John Collins, Artistic Director, Elevator Repair Service

First Published: Dublin Theatre Festival program for Gatz, October 2008
“We like to pick an idea that seems impossible. To try and find something you’re not supposed to do in theatre. Something that seems wrong, or impossible, or crazy.”
In an office overlooking the brownstone-and-bodega mix of Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighbourhood, where his company, Elevator Repair Service, [...]

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Joan Didion

First Published: The Irish Times, September 13, 2008

The apartment is as you’d expect. Books are everywhere – on the tables, on the ottomans, on the shelves around the pale, high walls – and where there are no books there are photographs; silver-framed family snapshots, tinted now with an intense melancholy. That autumn afternoon by Bethesda [...]

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Richard Maxwell, Playwright and Director

First Published: The Irish Times, January 8, 2008
Richard Maxwell has been watching a lot of Westerns, and the signs are on him. The names of the great films, of the great actors and directors, weave through his speech as naturally and as frequently as do the names of those experimental theatre-makers who have long formed [...]

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Arthur Miller’s Family Secret

First Published: The Irish Times, August 18, 2007
THE EULOGIES were eloquent, emotional, intense. They told of a life and of an art remarkable for its integrity, for its commitment to empathy and to truth; they showed a man and a writer battling against social and political injustice, against dishonesty, against discrimination. Arthur Miller was “the [...]

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Bob Crowley, Stage Designer

Most theatre artists would jump at it. The chance to work with Vanessa Redgrave, David Hare and Joan Didion on Broadway, on a stage adaptation of a book so acclaimed, and so talked-about, and with so many copies sold that a stage version was bound to be a box-office hit. Approached to be a part [...]

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Bill Nighy, Actor

First Published: The Irish Times, February 3, 2007
WAITING FOR Bill Nighy in a cafe on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I find myself sinking into a state of deep dread. There’s no easy way to put it – this cafe is a dive. In fact, I realise, this cafe is a pub. A dark, subterranean, regulars-only [...]

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On Brian Friel’s Translations

First Published: The Irish Times, January 4, 2007
Mayday, 1979. Brian Friel was battling with the beginnings of a new idea. He had thought of something, he wrote in his diary – a “hedge school/ordnance survey play” – and he was circling around it, reluctant to begin. The diary entries which followed revealed the extent of [...]

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John Patrick Shanley, Playwright

First Published: The Irish Times, October 20, 2006
FOR MORE than a year, it was the show that had Broadway abuzz. Then, when its producers announced an American tour, it became the show that theatres across America were begging to stage. It broke box-office records at its Broadway home – several times over. It more than [...]

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Glen Berger, Playwright

First Published: The Irish Times, September 16, 2006
‘In everything that I’ve written, people somehow wind up without their pants,” says Glen Berger. “It must be a Jewish thing.” Or maybe it’s an Irish thing, he reconsiders, mentioning the scene in Beckett’s Endgame where Nagg tells the story of the tailor who took longer to make [...]

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Lee Blessing, Playwright

First Published: The Irish Times, July 26, 2006
IN THE WEEKS following the events of September 11th, 2001, Lee Blessing found himself receiving phone calls about a play that he had written more than 10 years previously. That play was Two Rooms, an unflinchingly dark exploration of personal suffering and political failure, of terror and of [...]

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