Irish Theatre Quotes

What makes Ireland inclined toward the drama is that it's a great country for conversation.

The theatre training is second to none in Ireland and England. You meet people who haven't had theatre training - it is harder for people who worked in TV to go into theatre than the other way around.

With Irish drama, things are told with humor.

I've had three novels published, and I was working a little bit in theater in Ireland. I wrote one film script just to see what it would turn out like.

My usual trick with the Irish plays is to set things on islands I've never been to.

The English playwrights of the '50s and '60s didn't really keep writing or getting produced, while the Irish did. There's encouragement for the younger ones also in the fact that Ireland is exceptional in its ability to make theater part of the national dialogue, and it reaches to all four corners of the country.

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

I hold that the beginning of modern Irish drama was in the winter of 1898, at a school feast at Coole, when Douglas Hyde and Miss Norma Borthwick acted in Irish in a Punch and Judy show; and the delighted children went back to tell their parents what grand curses 'An Craoibhin' had put on the baby and the policeman.

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.

For me, people in Ireland who became actors would have to go through the Billy Barry's in Dublin.

The odd thing about 'Cripple of Inishmaan' is it's never actually been performed on the island.

I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more.