A smalltime criminal walks into the wrong job.The woman he loves has left him for his boss, his boss wants him dead. Part confession meets part road movie. It has been 20 years since Conor McPherson wrote The Good Thief. The monologue was awarded a Stewart parker award in 1995, This Lime Tree Bower won a Thames TV award in 1996 and McPherson went on to become one of the most renowned Irish playw
rights of our time. Greenlight originally staged The Good Thief alongside Rum and Vodka in a disused room in a pub in 1998. That run was so successful that it was extended. Then The Good Thief was invited to The Arches Theatre in Glasgow where it received further critical acclaim. So fifteen years later, why stage it again? For the love of the piece? For the experience of doing it again? To see what fifteen years of change brings to a piece, and to those who stage it? Most certainly, yes. The Good Thief is like a fly in amber, a snapshot of Dublin and Ireland 20 years ago, of life before mobiles and the internet, before the smoking ban, before the Boom and the Crash, before Love/Hate. It is also an exquisite study of unexpected compassion, even in the most brutal of places and that is the quality that makes it timeless. Would The Good Thief do it all again? Come with us on the journey and find out. The Good Thief Reviews
"On wednesday Night I got a small glimpse of what Temple Bar was supposed to be all about......compelling performance and deadpan comic timing"
The Sunday Business Post
"What a show......No praise is too high for the quality of concentration and passion that Leitch brings to this performance, or for Audrey Devereux's direction.... We applauded till our hands were raw." The Scotsman
"Enormously exciting piece of drama and in Greenlight's staging it packs all its original punch"
Sunday Independent
"If he was telling the story in the back bar of some pub overlooking the Liffey we would believe him, so coercive are his narrative skills"
The Herald, Scotland
About Greenlight
Wayne Leitch
Wayne Leitch lives and works in Dublin. He performed The Good Thief in 1998 in Dublin for Greenlight Productions and again at the Arches Theatre Glasgow in 2000. He originally trained with the Blue Moon Theatre Group, in Dun Laoghaire, where he had roles in Once a Catholic by Mary O’Malley and I do Not Like Thee Dr.Fell by Bernard O’Farrell. Audrey Devereux
Audrey Devereux is a teacher and theatre director living and working in Dublin. She was co-founder of Greenlight Productions with playwright Ioanna Anderson and dramaturg, Pam McQueen. Rum and Vodka and The Good Thief by Conor Mc Pherson were the first plays they staged together in 1998. Colm Maher
Colm Maher is the resident lighting designer in Bewley’s Café Theatre. He has designed for The Lilly Lally Show, Songs of Joyce and Bosco Hogan’s I am of Ireland. He has worked as production manager with touring productions of The Happy Prince, Ruby Tuesday and The Poe Show. Other lighting design work includes Karen Egan and Cian Boylan in the National Concert Hall and the Pori Festival in Sweden. He has also designed the Focus Theatre’s productions of The Tower and Tic.
