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Alan Stanford

Alan Stanford is a British-Irish actor and director whose career spans stage, film, television and voice work. Born in 1949, he has built a particularly substantial life in Irish theatre, working on both sides of the footlights and developing a repertoire that ranges from Shakespeare and Shaw to Noël Coward, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde. Stanford began his directing career in Ireland at the Project Arts Centre, where his productions included works by Shaw, Graham Greene, Brecht, Dürrenmatt and Shakespeare. He later served as Artistic Director of Second Age Theatre Company, directing King Lear, Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth, as well as Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! His directing work also extended to the Irish Theatre Company and other independent companies. For Storytellers, he staged The Mayor of Casterbridge and Oedipus. The central theatrical relationship of Stanford’s career has been with Dublin’s Gate Theatre, where he spent more than thirty years as both an actor and director. His productions there covered an unusually wide field: Romeo and Juliet, Tartuffe, Present Laughter, Pride and Prejudice, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Cyrano de Bergerac and A Christmas Carol were all part of that body of work. He also directed productions including Private Lives, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Deep Blue Sea, The Real Thing, Endgame and God of Carnage. That range gives Stanford’s career its shape. He has moved between classical drama, literary adaptation and modern theatre while continuing to work as a performer across several screen and vocal forms. Rather than fitting into a single lane, his work reflects the versatility of an actor-director with deep roots in Irish theatre and a sustained engagement with major dramatic writing.