The best performance I've ever seen: Frank McGuinness

I saw Arthur Miller's All My Sons at the Abbey in 1981 – before I'd had any plays on myself. It was directed by the great Irish actor Ray McAnally and had some of the best actors in the country in it: Godfrey Quigley, John Kavanagh, Deirdre Donnelly. But the landmark performance was Maureen Toal as Kate Keller, the mother. I had been studying Miller as a master who could teach me to write. I thought I knew the play like the back of my hand. I believed no surprises could be sprung. But Maureen made me aware the mother was as culpable as the father in the crime [shipping damaged aeroplane parts out of his factory during the second world war, causing the death of more than 20 pilots]. Her most striking quality was the courage she had to stand accused – she did not look for forgiveness. She played the role as Miller wrote it in all his harshness. Her lack of self-pity made your heart break. Ray was a great director with an enormous capacity to carry a play in his mind, to respect its unity. The design – the play is set in middle-class America – was hyperrealistic, as if the space were sculpted, and within it people could attain astonishing heights of perception and accusation. A consequence of seeing this was that in my plays The Factory Girls and Baglady , Maureen Toal played the lead. She was a crucial influence on me. She has the status in Irish theatre that Judi Dench does in British theatre. When, at the end, Joe Keller kills himself, she gave a cry that came from the earth. I have never heard anything like it – until after the Omagh bombings when, at the funeral of three murdered children from Buncrana, my home town, I heard a mother make the same sound. Frank McGuinness's plays include Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and Greta Garbo Came to Donegal