Seamus Finnegan is from Northern Ireland--more significantly, from Belfast; but his plays have been performed not in Ireland but in London, where most of them have been written. Finnegan is a writer with an ear keenly attuned to the colorful idiom of the Belfast streets and a talent for creating powerful stage images. Since the early 1980s he has built up a distinctive and valuable body of work that includes a variety of theatrical strategies for bridging the gulf of ignorance and indifference that separates the experiences of his characters from the media's simplified images of Northern Ireland.

Unlike the studies of life in rural communities and small towns undertaken by some of his better-known contemporaries on the Irish theatrical scene, most of Finnegan's plays are rooted firmly in the recent history of his native Belfast. His best work combines the desire to communicate to outsiders the daily...