Edna found the title of this play on the side of a delivery van that passed her in a London Street. The day after she told me that, I went out to my local shops in London and there it was again, on an awning beneath which I have walked for twenty-five years. I had seen but never noticed the words: Family Butchers.

In spite of the supermarkets, small independent butchers are still common in the British Isles. Vegetarians apart, even the squeamish return again and again to the beloved sawdust, flies, blood and bones, for real meat cut from real animals by someone we know. I can't think of a better metaphor for family life.

No one is a vegetarian when it comes to dissecting the family. We wield the knife and lie on the block: both. And we return home for more, again and again — as the Ancient Greeks well knew. Things haven't changed much since Aeschylus: the suicide rate, apparently, shoots up at Christmas.

The title of this play is also a pun. Rhyming slang comes from London but some of it has entered the bloodstream of wider usage in the British Isles. To "have a butchers" means to "have a good look" (butcher’s hook rhymes with look).

“Where you're from, decides you,” Edna said the other night at City Arts & Lectures. She expressed gratitude for her Irish legacy: “abounding in story, drama and conflict.” Family Butchers takes place in the west of Ireland in the seventies — a time of uneasy social change. The setting is a run-down Georgian country house called Kincora, named after the stronghold of the mythic Irish High King, Brian Boru. Edna's play has an autobiographical subsoil but this has been transformed by her formidable imagination into something that we can all understand. Family Butchers is a courageous and sometimes humorous descent into the heart of things: the yearning, the numbness, the casual cruelty, the blind alleys, the great inept murderous drama of the family.

Edna's language does not describe; it does not intellectualize; it does not, thank heavens, “deal with issues.” What it does, is afford us direct access into the mystery of experience. It has, to borrow a phrase from Edna's book Mother Ireland, “emotional bristle.” Her language is, in itself, an event. As I write this note, we are engaged in a rehearsal process in which we are trying, with Edna's enthusiastic collaboration, to meet the demands of this extraordinary script. We hope our work will give you a good ‘butchers’ at the perilous territory of the family: at desires, tensions, wounds and passions that are felt but not easily named.

I am delighted to return to the sawdust and the block of the Magic Theatre family. I should like to express my thanks and admiration for Edna, my brave actors, my designers and crew.