Liam Neeson considers return to stage

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/30/liam-neeson-considers-return-stage

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Liam Neeson has hinted at a return to the stage, potentially at the theatre where his career began.

The Oscar-nominated Irish actor last appeared onstage in 2008 at New York's Lincoln Center festival in a production of Samuel Beckett's Eh Joe by the Gate theatre, Dublin. Neeson played Joe, replacing Michael Gambon, who had played the role two years earlier in Dublin.

Since then, theatregoers have had the chance to see Neeson on stage only as a hologram. He recorded the narrator's part in Jeff Wayne's stage musical version of The War of the Worlds, which toured the UK last year.

"I would love to tread the boards again at some point," Neeson told the Belfast Telegraph during a trip to Northern Ireland to receive the freedom of his home town, Ballymena. "It's been four-and-a-half years since I was on the stage, so it's time to flex that muscle again," he said.

"I'd love to do it at the Lyric [in Belfast]. We're actively trying to find something, you know. I'm a single parent so it's hard trying to distance myself for the moment," he continued.

Though Neeson has become one of Hollywood's major players, he has had a distinguished stage career. In 1976, aged 24, he joined the Belfast Lyric Players, making his professional stage debut with a two-minute cameo in James Plunkett's The Risen People, and spent a further two years in rep with the company, playing roles in Henry VI Part One, Oedipus and Brian Friel's Philadelphia Here I Come. He subsequently moved to Dublin, joining the Abbey theatre's in-house company, before breaking into film.

Since then he has made a number of high-profile appearances in both the West End, where he played Oscar Wilde in the premiere of David Hare's The Judas Kiss – a role currently occupied by Rupert Everett – and on Broadway, starring in Anna Christie in 1993 and The Crucible in 2002. The former production led to a Tony award nomination and a marriage to his co-star, the late Natasha Richardson.