Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born.
There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.
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.
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.
And by endlessly sanitizing our feelings, we actually feed a disgruntled nation.
People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.
Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.
This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.
I had a ball doing Harry Potter.
Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.
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.
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.
The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.
I certainly had no intention of playing a man.
So I just play the character, I play the lines.
Once you've done one style, you leave it for a while.
Theater dates very quickly.
I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.
The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.
A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.
