Field Day Theatre Company - More Than Theatre

More Than Theatre

What began with a desire to develop a local Northern Irish theatre and make it available to a popular audience, quickly grew into a much larger cultural and political project. Even before the company's opening performance, four prominent Northern Irish writers were invited to join the project — Seamus Deane, David Hammond, Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin; they would eventually become Field Day's Board of Directors. (Thomas Kilroy, the only member from the Republic, joined the board in 1988). All of the members of Field Day agreed that art and culture had a crucial role to play in the resolution of what had come to be known as "the Troubles":

The directors believed that Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation. (Ireland's Field Day vii)

Field Day became an artistic response to the violence, history and politics which divided Northern Ireland into a series of seemingly irresolvable dichotomies; Orange/Green, Unionist/Nationalist and Protestant/Catholic are only the most prominent.