[at the Royal Court] there were a lot of gay plays, then came violent plays like Mojo and Shopping and Fucking. I feel that trend is on the way out now." Sierz credits three events, which for him "suggested that the tide was turning and that an era of confrontation had come to an end", signalling the decline of in-yer-face theatre: The first is "the enormous success of Conor McPherson's The Weir", which premiered at The Theatre Upstairs at The Royal Court in 1997 before it "transferred to the West End for almost three years, then Broadway" with "its box-office success being crucial to the [Royal Court] theatre's fragile finances". Sierz has said that "[the play] – despite that unpleasant episode about paedophiles in one of the ghost stories and the emotionally fraught aspect of the final story about losing your child – has got a very redemptive feel which most 'in-yer-face' plays don't have" and that the play's "immense success suggest[ed] that the public's taste for shock has been superseded by a desire for a calmer aesthetic." The next event that Sierz cites is "the failure of Irvine Welsh's shock-fest You'll Have Had Your Hole" which "received deservedly terrible reviews when it opened at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in 1998 and on its arrival in London in early February 1999". The last key event Sierz cites is the death of Sarah Kane in February 1999 which he has referred to as "a convenient end point". David Eldridge wrote that "Perhaps, 'in-yer-face' only really lasted from 1994 to 1997", likewise citing The Weir as "signalling a change of direction" and stating that "by the time Ben Elton was mocking the form in a novel [Inconceivable published in 1999] it was over." Sierz has said that "After 1999, you still get individual plays that have that [in-yer-face] sensibility, but it's no longer the norm" as "By 2000, there were signs that the heady days of outrage were numbered". Sierz has said that by the time his book In-yer-face Theatre: British Drama Today was published in March 2001 "the brash phenomenon of in-yer-face theatre […] loses not only much of its intensity, but also becomes less central to the British New Writing scene." He therefore feels that his book "is inevitably something of a backward glance". However, Seirz says that "although by 2001 the new wave has broken, one of the reasons