Healy and Lucianne McEvoy.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)