The Peacock Theatre in Dublin was packed to capacity on Monday night for the opening of Colm Tóibín's first play, Beauty in a Broken Place.
"It's an unmissable occasion," said writer Andrew O'Hagan, who flew from London to attend. His own book, Personality, has just won the James Tait Memorial Award. "I'd booked the flight before he had finished the play". (O'Hagan and Tóibín were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999.)
The writer Patrick McGrath also flew from London to attend. "I wouldn't miss it for anything," said the writer, who was also at this year's Listowel Writers' Festival.
Roddy Doyle was in the audience too, as was Yeats biographer Prof Roy Foster, who came to Dublin from Kerry. Tóibín's play recalls the people and events surrounding the 1926 première of Sean O'Casey's The Plough and the Stars at the Abbey Theatre. The playwright Tom Murphy, wearing a fedora that Tóibín gave him as a present three years ago, was also there.
Poets Paul Durcan and Prof Masazumi Toraiwa, from Tokyo, had both read the play. "This is the truth, it's very moving, it's like a bloody stone being opened," said Durcan.
Dr Margaret McCurtan, former professor of history at UCD, recalled teaching Tóibín in 1973 and seeing "the style in his work, especially in his exam papers". Students of promise used to stand out, she said. "It's in the exams that you recognise them. They come up like salmon."
The play is dedicated to the writer and broadcaster June Levine and her husband Prof Ivor Browne, who were both in attendance.
Helen Ó Murchú and Prof Máirtín Ó Murchú, parents of the actor, Caitríona Ní Mhurchú, were also there. Others in the audience included the writer Anne Enright; Martine Moreau, of the French Embassy; Vallejo Gantner, of the ESB Dublin Fringe Festival; Dr Michael Ryan, director of the Chester Beatty Library and his wife, Clodagh Ryan, and playwright Stuart Carolan with his wife, Emma Kelly.