The Duras Press is an independent publishing venture set up by Brian Lynch in 2005. The guiding principle of the press is to seek out good books that by reason of their unusuality are invisible to mainstream publishers.

Crooked in the Car Seat

“I saw Crooked in the Car Seat when it was performed in the Eblana Theatre in 1979. The play, somehow, was an enormous relief from what was going on not only in other theatres, but what was happening in the city outside.” COLM TÓIBÍN

The Eblana was a tiny theatre in the basement of Dublin’s central bus station. Brian Lynch’s first and only play was put on there because its rejection by the Abbey Theatre had led to the resignation of Hugh Leonard, the Script Editor, and to a front page row in The Irish Times with a member of the Board of Directors, Tom Murphy, backed up by Brian Friel.

Why were the country’s three leading dramatists fighting with each other over a gay play by a straight man? Partly because, at a time when homosexual acts were still illegal, Crooked in the Car Seat was, as Colm Tóibín says, ‘alarming’ and ‘electrifying’.

Brian Lynch’s introduction notes that the play was staged shortly after the IRA assassinated Louis Mountbatten, an atrocity he links to the ‘queer-bashing’ killing of Declan Flynn by an IRA supporter and to the unsolved murder of the RTE graphic designer Charles Self.

Lynch also describes Archbishop John Charles McQuaid as a genius; selects the worst crime against the arts committed by any Taoiseach; reveals why scripts he wrote for Glenroe led to the executive producer threatening to resign; and ‘problematises the heteronormativity of his performed identity’, as defined, in 2020, by eminent doctors operating out of University College Cork.

Samuel Beckett nominated Brian Lynch for election to Aosdána in 1984 — but as a poet, not as a playwright.

“Crooked in the Car Seat stays in the mind. It belongs to a noble tradition of Irish plays that were too challenging then, but seem in retrospect to define their own moment.” COLM TÓIBÍN

ISBN 978-0-9568379-5-0

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Limited edition hardback. 50 numbered copies.

Signed by Brian Lynch and Colm Tóibín.

ISBN 978-0-9568379-6-7