He has also written new versions of classic dramas, including works by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and Euripides, adapting the literal translations of others.
[6] In addition, he wrote the screenplay for the film Dancing at Lughnasa, adapting the stage play by fellow Ulsterman Brian Friel.
Then he was a writer-in-residence lecturing at University College Dublin before being appointed Professor of Creative Writing in the School of English, Drama and Film there.
McGuinness' first full-length play, The Factory Girls, also premiered in 1982, and dealt with a group of female workers facing redundancy from a small town in Donegal.
[8] A critic has highlighted its "Wednesday to Sunday time frame", in a link to Catholic imagery which, surprisingly given its theme, indicates that this is in fact "a passion play".
The play, about a group of Protestant soldiers in the First World War, was not primarily political in intent, but, according to the playwright, was originally inspired by "a great story".
It took its name from one of his paintings, The Sacrifice of Isaak, about the Biblical story of the father whose faith is tested by God's request that he kill his son.
Despite their contrasting backgrounds and beliefs the play soon erodes away their differences and brings to the fore the shared humanity that they rely on in order to cope with the horrors and uncertainties of their incarceration.
Gates of Gold looks at the dying days of MacLiammoir, because McGuinness wanted to write "something darker and stranger", and less predictable, about these two pioneers of theatre.
[7] A critic summarised this "impressive drama" as "a concentrated piece that intricately dissects a middle-class family at war with itself following the suicide of one of their three children".
He sometimes takes noticeable liberties in his adaptations, in order to strengthen characterisation—for example by making the alienated protagonist of Rebecca into an Anglo-Irish woman from a once privileged family—or to underline the theme of the play—for example in Rebecca "I've invented a scene in which Mrs Danvers confronts Max and says, 'You loved her, but she didn't love you'",[18] or in Barbaric Comedies, a play about a world of amoral grotesquerie, he added a sexual assault scene.
As a university student, he has explained, "I sent some poems to the 'Irish Press' and the wonderful [general editor] David Marcus wrote back to me saying [']I'm going to publish them['], and 'You are a writer'.
Broadly, McGuinness poetic style is characterised by the use of clear solid unrhymed lines designed to echo in the mind of the listener or reader.
[24] The Memorial Garden at University College Dublin, designed in a circular shape, features a carved stone with a short poem written by Frank McGuinness for the site: "This silence is round / So is remembrance, / they say".
[25] The book is set in a village in Donegal in 1950, registering the effect of the arrival of an Italian painter who "came from out foreign and … spoke wild funny".
[26] The story, told from the point of view of various characters, is inspired by a historic Italian artist who was commissioned to paint the Stations of the Cross in the catholic church of Buncrana in the 1900s.
The story of the play deals with a novelist who contracts Alzheimer's disease, and progressively loses control of his mind; in order to understand the character better, McGuinness decided to try to write a novel that that man could have written, and the result was Arimathea.
[10] In addition to this piece of work, McGuinness also conducted other research for the play, by interviewing people with experience of elderly parents being affected by Alzheimer's disease.
[28] Many commentators pointed out that this choral novel, told in a series of monologues, makes good use of Frank McGuinness' experience in the theatre, including his ability to render individualised voices.
[30] The novel is made of four sections, monologues from James, his partner Nora, their daughter Lucia, and son Giorgio, who are given the names of characters from Joyce's play Exiles.
[31] At the launch, Frank McGuinness explained that he fell under the spell of Joyce as a young man, when he heard Joni Mitchel read out the opening one and a half pages from the novel 'Portrait of the Artist'.
McGuinness also said that he was aware, in taking on the project of a novel about the Joyces, that he was "putting my head into a zoo-worth of lions' mouths", but that this would not stop him.
"Paprika" is a tale of murder, centered on a disgruntled, mentally unstable operatic white tenor, who is currently playing the role of Othello in an opera, wearing blackface.
Structured as a fluid but self-conscious monologue, the piece has various levels of association, including a subversion ─or an update─ of the plot of Shakespeare's play Othello, an investigation on the performance of identity, and a dissection of the 'logic' of inequality, and employing "[t]he shards of childhood", to "pierce the narrative in an unusual and thought-provoking [way].
[35] The stories have been described as "uproarious and outrageous, [tending] to depict insecure, unhinged individuals who find themselves on the wrong side of a comfortable life.
"[37] The original trilogy is "revered as a foundational document of western civilisation", and one of the main achievements of this "dazzling new opera", a reviewer pointed out, was that "it blows apart this crippling reverence and presents the drama afresh"[39] One reviewer underlined the fact that "McGuinness has whittled Sophocles's plays down to a succession of very short, simple lines that can be easily heard when sung across an auditorium", and that "Anderson's music fills the emotional space around these lines", to conclude that "[f]or all the antiquity of its roots, Thebans may point to the future of opera".
[40] Another reviewer declared that Frank McGuinness "has supplied what seems an eminently settable, elegant condensation of the drama", and that the opera as a whole offers "[t]he superb assurance of the writing metallically intent but underpinned by a novel harmonic richness".
Major recurring features of McGuinness's playwriting include the treatment of historical events and the prominent inclusion of gay or bisexual characters.