THE STORY: POOR BEAST IN THE RAIN is set in an old-fashioned betting shop on the weekend leading up to The All Ireland Hurling Final, which coincides with the return of Danger Doyle to town, a man who ran away to London with another man’s wife ten years ago. The play examines the lives of all those who were left behind—Joe, Danger’s old sidekick, who has managed to reinvent the past; Molly, Danger’s old girlfriend, who has become embittered by time; Steven, the cuckolded husband, who owns the betting shop; and Eileen, the daughter of the woman who ran away. Also in the story is Georgie, a boy who has learned to adore Eileen from a distance. Danger has come back not to set them all free, as we first suspect, but to debunk the myth and to entice Eileen to come back with him to London to visit her mother who is unwell.
“How many contemporary writers give us the feeling that O’Casey has been exhumed in order to set a Chekhov short story to dialogue?” —The Times (London).
Included in
The Wexford Trilogy.
