Brooklyn

In 2009 Tóibín released Brooklyn, a best seller that was adapted into a critically acclaimed film (2015) starring Saoirse Ronan, with a screenplay by Nick Hornby. A love story set within the landscape of Irish migration to the United States in the 1950s, it was inspired by a piece…

(2015)—based on Colm Tóibín’s lyrical novel about a young Irish woman who emigrates to Brooklyn and is then called home to Ireland—was evocative and absorbing and earned her a best-actress Oscar nomination. She made her Broadway debut in 2016, starring in an acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Ronan…

Yet his best-known work, Brooklyn (2009), looked back to the 1950s to tell a haunting story of the mid-century wave of Irish emigration to the United States. London-born McDonagh took satire and “stage Irishness” to new levels of absurdity with his extremely violent, yet also extremely funny, cycles of…