Stuart Carolan is an Irish playwright.
He wrote for "Raw", and "Little White Lie", in 2008.[1] He was 2007 Abbey Theatre's Writer-in-Association.[2] In 2007, Defender of the Faith played Off Broadway, at the Irish Repertory Theatre,[3][4] and in 2009 in Glasgow, Scotland.[5] He works in Dublin.[6]
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Comedian Stuart Carolan’s first play is a surprisingly dark and intense thriller set in 1980s Northern Ireland. Five years after the celebrated 1981 hunger strikes and in the midst of the paranoia surrounding the "supergrass" informers in the Republican movement, a Republican family in South Armagh faces a turning point. Dairy farmer and father of two, Joe (Gerard McSorley), is a local brigade commander for the IRA. He is eager to ensure ideological continuity in his household. His eldest son Thomas (Laurence Kinlan) is an active volunteer, though he still mourns the loss of his younger brother Seamus a year before.[9]
Stuart Carolan's Defender of the Faith has all the earmarks of a first play by a playwright with a promising future. Carolan's characters breathe fire. His story, like his characters and their relationships, transcends the play's period (the 1980s when the "Troubles" were at their zenith in Northern Ireland). But the plot sputters to a somewhat clunky ending. Still, there's enough emotional steam and dramatic tension to support its being tagged as a thriller and to send the viewer out of the theater imbued with the satisfying sense of having discovered a worthy new voice.[10]
Ten years after the first IRA ceasefire you'd think that a new play set at the height of the Troubles would lack resonance. Things have moved rapidly in the interim, politics has come to the fore and Northern Ireland is slowly emerging from its murky past. But while time marches on, its legacy lasts far longer. While the guns are now (largely) silent, it'd be foolish to ignore the past and the lessons it can offer for the future.[11]