Though best known for his 1996 BBC television production of the award-winning series Our Friends in the North--the series was in fact an adaptation of his original stage play--Peter Flannery is a noted playwright who has written a series of large-cast epic works. A sense of conscience about equality and social justice, paradoxically in tension with political disillusionment, pervades much of Flannery's work for both television and the stage. His early dramas tend toward an engaged social realism suggestive of television docudramas such as Jeremy Sandford's Cathy Come Home (1966) or plays such as Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff (1982), but all his work is firmly rooted in the interplay of personal and family relationships. His later and more successful work, however, follows an almost epic theater form encompassing a wide context of historical events. Flannery's work is also marked by the bringing together of past political struggles with...