Alan Simpson was born in Dublin and was educated at Campbell College, Belfast, and Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in engineering in 1946. During the Second World War he served with the Irish army. He was commissioned as captain with the Corps of Engineers in 1950. He was interested in the theatre, and he and his wife, Carolyn Swift, founded the Pike Theatre in Dublin, where the first Irish productions of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Brendan Behan's The Quare Fellow were staged. His book Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin recalls those years. He went to London and Edinburgh to work in theatre, and from 1968 to 1969 was artistic adviser to the Abbey Theatre. While in Dublin he directed musicals. He lectured in the State University of New York in 1978 and directed productions in America. He died in Dublin.

Born:	1920
Died:	1980