Paul Mercier and the company he founded, The Passion Machine, have made a pioneering contribution to Irish theatre. Such works as Studs, Wasters, Buddleia and Kitchensink bear the stamp of their author's creativity, his concerns and his use of entertainment to explore and truly reveal his subjects. Many successful stage talents were first tempered in those furnaces.
Mercier's new play, We Ourselves, (starring Gail Fitzpatrick, right) opens in Vicar Street next Monday. Its seven characters are Irish, of a generation born in the 1950s when economic expansion began to try out its shaky legs. Through their separate stories, extended to today's bemusing economic success, we are offered a view of ourselves as a people. It could be a penetrating one.