Novelist Roddy Doyle has been ordered by a High Court judge to provide a sworn statement that he only has one version of a play he allegedly co-wrote with a man who is suing him and the Abbey Theatre in a row over alleged copyright infringement.

A RADICAL new version of a famous play is being staged at the Abbey Theatre — 100 years after it caused street riots.

THE Playboy has moved with the times: a Mayo home called John Millington Synge House, built directly opposite the shebeen site where the Playboy of the Western World was set, has creature comforts such as a sauna and a Jacuzzi hot tub, along with a staircase which wouldn’t look too out of place in a production of Gone with the Wind.

THE ‘Playboy riots’ in the Abbey Theatre 100 years ago bring to mind how Barry Fitzgerald, later one of the most famous of all Irish actors, engaged in fisticuffs with a member of the audience, all because of the use of the word ‘shifts’.