Politics & Power Quote by Cyril Cusack

Cusack’s “nationalism” isn’t a flag pinned to a lapel; it’s greasepaint under the fingernails. By declaring “my native soil is the theatre,” he swerves around the usual demands of national belonging - bloodlines, borders, party loyalties - and plants his identity in a working space: rehearsal rooms, touring circuits, the nightly contract between performer and audience. It’s a shrewd inversion. Soil is supposed to be inherited and defended; Cusack’s soil is built, dismantled, and rebuilt every night under stage lights.

The line also reads like a quiet rebuke to the kind of cultural gatekeeping that often shadows Irish artistic life in the 20th century, when “authentic” Irishness could become a test you were expected to pass. Cusack, an actor who moved between Irish and British stages and screens, dodges the purity politics. He’s staking a claim to an older, more portable kind of nation: the repertory company, the shared canon, the craft itself. In that sense, the theatre becomes both refuge and passport.

There’s an actor’s pragmatism inside the poetry. Nationalism, in this formulation, isn’t an abstract doctrine; it’s a discipline. You belong where you can do the work, where language is alive in mouths, where stories are negotiated in real time with a roomful of strangers. The subtext is almost defiant: if you want to know where I come from, don’t check a map - check the stage door.