Marie Jones is one of the most prolific and popular writers working in Northern Irish theatre today. Her work has achieved local relevance and international recognition. In the course of a remarkable career now spanning five decades, Jones has been an actor, playwright, and screenwriter; she also helped to establish two major Irish theatre companies (Charabanc and DubbelJoint) as well as playing a major role in theatre-in-education through her plays for Replay Productions. From her earliest work with Charabanc in the early 1980s to the present day, Jones¿s work has engaged with Irish (and, more often than not, specifically Northern Irish) experience in ways that reveal the extent to which the personal is political in a distinctive form of popular theatre. This volume of essays engages critically with Jones¿s oeuvre, her reception in Ireland and beyond, and her position in the canon of contemporary drama.

CONTENTS: Eugene McNulty: Marie Jones and Charabanc: Popular Theatre in / for Northern Ireland - Charlotte J. Headrick: Finding her legs: Lay Up Your Ends and Marie Jones's international success - Deirdre O'Leary: Purchasing Power: Material Culture and the Function of America in Marie Jones's post Charabanc plays - Wei H. Kao: An Alternative Peace Process: Violence and Reconciliation in Marie Jones's Plays - Fiona Coffey: Marie Jones and the DubbelJoint Theatre Company: Performance, Practice, and Controversy - Eleanor Owicki: «I am a Protestant Man, I'm an Irish Man» : Politics, Identity, and A Night in November in Performance - Catherine Rees: Masculinity and the Performance of Gendered Identities in the plays of Marie Jones - Shonagh Hill: «Popular Feminisms» and the Radical Within: Menopausal Women's Desire for Visibility in Marie Jones's Women on the Verge of HRT - Dawn Fowler: Women's Suffrage and the Politics of Militancy in The Milliner and The Weaver.