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As a poet, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian Barry has established his reputation, in recent years, as one of Ireland's young literary stars. Particularly through his efforts for the stage and through his 1995 breakout play, The Steward of Christendom, Barry finds himself today compared to and associated with that host of Irish playwrights — including Brian Friel, Fr;nk McGUinness, Tom Murphy, Marina Carr, and Martin McDonagh — who have revitalized Irish theatre in the last few decades. Barry also shares a common goal with these playwrights: restaging Ireland.

Vaelav Havel's recent rise to political power in the now-dissolved Czechoslovak Republic has only confinned some critics' contentions that Havel's dramatic works are all basically political in origin and theme. These critics' beliefs are supported by some striking similarities in many of Havel's plays; the bureaucracies that are. often seen as thinly veiled representations of totalitarian regimes, for example, are present in or alluded to in all of Havel's major works beginning with The Garden Parry (i963) and ending with Temptation (1985). But while the existence of these bureaucratic systems and the protagonists' struggle to retain their personal identity in their dealings with such systems may suggest a political theme, they by no means limit Havel 's plays to political matters. The appeal of Havel's plays in the West especially in the United States, where threats of totalitarianism are distant seems to suggest that these works hold within themselves something beyond their political content, something capable of capturing the attention of a large portion of the Western hemisphere. Martin Esslin offers perhaps a better perspective to Havel 's plays (or at least one that is better able to explain the playwright's international popularity) when he identifies Havel as an absurdist. Esslin's absurdist playwrights strive to express "the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of the rational approach by the open abandonment of rational devices and discursive thought";' and indeed, Havel injects a multitude of contradictions and paradoxes into his plays, seemingly to express this very idea. And alongside these paradoxes and contradictions, Havel's works also mercilessly employ repetitions of words and actions. The end result of these techniques is a world often centered around scientific or business affairs where the human is remote or even alien; and it is in such a world that Havel 's protagonists confront the absurd in the guise of bureaucracy and inner-office power struggles. For Hugo Pludek, Josef Gross, Leopold Net