How Stoppard got rich, and the Gate got Stoppard

Tom Stoppard spent his twenties broke, smoking and trying to write. He had a series of lowly newspaper jobs, and then went freelance, or “self-unemployed.” He was a theatre critic and, briefly, “the only motoring correspondent in the country who couldn’t drive.” He sent scripts to the BBC, and they commissioned him to write a radio series for the Arabic Service. He received an advance for a novel, but only managed to start it two days before the deadline.

Then, in his late twenties, he seemed to get a break.

The late Irish actor, Donal Donnelly, remembered

The actor Donal Donnelly, who died on Monday in Chicago, aged 78, was best known to the public for his cinematic roles in The Godfather: Part III and The Dead, but is remembered by his friends primarily as man of the theatre.

“He was the real thing, a fabulous stage actor,” said Noel Pearson.

Born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1931, to Irish parents, James, a doctor from Tyrone, and Nora (nee O’Connor), a teacher from Kerry, the family soon moved to Dublin, and Donnelly attended Synge St CBS, where he acted in school plays alongside Milo O’Shea and Eamonn Andrews.

After an apprenticeship at Callaghan’s outfitters on Dame Street, he left the trade to join the Gate Theatre, and subsequently joined Godfrey Quigley’s Globe Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. He later moved to London, where he met his wife, Patsy, a dancer, on the stage.

His break came in 1964, when he was cast as Gar Private

Review: ‘No Man’s Land’

Published in the Sunday Tribune, August 31, 2008

There are two moments in ‘No Man’s Land’ that are great theatre. Late in the first act, Michael Gambon, playing Hirst, a writer of apparent high class and distinction, lapses into a drunken, maudlin reminiscence. He is haunted by the dream from which he has just woken, of a drowning. “There’s a gap in me”, he cries, “I can’t fill it… They’re blotting me out. Who is doing it? I’m suffocating.” His words, as befits somebody still mired in half-sleep, and drink sodden, are barely coherent. But the fear is very real, and it shoots through his character and the play: it is, it seems, the age-old fear of abandonment – of being a fraud and, worse, being a solitary fraud.