The Return Room

The Return Room – W.R. Rodgers's answer to Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood and Beckett’s All that Fall – paints a clear-eyed portrait of 1920s Belfast. It is presented here with a CD of the original 1955 recording and Gerard Dillon’s illustrations.

Gerard Dillon was born just off the Falls Road, Belfast, in 1916. He left school at fourteen and worked as a house painter for seven years, mostly in London. Although he was largely self-taught as an artist, he did attend Belfast College of Art for a short time. He had his first solo exhibition in Dublin in 1942 but was unable to make his living as an artist and shortly after returned to London to work on the demolition gangs. After World War 2, he became more successful as an artist. He died in 1969. His work illustrates The Return Room, a radio play by Irish poet W.R. Rodgers.

W.R. Rodgers was born in 1909 in east Belfast. In 1931 he graduated with a BA in English Literature from Queen’s University Belfast before training as a Presbyterian minister. 
In 1935 he became minister at Cloveneden church in Loughgall, County Armagh. It was during this period that Rodgers began writing poetry; his first full-length collection, Awake! And Other Poems, followed in 1941. 
In 1946 he took up a scriptwriter post for the BBC in London, where he worked until 1952, the year in which he published his second collection, Europa and the Bull and Other Poems. In 1955, his radio play The Return Room was broadcast, and was quickly hailed as one of the finest radio broadcasts ever produced in Ireland. Rodgers died in 1969 and is buried in Loughgall.