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A State of Emergency
by Mary Kenny
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 15th February 2010
ISBN: 978-1-907179-53-2
Price: €12.00
It is the summer of 1940 and Europe is falling before the onward march of the Third Reich. Dublin is as yet untouched by the war, and parties, race-meetings and dances continue apace. Julia and Pamela continue to enjoy good times, until a personal problem arises to spoil their fun.
Mary Kenny’s all-women play revises a personal dilemma in neutral Ireland, seen in retrospect, and drawing on family memory and social research. And almost forty years after Mary Kenny pioneered the famous “condom train” between Belfast and Dublin, a rather more complex picture of birth control emerges in this partly autobiographical tale…..
About the Author
Mary Kenny is an author, journalist and public speaker with wide media experience in Britain and Ireland. She is a columnist with the Irish Independent and the author of Germany Calling – A personal biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw and Crown and Shamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy. She was born in Dublin and tries to live there as much as she can.
Reviews of other publications by Mary Kenny
From reviews of Mary’s biography of William Joyce, “Lord Haw”, Germany Calling.
“This book is a classic. Mary Kenny’s book made me laugh aloud, and weep, and think. It is sympathetic, in all the right ways, to the monster it portrays.”
A.N. Wilson, London Evening Standard.
“Mary Kenny has written an absorbingly elegant study. To all Joyce’s shabby dreams, loyalties and cruelties, Kenny brings both compassion and a clear mind. A biography whose even-handed beauty of expression combines Irish gravity with Irish spark.”
Hywel Williams, The Guardian.
“Comprehensive and authoritative, Germany Calling nonetheless manages to be as compelling in its sweeping mastery of material as a thriller. ….A triumph…Sensitive and entertaining.”
Terry Prone, The Irish Independent.
“Germany Calling presents a wealth of new material…a fascinating, vital account of Joyce’s nasty, short and brutish life.”
The Jewish Chronicle.
Reactions to Allegiance (a play about Michael Collins’ meetings with Winston Churchill in 1921-22).
“Kenny suggests that even those on opposite sides of the negotiating table can discover common ground if they reognise the humanity in each other.”
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian.
“A discussion as plausible as it is absorbing…The wishfulnesss of the play doesn’t turn into sentimentality.”
Benedict Nightingale, The Times.
“An interesting and touching work…a warm portrait of the two men. Mary Kenny has written an intriguing vignette.”
Quentin Letts, The Daily Mail.
“A keenly imagined script…an absorbing entertainment.”
Lynne Walker, The [London] Independent.
