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Life
| 1952- [err. 1951]; b. Dublin, son of Amien St. ticket-collector; br. of Jim Sheridan; engaged in amateur theatricals with their father, incl. productions of O’Casey and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot; ed. UCD; became Project Arts Theatre Stage Manager, at first in Metropolitan Hall (Abbey St.) and later at Essex St.; wrote his first play, Paint it Black (Project Arts, 1971); directed Journal of a Hole, Jim Sheridan and Neil Jordan’s play about Artane; with Jim Sheridan, appt. Director with Project Arts Centre, Dublin, with Arts Council grant of £4,000, 1976; wrote and directed No Entry (Project Arts, 1976), set in Sean MacDermott St. and dealing with Dublin housing conditions; also dir. Jim Sheridan’s Mobile Homes (1976), set in a caravan site; |
| transferred to Inst. of Contemporary Arts, London; wrote The Liberty Suit (1977) in collaboration with Mannix Flynn - a borstal veteran - and treating of juvenile prison life; performed Dublin Th. Fest. and transferred to Cork Opera House; dir. Jim Sheridan ’s The Ha’penny Place (1979); with Jim Sheridan revived Plunkett’s The Risen People (1978); became involved in Irish Writers’ Co-Op with Dermot Bolger, Jordan, et al.; winner of Rooney Prize for Literature, 1977 [var. 1978]; wrote Emigrants (Edinburgh Fest. and Dublin Th. Fest. 1978), a strongly theatrical treatment of Irish economic migration to England in the nineteenth century; transferred Royal Court with cast of Shane Connaughton, Gerard Mannix Flynn and sometimes Sheridan himself; awarded Abbey Theatre Bursary, 1979; |
| retired from Project and took appt. as writer-in-residence, Abbey, 1980; scripted film version of Christy Brown, Down All the Days (Abbey 1980); screenplays include The Breakfast, short film; also The Bells of Hell, The Maggies, Strumpet City; dir. Borstal Boy, feature (2000), with Michael York as the Governor; issued 44: A Dublin Memoir (1999), and a sequel, Forty-seven Roses (2001), dealing with his father’s near-bigamous marriage; lives with his family in Dublin; also Big Fat Love (2003), Sherriff St. Dublin fairy-tale concerning Philo Nolan, a wife and mother who smuggles herself in to a convent community on the North Wall. DIL |
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Works
Plays, Paint it Black [1971]; No Entry [1976]; The Liberty Suit (Dublin: Co-op Books 1978), 70pp.; Emigrants (Dublin: Co-op Books 1979), 58pp.; Old Money, New Money (Dublin: New Island 2000), 58pp. Fiction, Big Fat Love (Dublin: Tivoli 2003), 316pp.
Miscellaneous, ed., Holy Places of Ireland (Dublin: Carlton 1975), 42pp.; ‘The Theatre and Politics’, in The Crane Bag, 1, 1 (1977), [q.p.] rep. in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies: 1977-1981 (Dublin: Blackwater 1982), pp.73-76 [infra]; Forty-seven Roses (2001), extract in The Irish Times, Weekend (8 Sept. 2001), p.13; [On Project Arts Gallery & Theatre], The Irish Times (28 Jan. 2006), Weekend, p.7.
Autobiography, 44: A Dublin Memoir (London: Macmillan 1999), Do. (London: Pan 2000), 304pp., rep. as 44: Dublin Made Me (NY: Viking 1999), Do. (NY: Penguin 1999; rep. 2000), Do. (Thorndike, ME: Thorndike Press), and Do. [trans. by Gian Castelli] as 44: Seville Place ([Madrid] Espasa Calpe 2000); Forty-seven Roses (London: Macmillan 2001), xii, 207pp.
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Commentary
Yvonne Nolan, notice on of Big Fat Love (2003): ‘Dubliner Philo Nolan, née Darcy, is so big that even Evans’s size 26 won’t fit her, and that’s the least of her troubles. Philo’s life becomes hopelessly complicated when she flees her drunken thug of a husband and ends up putting her children into care, and seeking refuge for herself at the local convent under the guise of a sudden and late vocation. Sheridan’s lovingly evoked heroine then leads us at a headlong pace through Blind Date for Old Folks, sing-songs, car-racing at Santry, toe amputation, bingo, and a cremation that goes horribly wrong. Philo touches those around her with her capability and ability to love but can she solve her own intractable problems? A breezy summer read with a subtle undertow of seriousness about the life-disfiguring effects of abuse, and a quietly observed requiem for a North Wall changed beyond imagining.’ (The Irish Times, Paperbacks, 14 Aug. 2004 [Weekend].)
See also interview with Deirdre Mulrooney, in Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, ed. Lilian Chambers, Ger Fitzgibbon, Eamonn Jordan, et al. (Blackrock: Carysfort Press 2001), pp.443-58.
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Quotations
‘The Theatre and Politics’, in The Crane Bag, 1, 1 (1977),[q.p.] rep. in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies: 1977-1981 (Dublin: Blackwater 1982), pp.73-76; discusses the with-holding of grants to the Project Arts Centre on account of his own play No Entry and Jim Sheridan’s Mobile Homes; also criticises land speculation in inner city Dublin.
Peter Sheridan, ‘The 40-year-old Thorn’, in The Irish Times (28 Jan. 2006), Weekend, p.7. ‘[...] In 1976, Jim and I took over the running of the theatre [the Project at Essex St.]. We had a small Arts Council grant of less than £4,000. There was only one wage and we split it between us. The actors initially worked for a share of the box office. We quickly built a loyal audience and generated much media interest. The Arts Council responded with a large increase in funding. By the end of our first year, we were paying everyone equity minimum wages. / The plays we staged were cutting edge in the style of Journal of a Hole. My play No Entry was set in the tenements of Seán MacDermott Street. We followed this with Jim’s version of the housing crisis, Mobile Homes, set among families living on a caravan site. Our biggest success came with my play The Liberty Suit, a drama honed from the juvenile prison experiences of my collaborator, Gerard Mannix Flynn. The play was too big for our Project space and opened at the Olympia Theatre, around the corner from us. The cast included Mannix himself, Gabriel Byrne, Gerard McSorley, Noel O’Donovan, Johnny Murphy, Garret Keogh, Godfrey Quigley, Paul Bennett and Tom Jordan. [...; &c.’; see full text]
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References
Andrew Carpenter & Peter Fallon, eds., The Writers: A Sense of Place (Dublin: O’Brien 1980), incls. excerpt from Down All the Days, an adaptation of the novel by Christy Brown, pp.191-94 [with photo-port.]
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Notes
The Liberty Suit (1977), written in collaboration with Mannix Flynn, a native of inner-city Dublin and veteran of industrial schools opened at the Olympia Theatre with a cast including Gabriel Byrne, Gerard McSorley, Noel O’Donovan, Johnny Murphy, Garret Keogh, Godfrey Quigley, Paul Bennett, Tom Jordan and Mannix
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