Posted: 15 May 2008
Four Tony Award nominations for play by UCD graduate
The Seafarer, a play by UCD graduate, Conor McPherson has received four nominations for 2008 Tony Awards, Broadway’s top theatre honours. The nominations include: best play, best direction, and best performance by a featured actor in a play, for Jim Norton and Conleth Hill.
The play, a dark and enthralling Christmas fable of despair and redemption, is about two brothers playing poker with the devil. “McPherson is considering the impenetrable, scary mystery that is being alive and the blundering ways that poor humans deal with it,” said Ben Brantley in his review of The Seafarer in The New York Times last December. “The Seafarer portrays the forms of amnesia and anesthesia that allow people to wake up with themselves. Not that you think in such lofty terms while you’re listening to the liveliest, funniest dialogue yet written by McPherson.”
“Conor was one of the best students we ever had,” said Professor Tony Roche from the UCD School of English, Drama and Film. “While studying english and philosophy, in which he graduated with a double first, he was also heavily involved in directing, writing and acting in DramSoc.”
“Conor has always been determined to write and have his plays produced in his own way. These nominations are a vindication of a writer pursuing his or her own vision," said Professor Roche.
The 2008 Tony Awards ceremony will be held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on June 15, 2008, and broadcast on CBS television. McPherson also received a Tony Award nomination in 2006 for his play Shining City.
