On a beach at night, a woman fights an enveloping grief.

“A haunting, cunningly constructed play that tackles big themes – the nature of truth and love – with a deceptively light touch. Deeply affecting.” – Charles Spencer, Telegraph

“Shinn has a delicate touch with his material, combining a well-observed but not condescending picture of the characters’ lower-middle-class background with a poignant awareness of their distress. The Coming World is a small play, but, after it ends, you can still feel the ripples.” – Rhoda Koenig, Independent

“An eerily intense poetic trance. Shinn weaves his words into a structure of shifting feelings and perspectives. The result is cumulatively bleak, but for all its bleakness it is never also pitiless. Its sense of hope and desolation shifts between solid sands and liquid seas.” – Patrick Marmion, Evening Standard

world premiere: Soho Theatre, 2001

pictured: Making Strange Theatre (Dublin), 2007. Directed by Tom Creed. Photos by Adrian Mullan.

This play is also included in the anthology “Where Do We Live and other plays.”

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