Astride the Moon
Vincent Dowling

6” x 9 1/4” • 368 pages • b&w photos
ISBN 0863278280 • hardback • $25.00 •

A book about an extraordinary Irish life, the quintessential shabby-gentile Dublin childhood, the stories of growing up and of girls and more girls! Vincent Dowling is a flamboyant lover of life—his life has been an amazing one where he has mixed with stars and politicians and always managed to do his own thing. These pages are filled with life and energy and will be enjoyed by anyone who loves life and the theater.

For the past five decades, Vincent Dowling has been a key figure at the center of Irish, British, and American theater as an actor, producer, director, and artistic director.

He is best known for his two spells spent as artistic director of Dublin’s world famous Abbey Theatre. The intense politics of the Theatre are exposed and the joy of bringing successful productions to the West End and Broadway is ably demonstrated in his lively prose. His key achievement while at the Abbey was the re-establishment of bringing successful plays like The Plough and the Stars and Shadow of a Gunman to Broadway, the West End, Moscow, Paris, and Florence.

He began in British theater in the early 1950s and A Theatrical Life is peppered with anecdotes about his time spent touring the country, playing the lofty heights of the West End or Stratford one night and Kidderminster the next. His views on the various towns and cities visited have not been softened by the intervening years! (Bradford is described as “the grimmest town we had seen.”)

He became enamoured with American theater in the 1980s and moved to the U.S. and among other roles served as artistic and producing director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival for nine years. In this role he is credited with giving Tom Hanks his big break by inviting him to take the lead in The Taming of the Shrew in 1977 and since then has acted as a mentor to the double Oscar-winning actor. Vincent won an Emmy for his television production of The Playboy of the Western World and has staged his one man show in New York, Chicago, and on three occasions at the White House.

Dowling spares no blushes in his recounting of the shenanigans, partying, and bed-hopping that went on during his time in theater.



Vincent Dowling was born in 1929 in Dublin and has been involved in every aspect of theater on an international level. He currently lives in North Chester, Massachusetts, where he founded and runs The Miniature Theatre of Chester. He has won several international awards for his services to theater and is currently an active member of the International Artistic Directorate of the rebuilt Globe Theatre in London.

Wolfhound Press

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