Along with two other civilised contrarians who worked in or for Radio Eireann in its heyday -that's to say, poet Austin Clarke and broadcaster Robert Farren- the late Conor Farrington, actor and author, doggedly continued an age-old, if threatened, tradition in Western drama: that of the verse-play, once a vigorous popular form and now, alas, a protected species with a coterie aura.
Farrington's fiftieth (and final) work in rhyming couplets is the ingenious BALLAD OF CAIN AND ABEL, a feisty revisiting of the Genesis shaggy-dog story with its mother of all murderers, its two embattled brothers, plus a serpentine python worthy of Monty. The playwright plays God to Frank Kelly's pain of a Cain,