A boisterous and affectionate, if sometimes thin and too-easy, sendup of this flourishing era of post-Troubles Northern Irish writing ... The prevailing mode is comic, breezy. Prestige Drama is designed to make you laugh, a book of voices that’s at its best when showcasing the Derry residents’ lovingly scornful turns of phrase ... The book’s form can occasionally leave Prestige Drama feeling rudderless ... Still, the novel has charm and punch enough to carry it through, and a steely determination not to take the seriousness of it all too seriously.
As in Séamas O’Reilly’s memoir, the gags can be very funny, but the rhetorical style depends heavily on the use of simile, which can become wearying ... Prestige Drama is both funny and tragic, but not all readers will find that its tonal shifts add up to a satisfying whole.
A debut novel that sings from the page via a winning combination of searing satire and genuine emotional heft ... A riotous mixture of raucous humour, burning sarcasm, genuine empathy and real sadness ... O’Reilly keeps the plot barrelling along via his wonderfully conversational writing style ... Frequently laugh-out-loud funny ... Behind the humour, however, there is real heart, and often unadulterated anger ... The ending is perhaps a little abrupt, but this is a minor quibble, as O’Reilly’s debut proves itself viciously and hilariously astute.
Disarmingly hilarious ... The central mystery of the Hollywood actress’s disappearance feels a bit forced ... But O’Reilly shows a genius for illuminating the guilty, awkward complexities people feel in trying to shrug off the sanctity of a collective historical wound. Just because you’re being funny about the past, as O’Reilly showed in his memoir, it doesn’t mean you’re not being desperately serious about it.
Séamas O’Reilly’s consistently playful and captivating stream-of-consciousness writing style is truly immersive in his debut novel, Prestige Drama ... The kind of book that begs for a reread to better piece together how the overlapping storylines subtly build after each new character is introduced ... With humor, honesty and compassion, O’Reilly takes the pulse of a community in recovery, and invites us to feel it, too.
