Irish theatre: An actor’s theatre

Irish theatre is renowned for its playwrights, its politics and, to a lesser extent perhaps, its performers. It is widely considered a tradition of great literary wealth, of postcolonial significance, but what of the people who actually perform it? Who, night after night, take to our stages to sometimes almost empty houses in frustrating roles or substandard working conditions—what of the actors? This chapter seeks to address the actor’s theatre in its complexity and elusiveness as an embodied phenomenon, with attention to some of the people, productions and issues raised by the topic, and occasional attempts to gain insight from the actors’ own words.