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Emma Donoghue

EMMA DONOGHUE

  (1969 - )
Nationality:    Irish
email:    n/a     Website:    Click here

Literary Agent:    IPR Limited - International Performing Rights  

Emma Donoghue is an Irish-born playwright, literary historian and novelist now living in Canada. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and an international bestseller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. Her latest novel, Frog Music, was published in 2014. Emma is currently adapting Room for the stage.

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below is a list of Emma Donoghue's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

         Don't Die Wondering         I Know My Own Heart: A lesbian Regency Romance         Kissing the Witch         Ladies And Gentlemen         Room         Talk Of the Town, The         Trespasses

Don't Die Wondering

Don't Die Wondering
When a restaurant cook loses her job because of a homophobic customer, she mounts a one-woman picket in protest. The police officer assigned to protect her is her nemesis from schooldays. This one-act comedy, set in a fictional small town, stages a battle between old and new elements of Irish culture.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Dublin Gay Festival     2005

Organisations:
-

1st Published:

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
LGBT short comedy

Parts:
Male:  4            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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I Know My Own Heart: A lesbian Regency Romance

I Know My Own Heart: A lesbian Regency Romance
Inspired by the secret coded diaries of Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister, this play subverts all the conventions of Regency romance. Teasing out the entangled lives of mannish, arrogant Lister (nicknamed 'Gentleman Jack') and three of her many lovers, I Know My Own Heart explores the different choices women made in a time of limits and prohibitions.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Playroom Theatre, Cambridge, Uk     1991

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
in Seen and Heard: Six New Plays by Irish Women, ed Cathy Leeney, Carysfort Press, Dublin, 2001
Oberon Books (2015) >>>    

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Lesbian Regency Romance. - - Lesbian, full length

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  4            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Kissing the Witch

Kissing the Witch
Five tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed. Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; a fishergirl trades her voice for the man of her dreams, only to learn that some dreams are nightmares; a pauper trades places with a princess, finding the crown weighs heavily on her head. In these fairy tales, women young and old tell their own stories of love and hate, honor and revenge, passion and deception. Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age-old characters in a dazzling new skin.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Magic Theatre, CA, USA >>>     02 Jun 2000

Organisations:
-

1st Published:
Playwrights Co-op, Toronto
Oberon Books (2015) >>>    

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  1            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Ladies And Gentlemen

Ladies And Gentlemen
Based on a true story. . . Annie Hindle - the "Monarch of Male Impersonation" who at the height of her success threw it all away to marry another woman. the play takes place in various time frames. annie is waiting in her dressing room to go on when Ryanny a young Irish-American girl arrives seeking work. annie introduces her to Tony, the manager and she is hired.as time goes on it is obvious that annie and Ryanny are in love and they hatch an audacious plan to wed as Ryanny does not believe in sex until after marriage. a drunken priest in the dark with annie in her stage outfit and it all takes place. annie retires from Vaudeville and they go to live in annie's cottage by the sea.But Ryanny developes the disease that killed her mother and dies and annie returns to the stage.

Notes:
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1st Produced:

Organisations:
Glasshouse Productions

1st Published:
New Island Books, Dublin, 1998
Oberon Books (2015) >>>    

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama. - - Gay/Lesbian, historical characters

Parts:
Male:  2            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Room

Room
Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captors garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Mas games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.

Notes:
music and lyrics by Cora Bissett and Kathryn Joseph

1st Produced:

Organisations:
-

1st Published:

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  3            Other:  1 boy

Further Reference:
-

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Talk Of the Town, The

Synopsis:
Daughter of a famous revolutionary father, she threw herself into the glamour of New York literary circles while writing heartbreaking stories of a very different world back in Dublin. Beautiful, mercurial and devastatingly truthful in her work, she fascinated the world, including the brilliant and volatile men in her life at the New Yorker. Multi award-winning Emma Donoghue, author of the worldwide bestseller Room, returns to the theatre with this dazzling new play inspired by the life and work of a pioneering writer and remarkable woman.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Project Arts Centre, Dublin     01 Oct 2012

Organisations:
Hatch Theatre Company, Landmark Productions and Dublin Theatre Festival

1st Published:
-   

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
-

Parts:
Male:  5            Female:  2            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Trespasses

Trespasses
Set over three days in 1661, Trespasses is inspired by the judge's own account of one of the tiny handful of witch trials that ever took place in Ireland. It asks why a servant girl who fell into fits would have put the blame on an old beggarwoman  but also, more timeless questions about the clashing cultures that have to share a small island country. Trespasses is about faith and superstition, politics and class, sadism and love.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Cirencester College at Cheltenham Festival of Literature Youth Drama Festival     11 Oct 1997

Organisations:
-

1st Published:

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  9            Female:  2            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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