Grace and Disgrace<br > In Sebastian Barry s luminous plays， grace and disgrace are<br > not opposites but constant companions. His people are， in the<br > eyes of their time， disgraceful. The central characters of these<br > plays are， respectively， a desperado， an enforcer for a<br > discredited regime and an exotic dancer. They are misfits，<br > anomalies， outlanders. Yet each is also marked by an amazing<br > grace. They are， in the mundane meaning of grace， possessed<br > in their different ways of extraordinary emotional elegance.<br > And they are also， in the religious sense， full of grace， touched<br > by some kind of inexplicable tenderness that rescues them<br > from oblivion and grants them an equivocal but unmistakable<br > blessing.<br > Sebastian Barry s plays are about history， but not in any<br > very obvious or familiar sense. Much of Irish theatre since<br > Scan O Casey has had a direct relationship to public events.<br > Either directly or indirectly virtually all of the major plays<br > written in Ireland this century have reflected on the large-<br > scale public conflicts that have shaped individual destinies on<br > the island. First the conflict between Britishness and Irishness<br > (or Protestantism and Catholicism) and then the conflict<br > between tradition and modernity in independent Ireland<br > echoed through the theatre. The plays themselves tended，<br > inevitably， to be full of the resounding clash of epic forces. We<br > came to expect an especially turbulent kind of drama in<br > Ireland， and we were not disappointed.<br > Sebastian Barry s extraordinary theatrical history of<br > anomalous people， sustained now over five<br > Boys and Praters of ~;. ~. ， . plays (Boss Grad "s<br > .jShe ， oum puonsneo in 1991 as well a~v<br > the three collected here) marks a striking departure from these<br >precedents. By the late 1980s， when he found his voice in the<br >theatre， the old conflicts were losing their grip. On the one<br >hand， the contest between Britishness and Irishness had run<br >~tts~f intoTthe，barren and.<br ><br >