Sebastian Barry started his career as a playwright in his thirty-first year and did not achieve wide acclaim until his fortieth year, when The Steward of Christendom (1995), had a sellout run in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, and then transferred, after a tour, to the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs. As reviewers praised the poetic language and vision of this play that poignantly links personal memory and history, Barry was firmly established as an important member of the new generation of Irish writers.

While some reviewers have dwelled on the so-called typical Irish characteristics of Barry's plays, Barry dislikes the label "Irish writer," commenting in an unpublished November 1996 interview that it is an "awful phrase--which I resist." As Fintan O'Toole has pointed out in his introduction to The Only True History of Lizzie Finn, The Steward of Christendom, and White Woman Street: Three Plays (1995), although Barry's plays seem "utterly...