The following biography is sourced from interview by Charlotte Higgins for The Guardian, October 18, 2008 and Pitsburgh Public Playhouse's educational packet on Electra, 2010.
Award-winning Irish playwright, poet, professor of creative writing and writer-in-residence at University College, Dublin, Frank McGuinness has become renowned for his adaptations of the classics, and the provocative subject matter of his plays.
He was born in 1953 in Buncrana, a town in County Donegal, Ireland. Coming from humble beginnings, his father owned a bread business and his mother worked in a shirt factory to support Frank, his younger brother and sister. Once his father lost the business, Frank McGuinness continued his education, receiving his degree and a Masters of Philosophy in English and Medieval Studies at University College Dublin. He began playwriting through a workshop with director Patrick Mason, leading to his acclaimed work Factory Girls that was produced at the Abbey Theatre in 1982. His most prominent work of the 1980s, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, his “political and cultural challenge” about Protestant soldiers in the Ulster regiment in World War I established his place in the theatre world, winning him the London Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright.
McGuinness's talents stretch beyond original works to daring adaptations. He has worked on nine dramas of Ibsen including A Doll’s House, Peer Gynt, Hedda Gabler, and Ghosts; Chekhov's Three Sisters (1990) starring the Cusack sisters; and Electra by Sophocles, with Zoë Wanamaker in the title role (1998). In 2008, he wrote a new version of Oedipus the King for the National Theatre. Describing his process for adapting, McGuinness references another branch of the arts: the visual. "I remember once going to the Picasso Museum, and on the wall there were four very quick sketches of Le Déjeuner Sur l'Herbe - very quick, rough sketches. And I looked at them and they were all different, and they were all evidence of Picasso's obsession with the painting; he was recording different ways of seeing. That's exactly what I want to do. It's me thinking about a play and brooding on a play. I make absolutely no scholarly claims. But I have to be able to share the obsession through my writing."
His works have been performed all over the world including Broadway, the West End, and in Pittsburgh where his play The Bird Sanctuary received its American premiere at Pittsburgh Public Theater in 2005. Other famous works include Baglady (Abbey Theatre, 1985), Innocence (Gate Theatre, Dublin, 1986), Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me (Hampstead Theatre, West End and Broadway, 1992), Mutabilitie (National Theatre, 1997), Dolly West’s Kitchen (Abbey Theatre, 1999; Old Vic, London, 2000), Speaking Like Magpies (RSC, The Swan Theatre, Straford-upon-Avon, 2005), Gates of Gold (Gate Theatre, Dublin, 2002. UK premiere Finborough Theatre, 2004. West End transfer 2006.),There Came a Gypsy Riding (Almeida Theatre, London, 2007), The Holy Moley Jesus Story (Greash Theatre, Dublin, 2008), Greta Garbo Came to Donegal (Tricycle Theatre, London, 2010), Donegal (The Abbey Theatre, 2016) and many others
Frank McGuinness
