Orders and Desecrations: The life of the playwright Denis Johnston.
Author: JOHNSTON, Rory (Editor).
Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992. xii, 224 pages. Hardback.
Denis Johnston (1901-84) - barrister, theatre director, playwright, war reporter and broadcaster, author of The Old Lady Says ‘No!’, The Moon in the Yellow River, In Search of Swift and The Brazen Horn - led a life of extraordinary diversity. That life was documented in a rich deposit of autobiographical writings spanning forty-five years, now woven into this fascinating memoir edited by his son Rory. Johnston, last of the theatrical generation of Sean O’Casey, Barry Fitzgerald and Micheal MacLiammoir, was a protege of W.B. Yeats and Bernard Shaw. He became a pioneer of television before the Second World War, and earned an OBE during the war reporting for BBC Radio from El Alamein, Yugoslavia and Buchenwald, on its liberation. As a theatre director and university teacher he was guru to a generation of young Americans in the 1950s. He writes incisively and entertainingly about these experiences and much besides - his childhood in Edwardian Dublin, travels in the 1920s, Broadway, and the new era of television broadcasting, reflecting on each of his professions in turn and, finally, on what it means to be Irish. Denis Johnston was a wit, stylist, explorer and iconoclast: Orders and Desecrations is a vivid testament to that spirit, and a personal chronicle of enduring interest.
ISBN: 0946640637
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