This collection brings together the best of Northern Irish playwright Stewart Parker's literary prose and journalism. These writings showcase his anticipation and knowledge of the changing cultural conditions of theater life and play-making in the closing decades of the twentieth-century. Alongside this alert cosmopolitan sensibility, Parker's experience of living in and through Belfast's self-inflicted wounding made him keenly aware of what happens when politics fails to deliver a democratic answer to the contradictory beliefs of ordinary citizens. His innate skepticism about politics is etched herein with feisty and unambivalent vigor.