The energy released by it is enormous and it becomes quite addictive, the power between the audience and the actor.
My mother adores singing and plays piano. My uncle was a phenomenal pianist. My brother John is a double bassist. I used to play the piano, badly, and cello. My brother Peter played violin.
There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.
I once saw my mother playing Mary Magdalene in a parish event. But she had to put the role aside in order to go and front the choir who were singing at the same occasion. She left the stage halfway through the Crucifixion.
Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.
I loathe bad theater and most theatre is very bad because it's repetitious, unexciting and, dangerously, it is sometimes praised for those things.
I think America becomes more disgruntled by going to the movies and having an endlessly good time at them.
And by endlessly sanitizing our feelings, we actually feed a disgruntled nation.
To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble, hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them, they lack the joy that the Irish have.
I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I'm totally exhausted.
Like a lot of Irish households we read a lot of Irish history. It was almost Soviet, raising the next generation with a mythic view of their history.
I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.
A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.
Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.
I take the theater seriously in that I loathe it, I'm bored by it.
I certainly had no intention of playing a man.
The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.
Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.
There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.
There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.
