Saint Oscar and other plays

Terry Eagleton's plays in this the first collection of his work for the theatre - Saint Oscar, The White, the Gold and the Gangrene, Disappearances, and God's Locusts - transgress what he terms 'the jealously patrolled frontiers between "art" and "ideas"'. In spirit they owe at least as much to Oscar Wilde, the Irish Oxfordian socialist and proto-deconstructionist, as, for example in their use of prose and ballad forms, they do to Bertolt Brecht. Saint Oscar, about Oscar Wilde, and The White, the Gold and the Gangrene, based on the life and tragic death of James Connolly, originally toured Ireland respectively in productions by Field Day of Derry and Dubbeljoint of Belfast. God's Locusts, written to commemorate the Great Famine and broadcast on BBC Radio 3, excoriates British officialdom for its callous inhumanity in mismanaging the relief operation.