Field Day Theatre Company

Informal coalition of Irish artists created in 1980 who addressed the political situation in Ireland using artistic works, without being propagandist. The original members were playwright Brian Friel, actor Stephen Rea, poets and academics Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin, and singer and film-maker David Hammond. The group produced some of the finest English-language theatrical works of the 1980s, many of them studies of traditional pre-1960 Ireland.

Notable works produced by the group include Friel's Translations (1981) and Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross (1986). In 1983 Field Day began to issue pamphlets on cultural nationalism, and in 1991 the group produced the three-volume The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Despite attacks from revisionists (for being too nationalist) and feminists (because of its underrepresentation of women), this anthology proves to be an ambitious and remarkable achievement.