The following information about Jim Nolan is from the website of “Aosdana, An Affiliation of Creative Artists in Ireland.”
[Jim Nolan was] [b]orn in Waterford [in 1958]. He is a founder member and artistic director of the Waterford-based Red Kettle Theatre Company, which was launched in 1985 with his play, The Gods are Angry, Miss Kerr. His other plays include Round The Garden (1981); Doorsteps (1982); The Boathouse (1986); The Black Pool (1986), which won the O.Z. Whitehead Award; Heartstone (1987); Dear Kenny (1987); Moonshine (1992), which won the RTÉ/Bank of Ireland Award, and was produced at the Irish Arts Centre in New York in 1998; and The Guernica Hotel (1994). In 1998, The Salvage Shop won the Sunday Independent/Ford Play of the Year Award. Blackwater Angel premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 2001 while he was the theatre's writer-in-residence. He lives in Waterford.
The following is from an interview with Jim Nolan conducted by Jennifer O'Connel.
Every so often, a critic or a member of Ireland's theatre-going population finds time to draw breath between festivals and opening night parties and wonder about the apparent boom in talented young playwrights.
Maybe they muse, it's the experience of 800 years of colonisation, maybe it's Catholic guilt, or the education system, or maybe it's just something they're feeding the cows.
Jim Nolan's got an answer for them. "It's being an altar boy," he says. "That and football."
Long before there was Brian Friel [a well-known and and successful Irish playwright] . . . in his life, Nolan says he was a regular theatre-goer. On Saturdays it was the theatre of penalty shoot-outs, the refs whistle, grass stains and blue scarves; on Sundays it was incense and robes, vestibules and bells.
"I know that where I started in theatre was aged about 11 on that altar. I was in love with the ritual of it. Mass would start at half seven in the morning, but I'd be over there from seven, and I couldn't wait to smell the incense."
Nolan's other passion, and the one that hasn’t waned, was for Waterford football club. . . . “The drama that you experience as a spectator of any sport -- I defy the theatre to match it."
Nolan admits he worries occasionally that the theatre is too remote from the here-and-now of football games and mass on a Sunday. "You go into a sanctuary, some dark place for weeks while you create this story, and when you come out, you hope it has some kind of connection to the real world. The other day in rehearsals, someone mentioned that they'd heard a story about this guy who'd paid $20 million to go into space. "We all said 'nonsense!'. We might as well be on another planet too. I worry about that sometimes -- in the act of theatre itself, there's always the danger that it will become dislocated from the here and now."
[Jim Nolan was] [b]orn in Waterford [in 1958]. He is a founder member and artistic director of the Waterford-based Red Kettle Theatre Company, which was launched in 1985 with his play, The Gods are Angry, Miss Kerr. His other plays include Round The Garden (1981); Doorsteps (1982); The Boathouse (1986); The Black Pool (1986), which won the O.Z. Whitehead Award; Heartstone (1987); Dear Kenny (1987); Moonshine (1992), which won the RTÉ/Bank of Ireland Award, and was produced at the Irish Arts Centre in New York in 1998; and The Guernica Hotel (1994). In 1998, The Salvage Shop won the Sunday Independent/Ford Play of the Year Award. Blackwater Angel premiered at the Abbey Theatre in 2001 while he was the theatre's writer-in-residence. He lives in Waterford.
The following is from an interview with Jim Nolan conducted by Jennifer O'Connel.
Every so often, a critic or a member of Ireland's theatre-going population finds time to draw breath between festivals and opening night parties and wonder about the apparent boom in talented young playwrights.
Maybe they muse, it's the experience of 800 years of colonisation, maybe it's Catholic guilt, or the education system, or maybe it's just something they're feeding the cows.
Jim Nolan's got an answer for them. "It's being an altar boy," he says. "That and football."
Long before there was Brian Friel [a well-known and and successful Irish playwright] . . . in his life, Nolan says he was a regular theatre-goer. On Saturdays it was the theatre of penalty shoot-outs, the refs whistle, grass stains and blue scarves; on Sundays it was incense and robes, vestibules and bells.
"I know that where I started in theatre was aged about 11 on that altar. I was in love with the ritual of it. Mass would start at half seven in the morning, but I'd be over there from seven, and I couldn't wait to smell the incense."
Nolan's other passion, and the one that hasn’t waned, was for Waterford football club. . . . “The drama that you experience as a spectator of any sport -- I defy the theatre to match it."
Nolan admits he worries occasionally that the theatre is too remote from the here-and-now of football games and mass on a Sunday. "You go into a sanctuary, some dark place for weeks while you create this story, and when you come out, you hope it has some kind of connection to the real world. The other day in rehearsals, someone mentioned that they'd heard a story about this guy who'd paid $20 million to go into space. "We all said 'nonsense!'. We might as well be on another planet too. I worry about that sometimes -- in the act of theatre itself, there's always the danger that it will become dislocated from the here and now."