A stage version of Joseph O’Connor’s Star Of The Sea novel focuses on the character of housemaid Mary Duane, writes Colette Sheridan

READING Star of the Sea is to experience a book of textures, the novel as collage. Joseph O’Connor’s modern classic is a book about books, but also a book about journalism, log-keeping, letter-writing, and 19th-century print culture. It leaps off the page with its multiple voices, but it certainly does not suggest that it is leaping towards a stage.