Have you mellowed, Garry? “I probably have mellowed, to even be able to talk like this, although I had some instinct in this way when I was younger. You have to learn that theatre isn’t everything. You have to learn no matter how good your ideas are, how enthusiastic you may be, other people won’t necessarily see it like that.
“You have to lead. A lot of leadership is inspiring other people to feel confidence in themselves. Destroy that and you destroy everything.”
Garry Hynes is talking about being a theatre director, and about learning to balance being demanding in rehearsal with working together. One of the founders, 50 years ago, of the acclaimed Druid theatre company, Hynes is at a very particular and tender juncture. A phenomenal director with a lifetime of achievement, she is raw with grief but in the midst of making theatre.
This is, perhaps, a portrait of the artist aged 72.
RM Block
We’re talking after rehearsals for Druid’s double bill of Macbeth and Riders to the Sea, which opens next week as part of Galway International Arts Festival. Well into the conversation, she has leant back in the hotel bar’s booth, balancing her knees against the table. She seems mellow all right, as well as thoughtful and open. Engaged, enraged, emotional, heartsore, sardonic, funny, honest.
Her beloved wife, Martha O’Neill, died on Easter Sunday, at the age of 64, and here she is just a couple of months later, in the thick of meaty rehearsal.
“I never realised the circumstances would be as they are,” she says. “I had a decision to make, when it was clear Martha’s illness was very, very serious. It was kind of clear from the beginning, but when it was inarguable I had to decide.”
Macbeth and Riders to the Sea were planned long before illness struck. “My concern was that I would be caring for Martha” now, when rehearsals were scheduled. “And I couldn’t rehearse and care for her properly. I couldn’t. And nor could I assign her care to ... We thought she would be at home. Certainly in the early months, we never thought it was going to be that fast.”
Hynes had to make a plan B in case she couldn’t direct. She was conscious of the large investment in the double bill, and of all the others involved in it, of actors’ contracts. “People’s commitment to it. Lives would be affected. At a certain stage you could not cancel it.”
But it was quicker than either of them expected.
“It was a very short time, six months from diagnosis to death.” It was cruel. “Shocking. Beyond words.”
[ Martha O’Neill obituary: Film and TV producer whose work spanned multiple genresOpens in new window ]
In the rehearsal room “you bring everything” to directing. “I mean, I do. Not in terms of talking about it, but I bring everything in terms of, I’m thinking or feeling the experience.”
Also, “it’s very odd”, realising now that “I was doing exactly the same thing after Jerome died”. Her brother Jerome Hynes, Druid’s former general manager, who had gone on to become chief executive of Wexford Festival Opera and vice-chairman of the Arts Council, died suddenly in 2005, aged 45.
Shortly afterwards, Druid revived an earlier Riders to the Sea, JM Synge’s short tragedy, set on Inishmaan, about loss and the sea’s relentless power. “I remember [the scene] when the body of Bartley was brought in. That’s when I actually lost it, briefly. I’m doing that again now. Just this afternoon.”
Hynes was prepared for it, but she acknowledges that “you always are emotionally vulnerable. I suppose you have to be emotionally vulnerable” to make theatre.
You usually think of bereavement as sad and grieving, but actually it’s a multiplicity of feelings, including fear and anger. It’s such a complex thing
— Garry Hynes
“I think for everybody who experiences grief at this level, you never stop thinking about the person. And you probably never stop experiencing their absence ... But in a rehearsal room you have to be present. So at the very least it’s a distraction. Because I didn’t necessarily know what it’d be like.”
She talks about the way we’re all trying to make sense of things. Making theatre involves forging connections – with yourself, with others and with audiences. “You can’t do a play as a piece of private psychology. It has to be a communal act.”
In 1975, after three years in the drama society at University College Galway, Marie Mullen, Mick Lally and Hynes founded Druid, where she has been artistic director for all but three years since. “Obviously, you gain in confidence”, but you “gain relationships, and relationships are absolutely critical in making theatre”.
“I often wish I was something else. If I was a novelist I could write a book without having anybody. I can’t do a single thing without at least one other person saying, ‘Yes, I collaborate with you.’ Collaboration is the beating heart of theatre. It’s not theatre until somebody’s watching.” Collaboration gives value and meaning.
Her brother was making a speech at Wexford Festival Opera when he died. He had a brain aneurysm. “Jerome’s death did feel catastrophic,” Hynes says. She recalls the shock of hearing the news in France with O’Neill. “You usually think of bereavement as sad and grieving, but actually it’s a multiplicity of feelings, including fear and anger. It’s such a complex thing.”
Circumstances also affect it. “We were very close. To lose my brother, my collaborator, my best friend, in one fell swoop, was astonishing. But for Alma” – Alma Quinn, Jerome’s wife – “and their three boys, in their early teens, I knew it even then: my loss did not compare with theirs.”
Family has been important, always. In Druid’s early days “my mother did box office. My brother Donal did lighting; Aedhmar” – her sister – “front of house. All volunteers. My mother said she was fired when they started paying people. She blamed Jerome rather than me.” Hynes laughs at the joking.
“It was extraordinary then that Feargal,” Jerome’s son, “worked in Druid in the same position”, many years later.
Hynes’ relationship with her mother, Carmel, a Morley, “while complex, was very close”, and her death three years ago was hard. She was close to her aunt Phyll McCormack, from Ballaghaderreen, who died a few weeks before O’Neill.
Such loss. “It wasn’t until a couple of months ago I experienced what it was like to be bereaved of your life partner, your wife.”
They first met around 2002. O’Neill, a film producer, asked Hynes to join the board of the Irish Film Institute, which she chaired. They clicked immediately. “I think both of us, there was a match.” It was gradual, getting to know each other. “Quick drinks after meetings turned into longer drinks, then turned into, ‘Sure, maybe we’ll have dinner.’”
They lived 10 minutes’ walk from each other. Later they decided to live in Hynes’ house off South Circular Road in Dublin, rebuilding it as a joint project. They became civil partners on December 18th, 2014.
She was lucky in love. “Which makes it so hard. We just worked. It was a very, very good relationship. From the beginning it was good, but it continued. We were very, very happy. Martha was seven years younger than me, but we had begun to plan for the next stage of our lives.
“Taken from me in the blink of an eye. It’s all gone. My whole life’s changed out of all recognition. I’m very lucky to have support among friends and family. I’m very lucky to have theatre as well.”
The heartbreak is also because “I just feel so sad for Martha. She enjoyed life. She enjoyed people. We always thought, because of the age difference, I was going to go first.”
Rows of pictures they intended to hang but never got around to are lined up on the floor, a Mick O’Dea at the top of the stairs against a wall. “I joked for years, ‘Don’t think you’re just going to hang them for my wake. I want it done before I die.’”
She’s laughing, but there’s pathos too. “I’m going to get them hung. I want to just go,” Hynes says, gesturing upwards, “see, I did it.”
There’s no consolation in Macbeth, but “there is feeling. Macbeth goes from a life he thinks he understands to a life which splinters around him.” Hynes talks about difficult or challenging experiences. Not just death, “although death, in its finality, is shocking. Absolutely shocking. Everything changes. The nature of time changes. Your experience of time.
“It’s not being very, very sad and then gradually being less sad.” Grief “alters everything. I’m only two months out from this. Hopefully you learn to live with the tragedy of it better. The tragedy is not just mine. The tragedy is hers, too, and her family’s and friends’.”
Druid is of Galway, and so is Hynes, though she’s of Ballaghaderreen, a Rossie, too. But she’s lived in Dublin since 1991, when she became artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, a role that many of its holders have found to be a fraught one.
Hynes wanted a three-year contract – “if it isn’t working by the end of three years, I don’t want to stay” – against some advice. “Strategically it was a mistake,” she now says.
[ Board governance at the heart of problem at the Abbey, says Garry HynesOpens in new window ]
Her tenure there was “very difficult”. She recalls a photograph in an Abbey office of its old touring company. “Very few people were different from those I was working with. The artistic director was the only person who was expected to change. I realised I was coming into a set-up with established ways of working.
“An artistic director is supposed to have the vision, but there’s no way a single individual can provide everything in terms of leadership, administration, management, of a complex theatre. There was no facility, as there is now, to bring in a team.”
She wanted at least an executive director, “but the argument couldn’t even be heard”. Such a set-up is common internationally; it happened at the Abbey only in 2015.
Leaving the Abbey after three years, she saw her future life as a freelance director based in Dublin, where she’d bought her home. But in Druid, after its artistic director Maelíosa Stafford returned to Australia after three years, as planned, the board asked Hynes to take over temporarily, while seeking a successor.
“I said yes, with a lot of trepidation. My phrase then and my phrase now is, ‘You can’t step in the same water twice.’ So here. They didn’t manage to get rid of me since.”
These are her sliding doors. “If I hadn’t gone back, my life would have been completely different in all sorts of ways. But if I hadn’t left, I wouldn’t have been able to go back to Druid. I couldn’t have still been there.”
Before leaving Druid, Hynes had begun wondering, “Who needs who more? Do I need Druid to support my sense of myself as a director or does Druid need me?
“I had to get out, for all the right kinds of reasons. Then, when I did go, I began to see Druid from a distance, to understand the nature of Druid in a way I wouldn’t have been able if I had just continued unbroken. There’s no question about that. My tenure in the Abbey made my return to Druid possible. But I wouldn’t have come back only for the board’s difficulty, because I wouldn’t have been asked.”
Hynes has broken moulds, been part of a team making Druid a world power in theatre. Sometimes she has been an intimidating force.
Is she bossy? She answers without hesitation. “Yes.” Then elaborates.
“I would have been regarded as bossy. I’m sure nobody refers me like that now,” she says, self-mockingly. “As if.”
“I would have been called bossy in school. As director you have to be able to control the room, to control the nature of the process. Because who else can? That would have been called bossy then in young women. It wouldn’t be called that now. I was very aware certain qualities I have wouldn’t even be remarked on if I were male.”
She has high standards. “The thing is, if you get it wrong, if you’re too demanding, then you kill the very thing you’re trying to control. You learn that from sore experience – very sore experience. If people don’t understand, or feel intimidated or whatever, you’re killing the very thing you’re trying to create. It’s a very, very long time to get the balance right.
“I knew even then when I made mistakes. I knew when I went over the top. I knew when, essentially, what would be described now as bullying. It wasn’t intended, but it would have come across that way. And now you have to be aware of your behaviour. Aware in a way you would not necessarily have been then, especially when you’re young and green.
“You have to be persuasive. If I ask an actor to move in a particular direction, and the actor thinks that’s not a good idea, it’ll never be a good idea.
“Unless I persuade the actor it’s a good idea, it won’t be a good idea, because he or she’s the one who has to do it. It’s not an army. You can’t habituate people to certain action.”
She means the way armies have to deliberately drain people of individual responses and so, say, be prepared go over the top to certain death in trench warfare. “Take that from an actor, you take the light from them. Or anybody who’s working with you – designer, technician, whatever.
“And, like everybody else, I’ve made mistakes. I know that. I would have known it at the time, which doesn’t necessarily mean I was able to ... You just get a little bit of wisdom and experience. Once you grow up you learn, or you have to learn, compassion and understanding.
“There might be people out there who say, ‘She said she had to learn compassion and understanding? Really? I wouldn’t like to have seen you then.’ But I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done a bit of growing up over a long period.”
This is the mellowing.
Though actors are her world, “I could not walk onstage and pretend to be somebody else. Even being in the wings absolutely terrifies me.” In the early days she once played the maid in the Brian Friel play The Loves of Cass McGuire. “I think I had to step up because I got on the wrong side of whoever was to do it, and she left.”
Talking about actors, “the first time I worked with an actor that was significantly older than me” was on A Whistle in the Dark, by Tom Murphy, at the Abbey in 1986. She asked Godfrey Quigley to play the chilling Dada. “And boys, oh boys. Did I learn? Did I learn? Very fast. Managing Godfrey was a very serious challenge. I liked him. I can’t say I loved him, but managing him ... He was terrifying.” Establishing authority was a challenge, “because Godfrey was old school”.
On the other hand, Hynes heard of a famous actress (she won’t say who) observing, after Siobhán McKenna’s death, “that I’d seen her off, as a result of doing Bailegangaire with Garry Hynes, that wicked witch of the west, that young whippersnapper”.
Hynes says that “working with Siobhán was fantastic. It was one of the happiest experiences. I’ve had a lot of happy experiences. I’ve had a lot of very unhappy experiences as well. But, God, working with Siobhán was great. She was witty. She was so intelligent. Tom had written the play for her. I mean, she was Mother Ireland.”
I did increasingly find the gap between my public persona and my private persona difficult. Not only was I not out in public, but I wasn’t really out to most of my circle. It stopped making sense
— Garry Hynes
She tells a great story about plans for McKenna to wear a wig, which she was generously having made herself. “She had beautiful red hair, which she managed beautifully. It was a defining characteristic. It was very hard to do Bailegangaire the first time,” in 1985. “A very big, challenging thing.” At tech rehearsal “I looked at her and, ‘That’s not Mommo.’” She became convinced McKenna shouldn’t wear the wig. “She was affronted. ‘She’s in her 80s, and I’m only in my 60s. This is my hair!’
“She kind of refused ... I was so utterly determined she wouldn’t wear a wig. Now, you can go back and set this against learning how not to bully people, but, honest to God, I would have lain down on the ground and let her drive over me before she wore that wig on stage. And she eventually agreed. She was brilliant.”
Hynes’ degree was in English and history. History was a passion, which chimes with writers and plays she has chosen. If not theatre, she might have continued with history. After college she became fascinated by 1930s Germany.
“How did Hitler become Hitler? How did he get away with it? Why did nobody shout stop, to quote the Irish journalist John Healy? Hitler was elected, which is kind of fascinating. It was only gradually he took over the machinery of the state. The comparisons are eerie and really terrifying.”
She worries about the long term, not the world going up tomorrow. “I won’t be around.” The rise of the right, and the implications for the future, terrify her, “being the lefty liberal that I am”.
Hynes is a big reader. “Funnily enough, nonfiction, history, politics.” Also newspapers. “Guardian, Irish Times, New York Times, news magazines. Everything. I love long-form journalism.” In print. “Martha used to read all her news online. She couldn’t understand” all the paper.
“The other thing I fancied, but I would never have had brain for, was the law.” Years later, Hynes saw “a commonality”. With law and history “you’re taking a series of established facts and you’re trying to make connections between them and through them. See a narrative, understand why one thing follows another, follows another. Or understand what motivated people. That is one of the fascinations in my life.”
She’s “a director of text”. She’s dismissive of her early writing, saying her play Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass, from 1980, about Granuaile meeting Elizabeth I, was workshopped in rehearsal; it won a Fringe First at Edinburgh. “It wasn’t serious original writing at all. It wasn’t a Tom Murphy I can assure you, or a Shakespeare.”
Hynes came out in her early 30s. “I wish I’d come out earlier. I do,” she says. “To have had the courage to come out when you’re in school or college still seems extraordinary to me.” The 1970s were different times but “as a student from a middle-class background, I should have had the guts to come out earlier ...
“I did increasingly find the gap between my public persona and my private persona difficult. Not only was I not out in public, but I wasn’t really out to most of my circle. It stopped making sense.
“I remember telling a couple of people who knew, ‘I’m coming out. I can’t take it any more.’ I had started a new relationship. ‘Stop the best-friends thing ...’ Eventually you just realise it’s a terrible contradiction between living with somebody you love, being their partner, and then hiding that from everybody else.”
So she had something to tell Aedhmar, who is 14 years younger but “like an older sister. ‘What hopeless trouble have you got yourself into now?’ I’m gay and I’m coming out. ‘Thank God. I thought you were going to say you were pregnant.’”
Hynes says she has been happy “an awful lot of times – far too much for any one person”. But “I worry all the time. Why did I pick a career that was the equivalent of sitting the Leaving Cert three or four times a year?”
Does she believe in an afterlife? “I wish I did more than I do. But I do absolutely believe in the persistence of somebody’s spirit ... Once you exist and have connected with other people, the spirit persists. Martha’s spirit will persist. Martha’s spirit will be in me when I die.”
Druid’s double bill of Riders to the Sea and Macbeth is in preview at the Mick Lally Theatre, Galway; it opens on Tuesday, July 15th, and runs until Saturday, July 26th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival; all performances are sold out. Macbeth moves to the Gaiety, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival, from September 25th until October 5th
