ABSTRACT
Our players, too, have been vivid and exciting because they have copied a life personally known to them…. One of our early players was exceedingly fine in the old woman in Riders to the Sea. ‘She has never been to Aran, she knows nothing but Dublin, surely in that part she is not objective, surely she creates from imagination,’ I thought; but when I asked her she said, ‘I copied from my old grandmother.’ Certainly it is this objectivity, this making of all from sympathy, from observation, never from passion, from lonely dreaming, that has made our players, at their best, great comedians, for comedy is passionless.
