Dennis Kelly: Plays One

Book excerpt: Features the plays Debris, Osama the Hero, After the End and Love and Money. The four plays in this first collection by Dennis Kelly are linked by their characters' desperate need to believe that there is more to life than the often brutal worlds in which they find themselves. Kelly's remarkable debut Debris finds humour and pathos in a spectacularly dysfunctional family unit. The harrowing Osama the Hero shows a group of neighbours taking ill-defined revenge on an odd-ball teenager in a climate of fear. In After the End a woman discovers she has been rescued from Armageddon by a paranoid ex-colleague with a nuclear bunker in his garden. And in a fractured narrative Love and Money portrays a marriage driven to brutal destruction by financial pressures.