Stewart Parker's Heavenly Bodies: Dion Boucicault, Show Business, and Ireland

Belfast playwright Stewart Parker conceived his 1986 play Heavenly Bodies near the beginning of his career as a dramatist, wrote it when he was at the height of his powers, and revised it as one of the last acts of his professional life. Throughout the long genesis of this stage biography of the Victorian melodramatist Dion Boucicault, Parker used his play to focus his own recurring questions about the price of popular success and the responsibility of a playwright to his own place and people. Over time he came to see Boucicault less as a remarkable individual and more as a figure emblematic both of the demoralized condition of Ireland in the nineteenth century and of the plight of the artist in an inhospitable era. Like Boucicault, Parker was an Irishman who lived and produced plays in North America and England as well as in Ireland, and his subject's "equivocal lrishness" exerted a continued fascination for him. In Parker's opinion, Boucicault's nationality was central to an understanding of his career because, "[l]ike many Irish writers before and after him, he had tumbled headlong out of the country at an early age, only to find his imagination eventually returning there for its truest inspiration”.