Acting

Lisa Dwan

Biography

Lisa Dwan is an Irish actress. She is best known for her work in theatre, performing in Samuel Beckett adaptations among other works. She began her career in the Fox Kids series Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog (1998–1999). More recently, she starred in the Netflix series Top Boy (2019–2023). She also appeared in the RTÉ soap opera Fair City (2006–2007) and the ITV drama Rock Rivals (2008). Dwan was born in Coosan, Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland, and originally trained as a ballet dancer. She was chosen to dance with Rudolf Nureyev in the Ballet San Jose's production of "Coppélia" in Dublin when she was 12 years old. She left school at 14 after winning a scholarship to attend the Dorothy Stevens School of Ballet in Leeds, and also danced with the London Lewis Ballet Company. Dwan began acting professionally as a teenager. Dwan's first movie was playing the role of Agnes in an adaptation of Oliver Twist, co-starring Elijah Wood and Richard Dreyfuss. Dwan is most well known internationally for her performances and adaptations of Samuel Beckett's works; Kate Kellaway has called her an "Irish actor and Beckett interpreter of the first rank". She performed in Beckett's Not I in London's Battersea Arts Centre in 2005, and was interviewed with Billie Whitelaw, whom Beckett called the "perfect actress", as part of the Beckett celebrations on BBC Radio 3. Beginning in 2006, Whitelaw mentored Dwan on her work on Beckett. Dwan performed the piece again in July 2009 at the Southbank Centre in London in a time of nine minutes and fifty seconds, and again at the International Beckett Festival in 2012. She replicated the feat at Reading University the next year. Beginning in 2013, Dwan toured with "The Beckett Trilogy", consisting of Not I alongside two of Beckett's other short plays, Footfalls and Rockaby, under the direction of Walter Asmus at the Royal Court Theatre, West End, The Barbican Centre, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and performed sold-out shows at various international locations. In a review of her performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ben Brantley wrote that Dwan "is an instrument of Beckett, in that way saints and martyrs are said to be instruments of God". Dwan regularly writes, lectures, and teaches on theatre, gender, and Beckett. Recent speaking engagements include appearances on BBC radio and television and WNYC. Dwan also writes about Beckett and the arts, including in The Guardian. She has lectured at the École Normale Supérieure, University of Reading and the University of Oxford, and recently completed a residency at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts, where she taught a class on adapting Beckett's prose work. Dwan was also a 2017–2018 artist in residence at Columbia University, where she worked with Irish writer Colm Toibin on Pale Sister, a play derived from the class they taught called "The Antigone Project". Dwan was a resident fellow at the School of Art and Ballet at New York University from 2017 to 2018.