Parker’s playwriting career began in earnest when his play
Spokesong was the runaway success of the 1975
Dublin Theatre Festival. A production the following year in London at the
Kings Head Theatre subsequently transferred to the West End. The play was then produced at the
Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1978 and by New York City’s
Circle in the Square Theatre in 1979, as well as in numerous other venues around the world. Parker’s second play, Catchpenny Twist, was produced by the
Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1977, which also produced Nightshade, his exploration of death and dying conveyed through the prism of stage magic, in 1980. By this time, Parker had also established himself as a television dramatist, with the BBC
Play for Today series airing Catchpenny Twist in 1977, the same year it premiered on stage. In 1979, Parker’s television play
I'm a Dreamer Montreal, produced by
Thames Television, won the
Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. The history of Ireland was one of Parker’s chief sources of dramatic material. Heavenly Bodies, commissioned by the
Birmingham Rep, centred on the 19th-century theatrical entrepreneur
Dion Boucicault and focused on the complexities of Irish national identity and literary recognition. Northern Star, produced by the
Lyric Theatre, Belfast in 1984, is the story of the
United Irishmen and the doomed
Rebellion of 1798, told through the life of Belfast revolutionary
Henry Joy McCracken. Uniting political and theatre history, the narrative is developed through at least seven different ages or styles of Irish theatre, from
George Farquhar to
Samuel Beckett. Parker moved from Belfast to Edinburgh in 1978. His marriage ended shortly after a subsequent move to London, in 1982. His partnership with television writer Lesley Bruce helped to make the last seven years of his life the most satisfying, both personally and creatively.
Field Day, the Derry-based theatre company co-founded by
Stephen Rea and
Brian Friel, asked Parker in 1983 to write for them; he eventually gave the company what many consider to be his most profound play. Pentecost is set during the
Ulster Workers' Council strike of 1974, when the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was stopped in its tracks by an insurrection fostered by Loyalists aiming to derail the power-sharing government established by the
Sunningdale Agreement. Pentecost was received with a mixture of admiration and scepticism —in the wake of the Hunger Strikes and ongoing atrocities in Northern Ireland, it was hard to imagine the positive future suggested in the play. ==Death==