The 50th anniversary of Galway’s Druid Theatre marks a record of sustained performances that have helped define what Irish theatre means. A west of Ireland regional company, they have foregrounded that landscape. Miraculously, the 50th anniversary still features two of the company’s three co-founders, director Garry (short for Gearóidín) Hynes and actor Marie Mullen.
Actor Mick Lally died in 2010 at the age of 64. But his presence towers mightily in Patrick Lonergan’s text and the wonderful production photos (in the photo from MJ Molloy’s The Wood of the Whispering, Lally looks as if he’s been living in a cave for 50 years).
JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World was the first production to bring Druid to national attention. The company was first drawn to the play as a cynical move to attract tourists, but Synge’s Playboy proved a dramaturgically inspiring work and Hynes soon realised it would take multiple productions to sound its depths. The various Druid productions of Playboy brought out the strong presence of violence in the play (their current production of Macbeth does something similar) and a gritty, realistic base.
The great contemporary Irish playwright whose work came to be most associated with Druid was Tom Murphy. In 1987, he became Writer-in-Association with Druid (not Residence, for as Murphy pointed out, he now resided in Dublin).
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The position came with a threefold obligation. The first was to produce a classic play from Murphy’s repertoire; the choice was the 1960s Famine, a neo-Brechtian work. Then there was to be a Murphy play with which the author was dissatisfied. The choice was The White House, a two-act play looking at the faded optimism of the 1960s from the disillusionment of the next decade. The play became a lengthy one-acter, entirely set in the 1970s. In its revised form, it proved one of Murphy’s greatest successes.
The one serious criticism of Druid made in Lonergan’s generally supportive book is the dearth of plays by women playwrights. As it points out, of the 10 new plays produced by Druid between 2000 and 2015, only three were written by women
Finally, there was a new play, Bailegangaire, with the great Siobhán McKenna as Mommo, a storming return to form for Murphy after the doldrums of the early 1980s. Murphy continued to work closely with Hynes until his death in 2018; there is a wonderful photo of the two of them in rehearsal in 2014. And it continues. Last year Druid did a new production of Murphy’s The House. As with all of the plays Hynes directs, she never repeats herself; The House was very different from its previous incarnations.
The other playwright Druid promoted was Martin McDonagh, giving the London-born and English-accented playwright a valuable veneer of Irish authenticity. Hynes’s direction fleshed out the cartoon comedy by encouraging the actors to develop the characters’ psychological depth. The production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane transferred to New York and was nominated for six Tony Awards, winning four. Hynes was the first woman director to ever win a Tony. Anna Manahan received her second Tony nomination (the first was 30 years earlier for Friel’s Lovers). This time she won.
There is no context for Anna Manahan’s acting career in Lonergan’s history. This is the book’s main shortcoming. It is overly focused on the founders of Druid, Hynes in particular, and does not take account of the broader theatrical context.
The other figure whose importance for Druid is discussed is Maelíosa Stafford. He memorably played one of the two brothers, Coleman, in McDonagh’s The Lonesome West. As well as being a superb comic actor, Stafford also features as the person who took over as Druid’s artistic director in the early 1990s while Hynes was artistic director at the Abbey Theatre.
Where she had favoured psychological realism, Stafford opted for a more overtly theatrical approach. His collaboration with Leitrim writer Vincent Woods produced At the Black Pigs’ Dyke, an innovative fusion of a traditional mumming play with the contemporary Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The one serious criticism of Druid made in Lonergan’s generally supportive book is the dearth of plays by women playwrights. As it points out, of the 10 new plays produced by Druid between 2000 and 2015, only three were written by women. The situation has improved somewhat in recent years with the arrival of the theatrically sophisticated and hugely inventive comic dramatist Sonya Kelly. The book reveals how Kelly started out as an actor with Druid, playing one of the village girls in Synge’s Playboy. She also worked as a stand-up comedian. Kelly broke through with her third play, Furniture, and hit a high point with The Last Return. Her promotion as a playwright by Druid disrupts their heavily male line-up.
Although I would have preferred a broader theatrical framework, the book in the main succeeds as a thorough and persuasive account of Druid’s first 50 years. I had a wonderful time reliving so many theatrical occasions through Lonergan’s vivid account. It also comes, courtesy of Galway University’s archivist Barry Houlihan, with a detailed list of all the Druid productions over the years. It has much to offer lovers of Druid, of Irish theatre and of theatre in general.
