Politics & Power Quote by Cyril Cusack

Cusack’s line lands like a quietly defiant stage direction: stop treating theatre as a passport stamp. Coming from an Irish actor who built a career across Irish and British institutions, it reads as both artistic credo and cultural pressure-release valve. Mid-century Ireland lived with a double bind: the hunger for a distinct national culture and the fear that “international” meant dilution, or worse, capitulation to English influence. Cusack sidesteps the trap by insisting that theatre’s real citizenship is the audience’s attention, not the flag stitched to the curtain.

The craft argument is pragmatic. Plays travel because their engine isn’t local trivia; it’s behavior under stress, desire in conflict, jokes that expose power. Great theatre carries its own translation kit: gesture, timing, silence, the charged proximity of bodies in a room. Cusack’s phrasing - “no national identity” followed by a list of nations - is pointed. He acknowledges labels while refusing their authority, making “Irish, English, or French” sound like costumes a production might try on, not the actor’s skin.

There’s subtext, too, about ownership. National identity can become gatekeeping: who gets funded, who gets staged, which stories count as “authentic.” Cusack’s internationalism isn’t a bland cosmopolitan shrug; it’s a claim for mobility and exchange, a reminder that theatre thrives on borrowing, adaptation, and touring. If the stage belongs to the world, then no single culture gets to police its borders.