ABSTRACT
In 1975, D’Arcy and Arden presented their most original, most extraordinary work – The Non-Stop Connolly Show, a monumental historical epic about James Connolly, the Irish socialist republican leader who with Padraig Pearse had led the 1916 Easter Rising. The Non-Stop Connolly Show is a cycle of six plays. The first two are each of one act, while the remaining four plays are full length. The cycle opens with Connolly as a young boy among his fellow Irish in Edinburgh, his birthplace. The Non-Stop Connolly Show attempts to do something similar for twentieth-century Irish identity and destiny, but it does this not through illuminating the workings of a dominant religion, but by tracing in detail the changing fortunes and continuing struggles of the dominant ideas of the time – republicanism and socialism.
