'Every role is a challenge,' admits Hill. Then I was in New York and he phoned and asked if I would play his mum. 'Peter took over the role I was playing in London ,' recalls Hill. 'I went to see him and he said, 'if I write something for you, will you do it?' I thought it was just small talk, it'll never happen. Not one to be pigeon holed, Hill has also forged a career as a screen actor, appearing in Woody Allen's latest New York film and Peter Kay's hilarious Britain's Got The Pop Factor. Since then Hill has developed into one of Northern Ireland's most successful acting exports, winning Olivier awards for his turns in Marie Jones' Stones In His Pockets and Mel Brook's smash hit musical, The Producers, in which Hill played the all singing, all dancing Roger de Bris. So it’s a real thrill to be doing this.'Īs a teenager Hill cut his acting teeth with the Ulster Youth Theatre and was one of the first members of Fringe Benefits, a company whose work was aimed at a younger generation of theatregoers. But I’ve always thought he was a brilliant Ulster writer, and his canon of work is amazing. One of the first things I did was Winners, which we toured in 1982-3. 'The whole play is about where people fit in and how they fit in, and how they are confined by their history. ' is an anthropologist, or an ethnologist, who studies the shape of people’s faces and is convinced that, somewhere along the line, he can actually tell what a person’s thinking - how they’re going to behave - by measuring their face, which is a pretty frightening theory for him to have. The fateful events of The Home Place, a play by Brian Friel, take place over a single day at The Lodge in the imaginary Ballybeg, home of the Gores, a planter family with issues.įriel's brilliantly crafted drama, soon to be produced by the Lyric Theatre, continues the historical probing which in his previous play Translations examined the tragic effects of a military operation to map the physical contours of the Irish landscape. In The Home Place, an exercise to determine the Irish character unleashes the tragedy, which revolves around ideas of national identity, love and belonging.Īcclaimed actor and Olivier award winner, Conleth Hill, took time out from rehearsals to shed some light on the complexities of his own character, Dr Richard Gore. It is the summer of 1878, a time of unrest and the early days of the Home Rule movement.