Dramatis Personae

The Plough [aka The Big Dipper] visible on a clear evening over Spiddal last week.
Nineteen years ago, I  didn’t have much interest in theatre. Apart from a few local productions in the local hall [and maybe a college production], I don’t think I’d ever spent a night in the theatre. But when a colleague mentioned that he had tickets to the opening night of a show in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, I decided to go. The Abbey is Ireland’s National Theatre, and an opening night sounded like a bit of fun, and, since I was living in Athlone at the time, there wasn’t much else to do. The play was Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and I remember   the visual impact of the play as much as I do the dialogue –  principally the fact that all of the cast seemed to me dressed like inmates in a PoW camp – uniform and grey and all shaven-headed (to the point where I had difficulty differentiating  some of the characters). That was a controversial production  and that was when I first became aware of the then  young, new artistic director of the Abbey, Garry Hynes.[This 1992 article in the UK Independent on Sunday gives a good flavour of the controversy as does this excerpt from the Cambridge companion to twentieth century Irish drama].

Nearly two decades later, I’ve become much more of a theatre fan, and Garry Hynes hasn’t done too badly either in the meantime. It is easy to take for granted that, for a small city on the west coast, Galway has an internationally renowned director and theatre company, namely Hynes and Druid, which she helped found back in 1975. Every year since I moved to Galway, part of the classic Irish literary canon gets an airing in the city, usually performed by as good a theatre company as one could hope to find. For the last two weeks, O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie has been playing in the Town Hall, performed by Druid and directed by Hynes. The Silver Tassie is rarely perfomed [Yeats refused it for the Abbey when O’Casey wrote it in 1928] and one can see why – the play is stridently anti-war but feels more like a lecture than a story being told [symbolized by the Silver Tassie – a sporting trophy won at the start of the play by one of the characters – which turns out to be as hollow and worthless as the ‘glory’ of fighting in the war itself ].

As always, there is much to savour in the performances. One of these days, Aaron Monaghan will get to play a character that makes it intact to the end of the play without being laid low by  a bullet, disease or the belt of a spade. It occurred to me watching Eamon Morissey taking a sip of a pint onstage that he has probably drank more Guinness while acting than I have in pubs [he’d have made up most of his quota doing The Brother]. The staging and set design is very impressive even though they could probably do with a bigger stage space than the Town Hall allows. [The Irish Times review is here].

The rpoduction was somewhat overshadowed this week by the death of Mick Lally, who helped found Druid along with Hynes and Marie Mullen. Best known in the rest of Ireland for his portrayal of Miley Byrne in the RTE TV show Glenroe [and was due to tour shortly with his former Glenroe costar, Mary McEvoy in a production of John B Keane’s The Matchmaker ], here are tributes from the New York Times, the Irish Times and the Galway Advertiser here, here and here.

Given the link between the Abbey, O’Casey and Garry Hynes, the Advertiser also has a piece on an opportunity lost to have a Druid/Abbey co-production of the whole O’Casey oeuvre. On a more positive note, the New York Times has a very positive piece on the Dublin  theatre scene. It makes a very good point – theatre in Ireland is relatively cheap entertainment [yes – the arts are subsidized, but no more so than sport or other activities]. A ticket for the Town Hall is usually no more than 25 euro, and the Abbey’ dearest ticket is less than 40 euro. Compared to the West End or Broadway, it’s not too bad at all.