A file of black-and-white photographs shows the beginning of Druid. A rehearsal room in Galway city. Garry Hynes, seated, overseeing the action in the room. Marie Mullen is studying lines while Mick Lally wrestles on the ground with another cast member. It is the rehearsals for Druid’s first production in July 1975 – The Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge. The photos capture a pleasingly disruptive energy – a group coming together to bring theatre to the people and make people think differently about Irish theatre.
Now, 50 years later, the Druid archive documents the energy and creativity that has sustained the company throughout that time and which it continues to bring to audiences around the world.
The Druid archive comprises more than 120 boxes of materials preserved and accessible at University of Galway Library. Beginning work on the Druid archive came with an added poignancy. The day I got the role was also the day that Mick Lally, one of the company founders, died in August 2010.
The story of Druid through its archive actually begins before Druid was a company at all. Scrapbooks from student days at University of Galway highlight the early development. A photo in the scrapbook from March 1975 shows Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen proudly holding ‘Best Producer’ and ‘Best Actress’ awards from the Galway Drama Festival that year. Both would go on to win Tony Awards with Druid on Broadway in 1998.
RM Block
Druid’s first printed season programme from 1975 showed the ambition and vision that the company and Hynes had for the venture. Hynes wrote:
“Theatre has for long been regarded as a night-time fancy of the elite. I feel it must be a means of expression for the community in which it is rooted, serving its educational, recreational and creative needs. If it fails in this it will not survive.”
The front cover of that programme featured a sketch of a Galway Hooker boat (drawn by company member Mairéad Noone). Inside, Hynes quotes American playwright Tennessee Williams: “Make voyages. Attempt them. There is nothing else.” In many ways Druid have never stopped making voyages, artistically, intellectually and physically, over its 50 years.
The archive documents how theatre gets made and shared from audiences in Galway to county villages and parish halls around Ireland to major venues in New York or Sydney. Production records reflecting the organising of shows and tours, beginning with the so-called ‘U.R.Ts’ (‘unusual rural tours’) of the 1980s, to major US and international tours through the 1990s, fill volumes of files. Large scrolls of fax paper correspondence, having criss-crossed the Atlantic with details of everything from shipping of sets to venue schedules, show the meticulous planning needed in a time where email was limited and the telephone and fax still ruled.
A digitised collection of recorded Druid performances dating back to the early 1980s brings viewers into a past sense of live performance. We can watch and experience again the actors and characters that audiences came to see. Moments stand out from the recordings such as Maelíosa Stafford as Christy Mahon in The Playboy of the Western World in 1982, as he peers around the shebeen door announcing the arrival of The Playboy with a meek ‘God save all here!’
We can watch as Siobhán McKenna pulled the duvet tight to her chin as she recounts her nightly story of how Bailegangaire came by its name in Tom Murphy’s classic play. We can listen to Mick Lally as Pozzo in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and revisit Tom Jordan Murphy and his fellow cast’s Tony-Award winning performances when Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane stormed to global success on Broadway in 1998. A photo in the archive shows the name of the play in glowing lights at the Walter Kerr Theatre as umbrellas are carried by passers-by in a rain-sodden New York. Perhaps the West of home was not too far away at all.
This digitised film archive of Druid continues forward through the years with recordings of contemporary restaging of classics, new Irish plays and play cycles, which Druid have developed and continue to champion, from Christian O’Reilly’s The Good Father (2002), DruidSynge (2005), Furniture by Sonya Kelly (2018), and The Beacon by Nancy Harris (2019).
The archive also allows us to understand and learn how roles and characters have been realised on stage and carried forward across time through different bodies and guises. The traces of playwright, actor and director lie scattered across these records through rehearsal reports, annotated prompt-scripts and show recordings.
It allows the sound and movement of characters to linger and be passed on. We can see how Ray McBride famously made the role of Liam in Tom Murphy’s Conversations on a Homecoming in 1985, which was later taken up by Aaron Monaghan during the DruidMurphy cycle in 2013. Set in a pub in the Irish midlands, a group gather to drink pints and talk of the past as well as progress, before Liam memorably (and drunkenly) sings Carson Robison’s American country hit There’s a Bridle Hangin’ on the Wall.
Marie Mullen also took up roles she first played opposite many years before. In 1985 she played Mary, alongside Mary McEvoy as Dolly, both granddaughters to Siobhán McKenna’s Mommo in Bailegangaire. Mullen later took up McKenna’s role in 2014 when it was staged alongside Brigit, in a world première of Murphy’s prequel play. A single page of McKenna’s original 1985 Bailegangaire script survives in the archive. Notes on accent and pronunciation, even facial expressions to go with certain words and phrases of the text, are handwritten onto it by McKenna, marking her process and preparation. Christy and Pegeen Mike from Synge’s Playboy similarly go through numerous hands from Maelíosa Stafford and Marie Mullen in the 1980s to Ruth Negga and Cillian Murphy in 2004.
The Druid Ensemble, with Aisling O’Sullivan, Rory Nolan, Aaron Monaghan, Derbhle Crotty, Marie Mullen, Marty Rea and Garret Lombard, are a core group of Druid actors that shapes Druid’s excellence in acting in the present while again looking back to Druid’s repertoire and archive. A 2018 production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, for instance, which Hynes first directed in 1987, stemmed from the ensemble and toured in Ireland and internationally.
The original Godot programme from 1987 featured commissioned drawings by artist Brian Bourke, which documented the cast during rehearsal in Bourke’s inimitable style. More recently, artist Mick O’Dea worked as Artist-in-Residence during the DruidO’Casey cycle, painting scenes from the play as well as the stillness of the in-between moments back-stage and in the wings as actors await their cues or as a scene and set are struck. These artistic works commit to memory the magic and craft of theatre-making, of the actor and the space, in a special way.
The archive also documents the work of the many designers who make the sets, costumes, and world of the characters we see on stage - from Monica Frawley, Frank Conway, to Francis O’Connor and Clíodhna Hallisey. A Druid oral history archive records conversations, stories, and memories that are not written down or otherwise would be lost. This allows the record to be added to directly from artists and makers, keeping the story alive in their own words.
An archive can be a finite thing. A place where the past is stored, preserved, and explored to better understand how things once happened. An archive such as Druid’s is something different. It is indeed where we can encounter the plays, people, places and audiences of 50 years of making theatre, but it also a live and evolving space, continually being added to, growing, and changing. It is filled with liveness and possibility.
What began with ‘making voyages’ in 1975 will continue as I keep navigating the story of Druid, preserving it and making space for the archive to come.
Druid Theatre 1975-2025: 50 Years of New Irish Plays is edited by Barry Houlihan, Patrick Lonergan, and Máiréad Ní Chróinín, published by Methuen.
