Garry Hynes and Druid Theatre Company ‘We’ll Be the Judges of That’: The Critical Reception of DruidSynge in the USA

José Lanters

DruidSynge, Druid Theatre Company’s production of the cycle of all six plays written by John Millington Synge during his brief lifetime, premiered at the Galway Arts Festival on 16 July 2005, and in subsequent months was performed in Dublin, Edinburgh, and a range of locations on the Aran island of Inis Meáin.²⁶⁴ The critical response to the event in all these locations was overwhelmingly positive, as evidenced by Karen Fricker’s summary, in the Autumn 2005 issue of Irish Theatre Magazine, of Irish and British newspaper reviews of DruidSynge:

It is ‘a triumph’, according to The Connaught Tribune. The Examiner gave it five stars. Emer O’Kelly in The Sunday Independent imagined it as a ‘chariot of dramatic fire’ and ‘a spinning sun in the theatrical heavens’. Michael Billington declared punningly in The Guardian that it is quite impossible to ‘have too much of a good Synge’. And Fintan O’Toole, in The Irish Times, proclaimed DruidSynge ‘one of the most important events in the history of Irish theatre’.²⁶⁵

While conceding that ‘[t]he level of ecstatic critical uniformity generated by DruidSynge doesn’t come along very often; nor, indeed, does a theatrical project as ambitious and impressive’, Fricker went on to ask a series of pointed questions about the nature of Druid’s project which, as its name suggests, focused as much on the theatre company as it did on the playwright and his works. Before the show went on the road, aspects of the production, publicity, and marketing were carefully packaged by Druid ‘to present a coherent, unified, and attractive theatrical product’, and Fricker felt that the entire experience was designed to make ‘high praise … a foregone conclusion’ (23-4). The formula worked in Britain and Ireland; Druid’s American tour of the Synge cycle in 2006, however, elicited a much more mixed response from audiences and reviewers: not only to the concept of DruidSynge, but also to the performances and the plays themselves.

DruidSynge premiered in the United States in June 2006 at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where it was the first stage show following the theatre’s opening festivities for its new venue on the banks of the Mississippi. The entire cycle of six plays was performed twice, on 27 June and 1 July, while on the three intervening nights the plays were presented in pairs: Riders to the Sea and Deirdre of the Sorrows on 28 June; The Tinker’s Wedding and The Well of the Saints on 29 June; and The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World on 30 June. From Minneapolis, the production moved to the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, where the entire cycle was performed seven times between 10-23 July in the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College. The Lincoln Center initially assumed it had the US premiere of DruidSynge, and information to that effect, provided by the festival, appeared in The New York Times, which subsequently had to print a rectification when it turned out that Joe Dowling had secured the premiere for the Guthrie – an unexpected order of events that led BroadwayWorld to print the tortuous headline, ‘Pre-Lincoln Center DruidSynge Hits St Paul’s Guthrie 6/27’.²⁶⁶ For the Druid Theatre Company, the five-week tour of the USA was the highlight of 2006. For theatre audiences and reviewers in Minneapolis and New York alike, the DruidSynge cycle was, in many ways, the conundrum of 2006.

Garry Hynes decided a long time ago to make touring central to Druid’s commercial and artistic policy. Irish commentators have tended to respond to Hynes’s enterprising spirit with a mixture of mild cynicism and grudging admiration. In 2005, Karen Fricker described the director as ‘a woman on a mission’ to bring the works of Synge to a larger audience, and pointed out that, because Synge’s achievement ‘is so difficult to classify, the unifying element – and the star player – in DruidSynge becomes Hynes herself’.²⁶⁷ In 2009, Deirdre Falvey ironically referred to Druid’s ‘barmy – if really impressive’ planned schedule that year of 335 performances in twenty-six venues in five countries as an attempt at ‘world domination’, and cited the enthusiastic response to this undertaking of Eugene Downes, chief executive of Culture Ireland, one of the funding agents for Druid’s international touring programme: ‘I can’t think of a better way to convince global audiences that Ireland is a world leader in creativity’. Minister for Arts Martin Cullen concurred: ‘Druid is now recognised by leading international festivals, venues and critics as a company of world stature’.²⁶⁸ Garry Hynes herself has described Druid’s ‘mammoth touring schedule’ as a ‘testament to the value for money the arts provide’.²⁶⁹

The commercial and political interest in Irish theatre on tour cannot be separated from the strategy prevalent during the Celtic Tiger era of selling ‘Irishness’ as a commodity in the international marketplace. One consequence of the success of this approach is that Irish plays are often ‘marketed or received internationally as corresponding to the Irish “brand”,’ suggests Patrick Lonergan.²⁷⁰ The limited range of references and conventions associated with that brand has become so well established that audiences expect to encounter them in every play. John Harrington notes with some dismay that the critical response to the Abbey Theatre’s production of The Playboy of the Western World during its 2004 Centenary Tour of the United States did not stray much beyond references to Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, the Celtic tenors, whiskey, Blarney, and the McCourt brothers.²⁷¹ While there certainly is validity in Lonergan’s caution that, ‘[j]ust as Irish critics should condemn stereotypical representations of Irishness on the global stage, we must also be alert to the dangers of essentializing the response of non-Irish audiences’,²⁷² such responses are nevertheless often predictable because in general, as the same author suggests elsewhere, the majority of contemporary theatre-goers, in the USA and Europe alike, ‘do not pay for something new or unfamiliar, but instead to have their presuppositions … confirmed’.²⁷³ American (and especially Irish-American) audiences often resist representations of Irishness that do not fall within their experience, expectations, or comfort zone. For that reason, the perceived rural nostalgia of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa worked on Broadway, but the contemporary urban mid-life angst of Wonderful Tennessee did not. Marina Carr’s characters and her representation of the Midlands often meet with hostility or incomprehension: after seeing a performance of Portia Coughlan in Pittsburgh in 2001, one audience member referred to the characters as ‘trash’ and dismissed them as not ‘my kind of Irish’.²⁷⁴

Much as in the case of the 2004 Abbey tour referred to above, American reviewers of DruidSynge frequently resorted to comparisons between Synge’s works and those of better-known figures from the Irish theatrical pantheon, or at least writers whose work had recently been seen on the New York stage, in an attempt to place the relatively unfamiliar playwright in a context that would make sense to their readers (and in some cases, one suspects, to themselves). The names of Samuel Beckett, Martin McDonagh, and Conor McPherson were most often invoked. The reviewer for The Philadelphia Inquirer spotted a connection between Synge’s The Well of the Saints and Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney.²⁷⁵ Only Deirdre of the Sorrows posed problems in this regard, and left critics at a loss for better-known Irish equivalents with which to compare Synge’s unfinished play: indeed, one frequently heard complaint was that Druid’s ‘brogue-free’ interpretation of Synge’s ‘Celtic’ play was not Irish enough. The phrase critics most often resorted to in relation to Deirdre was ‘Shakespearian’.

To a considerable extent, American theatre critics appeared to limit themselves in their responses to what they thought their audiences would know and expect. An interesting case in point is presented by two different articles written by the same critic in The New York Times: Charles Isherwood wrote a long piece about DruidSynge when the play cycle was first performed in Dublin in 2005,²⁷⁶ and then reviewed the production again in 2006 when it was staged as part of the New York Lincoln Center Festival.²⁷⁷ Although both articles are overwhelmingly positive, the difference in tone between them is striking. The piece written in Dublin in August 2005 describes an Irish event staged in Ireland, at a time when no American tour of DruidSynge had yet been arranged. The article written in 2006 was addressed to a New York audience and dealt with the same event taking place in that city. The earlier article is wide-ranging in its historical and cultural references, and almost academic in its tone and in the way it provides a context for the playwright, his oeuvre, and the production under review. It acknowledges the extent to which Garry Hynes’s ‘enterprising efforts’ have been instrumental in reviving interest in Synge’s life and career, and it gives a detailed assessment of each play and each performance. When Isherwood writes about the Lincoln Center Festival in 2006, he sounds like a different critic. In this later piece, his attitude towards Synge and the Synge cycle is markedly defensive in anticipation of the response of his fellow New Yorkers. Gone is the urbane, almost academic perspective, to be replaced by a more popular register that does not shy away from cultural clichés. Isherwood clearly feels that New Yorkers will need some persuading to go and see a Synge marathon in the middle of summer. If the alternatives are a trip to the beach or to Shea Stadium, do people really want to enter a dark theatre to spend the day ‘submerged in the little-known oeuvre of the Irish playwright J.M. Synge in its entirety? Don’t all jump at once, guys: tickets are still available!’ In his earlier article about the Dublin performance of DruidSynge, Isherwood had merely stated that experiencing all plays in one sitting is ‘vastly more illuminating’ than seeing them piecemeal on separate occasions. In the 2006 article, nothing is less self-evident. The prospect of sitting through all six plays, he admits to his readers, ‘seems daunting’ and rather like ‘the theatrical equivalent of a Super Big Gulp’. To convince his readers of the merit of such an endeavour, he resorts to a confession, from one New Yorker to another, about his own first encounter with the play cycle:

Intimidated myself when I travelled to Dublin last summer, I initially saw the plays in three separate programs, before returning, at the friendly urging of Ms Hynes, to see ‘DruidSynge’ in a one-day immersion. She was right to persuade me: the cycle was designed to be experienced as a single entity, and is more powerful seen whole. The Lincoln Center Festival has wisely – and bravely – programmed it in full-day instalments only.

In the article written in 2005, Isherwood praises the way the production brings the plays together, ‘with comedy and pathos emphasized in different measures as one play succeeds another. A vibrant physicality, an earthy, almost exaggerated realism and an idiomatic ear for Synge’s rich, folk-lyric language run through them all’. That folk-lyrical quality, discussed in 2005 as a self-evident aspect of Synge’s work, is presented in 2006 as a challenge. The production, Isherwood suggests in the later article, ‘brings alive a milieu that feels both intriguingly remote and utterly intimate, exotic in the eccentric syntax and unruly lyricism of its earthy dialogue – God bless the Irish! – but familiar in its consoling knowledge of the loneliness and despair that are the sorrowful scars of all humankind’. Synge’s dark yet life-affirming vision, he writes later, is expressed ‘in some of the most gorgeous rustic language you’ll ever hear onstage; language almost Shakespearian in its texture and vitality’. To which he adds as an aside: ‘(Don’t fret if you lose some of the dialogue, as you surely will, given the idiomatic delivery of the actors and the imperfect acoustics of the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at John Jay College; there’s plenty more on the way.)’

Isherwood also anticipates that New Yorkers will not be as accommodating of Hynes’s theatrically less effective Deirdre as he himself had been in 2005, when he saw ‘something aptly Syngean in the cycle concluding not with a bravura bang but with quiet letdown’. In 2006, the impatient New Yorker in him states: ‘After the intoxicating high of “Playboy”, it must be acknowledged that “Deirdre of the Sorrows” comes as a bit of a letdown and, to be entirely honest, a bit of a trial too’. Rather than place the play within the context of Synge’s oeuvre and Hynes’s vision, as he had done previously, Isherwood provides his readers with a more practical rationale for sticking it out to the bitter end: ‘it would be a shame – make that a disgrace – to leave before “Deirdre”, pleading fatigue or an early meeting. The plays are not performed with individual curtain calls. So only at the conclusion of the cycle do we have a chance to acknowledge the company’s extraordinary work’.

Charles Isherwood knows the New York public. He anticipates, correctly, that audiences will baulk at the length of the performance, its language, and the nature of the final play. Reviewers, however, can have a significant effect on audience response. When Fintan O’Toole saw The Beauty Queen of Leenane in New York in 1998 in a preview performance, before it had been reviewed, he noted that those attending ‘seemed deeply uncertain about how to respond to McDonagh’s blackly comic world’. When he saw the same production again, after reviewers had praised the comedy of the play, ‘the audience was laughing its head off in all the right places’.²⁷⁸ For Charles Isherwood to raise the issues that he does, even in a pre-emptive attempt to encourage audiences to look past them, has the inevitable effect of emphasizing that such issues exist. The reviewer thus perpetuates, even encourages exactly the response he is trying to forestall, and ends up condescending to his audience in the process. Isherwood’s own 2005 article in The New York Times on the Dublin run of DruidSynge indicates that there was no need for such a cautious approach.

All this is not to say that Isherwood was incorrect in his assumptions about how DruidSynge would be received in New York – or, indeed, in Minneapolis – because there were few noticeable differences between the responses to the production in these cities. American reviewers overwhelmingly focused on exactly the issues Isherwood had singled out, particularly the length of the performance, and Synge’s baroque language. At least a dozen reviewers mentioned the ‘authentic’ impenetrability of the performers’ accents. According to Bloomberg’s John Simon, ‘the brogue used is so thick it could blunt any knife trying to cut it, and left most of the audience chasing after comprehensible words like sparrows after sparse crumbs’.²⁷⁹ The New York Daily News complained that ‘some actors have accents so thick you might regret not knowing Gaelic’.²⁸⁰ Denis Staunton reported on the problem in The Irish Times:

At the end of Riders to the Sea, the first of six plays in DruidSynge, much of the audience at New York’s Gerald W. Lynch Theatre made a dash towards the cloakroom. They were not looking for their coats – in the scorching July heat, nobody had one – but queuing for earphones designed for the hard of hearing. By the end of the first interval all the earphones were sold out, as more than 600 New Yorkers strained to decipher Synge’s words delivered by Druid’s actors in the authentic voices of rural Ireland.²⁸¹

The Washington Times critic, who attended the first night of the Minneapolis run, observed that ‘more than one theatergoer could be heard grumbling in the lobby about the difficulty of understanding the actors’.²⁸² Ed Huyck praised the acoustics of the new Guthrie Theatre’s McGuire Proscenium stage while confessing in the same breath, seemingly without irony, that he had a problem understanding Synge’s language: ‘By Tuesday evening, a near-capacity audience filled the theatre for The Playboy of the Western World and Deirdre of the Sorrows … And while the thick, unfamiliar accents made much of the dialogue hard to understand, there was no difficulty in hearing the actors or seeing the action’.²⁸³ The muffled acoustics at the John Jay College theatre in New York City did contribute to the problem of audibility. A number of commentators wished for supertitles.

If Michael Billington’s declaration in The Guardian newspaper, that it is quite impossible to ‘have too much of a good Synge’, can be seen as representative of the British and Irish response to DruidSynge, the comment of the reviewer in The Philadelphia Inquirer, by contrast, that ‘all of Synge may be too much Synge’, can be said to reflect the general sentiment expressed by American critics.²⁸⁴ ‘Synge, Synge, Synge: six plays by one author in eight and a half hours? It might get anybody’s Irish up’, said the headline of a review in The Village Voice, whose author, Michael Feingold, argued that, as a way of enjoying Synge, ‘sitting through his entire oeuvre in one day is like a pie-eating contest as a way of enjoying dessert’.²⁸⁵ For The New York Post’s Frank Scheck, sitting through six works that were never meant to be seen one after the other was ‘an experience akin to cramming a graduate-level college course into one punishing day’.²⁸⁶ The Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout confessed, ‘Between the strain of understanding some of the actors and the sheer length of the performance, I found “DruidSynge” to be a bit of a slog’.²⁸⁷

Inevitably, given the almost unanimous description by US critics of DruidSynge as an endurance test, the cast members were praised as much for their stamina as for the quality of their performances. ‘If you think it’s hard to sit through all six of John Millington Synge’s plays, one after the other, … imagine what it’s like to perform them’, Barbara Hoffman wrote in The New York Post.²⁸⁸ In the same paper, Frank Scheck praised the actors for their ‘admirable versatility and endurance’.²⁸⁹ For several reviewers, any enjoyment of Synge’s work or even of the individual performances was eclipsed by the overwhelming sense that they were witnessing a project. ‘It felt like an event for an event’s sake’, Jeremy McCarter wrote in The New York Magazine: ‘not an especially shrewd way to savor great writing’.²⁹⁰ Michael Feingold put it more bluntly in The Village Voice: ‘Festivals are for pigs … DruidSynge has to have been a festival marketer’s idea of a good time in the theater’.²⁹¹ For him, the only redeeming feature of the event was Druid’s version of The Playboy. These negative statements about festivals can be seen as reactions to the phenomenon of event-driven theatre, where ‘audiences … consume the experience of having been to the play’ rather than engaging fully with the work or the performance.²⁹² For David Finkle, DruidSynge revealed as much about the concept as it did about the playwright:

Hynes begins each of the six pieces … with an economical tableau. When the opaque black scrim lifts, the director presents a lone figure holding a pose before beginning an action … While the lone figure is a striking convention, it is also a giveaway to a problem that occasionally mars DruidSynge. Hynes is essentially implying that we’re witnessing something iconic: and the unwanted (and unverbalized) response from some spectators may be, ‘We’ll be the judges of that’.²⁹³

A number of critics lacked a clear understanding of the socio-historical context of Synge’s characters: to call his plays ‘bleak, at times darkly comic tales of the downtrodden working class’,²⁹⁴ as the Washington Times critic did, was to evoke an inappropriate Marxist register; to call them ‘slice-of-life tales of common Irish folk’²⁹⁵ was to make them sound like an Irish version of the BBC radio soap opera ‘The Archers’ (‘An everyday story of country folk’). In the absence of a cultural context, most reviewers had no concept of the place of ‘tinkers’ in Irish society, nor was Hynes’s decision to represent the characters in The Tinker’s Wedding as contemporary Travellers well understood. Toby Zinman thought it a clever move, but for the wrong reasons, believing that it created ‘a portrait not of “folk” but of the provincial homeless’.²⁹⁶ Michael Kuchwara’s plot summary of the play, in which he describes Marie Mullen playing ‘a raucous, drunken hag whose indifferent son is being coralled into marriage by a slatternly younger woman’,²⁹⁷ ignored the ‘tinkers’ context altogether, as did Joe Dziemianowicz’s understanding of the play as being about ‘a rural couple and a greedy priest’.²⁹⁸

Garry Hynes, ‘whom many consider Ireland’s pre-eminent theatre director’, as The New York Times claimed when it profiled her in 2006,²⁹⁹ was often given special mention by American reviewers for her determination, innovative style, and risk-taking skills. The sometimes slightly sycophantic nature of critical responses to Druid and its Tony-winning director may have been what rubbed Bloomberg’s John Simon the wrong way. The unfairly negative tone of his review of the Lincoln Center event seems above all to have been a reaction to the sometimes uncritical reception of everything done by Druid in New York in the wake of the success of the Leenane Trilogy. Having dismissed the DruidSynge set as ‘dismally shabby’, the ‘rural Irish syntax’ as ‘monotonous’, the leading man as ‘both unattractive and undistinguished’, and Marie Mullen as ‘overexposed in five plays’, Simon writes of the nineteen actors that ‘maybe three or four belong on a metropolitan stage’. He then goes on to suggest that the show’s director ‘is not really major league despite her lofty reputation at home and abroad. She gets the job done, but without that inconspicuously convincing extra touch that marks the true master’.³⁰⁰

The most important issue for John Simon, however, was that ‘poor, tubercular Synge … did not grow into a significant dramatist’. To question Synge’s standing as a playwright is, of course, not a new critical departure, nor is it an American prerogative. Karen Fricker reports that, after the premiere of DruidSynge at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre, some jokers were heard to wonder ‘whether it was really necessary to go to such lengths to prove … that Synge wrote one great play’.³⁰¹ But while opinion varies about the quality of the playwright’s entire oeuvre, in Ireland, unlike in the USA, Synge has been an important and constant presence in the national conversation from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. Certainly, Druid’s 1982 Playboy rescued the play from overly pious interpretations: up to that point, Fintan O’Toole argues, ‘Synge existed in the worst kind of artistic limbo. He was a semi-official figure, paid too much empty homage as a national treasure to be interesting to the young and yet too neglected to be a real, serious presence in the culture’.³⁰² While Synge was perhaps misunderstood, he was not a forgotten figure, however. Before Garry Hynes put her stamp on his oeuvre, others, ranging from W.B. Yeats and James Joyce to Myles na Gopaleen and Charles Haughey, had appropriated the playwright for their own ends. Druid may have been responsible ‘for our fresh understanding of Synge’s genius’, as Colm Tóibín argues, but it did not have to rescue him from oblivion.³⁰³

In the United States, Synge does not have the iconic presence he has in Ireland, and DruidSynge consequently had a different impact on that side of the Atlantic. Knowledge of Synge’s work and reputation varied greatly from critic to critic, and there was little agreement on whether Synge’s works were overly familiar or totally unknown to American audiences. The Washington Times reviewer argued that Synge is, on the whole, ‘not well-known to American audiences’.³⁰⁴ Michael Feingold’s appraisal of DruidSynge as an exercise in ‘festival tedium’, on the other hand, stemmed in part from his sense that, apart from The Well of the Saints and Deirdre, ‘Synge’s four other plays are as familiar to me (or to anyone my age who’s done time in a drama school or college theater department) as corned beef is to cabbage’.³⁰⁵ According to Brooke Allen in The New Criterion, Hynes restored ‘fizz and kick’ to a group of plays that all in recent decades ‘have become classics, and rather musty ones at that, with the popular Playboy, in particular, subjected to countless college and amateur productions’.³⁰⁶ Terry Teachout argued in The Wall Street Journal that in America, Synge has ‘vanished into the pantheon of half-remembered masters – none of his plays has been seen on Broadway since 1971’. Since Synge’s work ‘is no longer familiar enough for Americans to have any preconceptions about it’, theatre-goers ‘take it for granted when Synge’s peasants are played not as poetry-spouting romantics but dirty barefoot louts’. Without the shock value, this reviewer felt that DruidSynge came across as a ‘mixed bag’ – good in parts perhaps, but decidedly uneven.³⁰⁷

Although there seems no question that the American tour of DruidSynge was successful, what Karen Fricker called ‘the level of ecstatic critical uniformity generated by DruidSynge’ in Ireland and the UK was not duplicated in the USA. If there was critical agreement about the event, it was that the length of the show taxed audience patience; that it was hard to understand; that the performances were admirable; and that, while Druid’s interpretation of The Playboy made the marathon (almost) worthwhile, Synge’s oeuvre came across as uneven. The spectrum of critical responses to DruidSynge was broad, ranging from ecstasy (Charles Isherwood, who called the event ‘the highlight of … my theatre-going life’³⁰⁸) to exhaustion (TimeOut’s reviewer, who felt that ‘Garry Hynes’s ambitious undertaking doesn’t accumulate enough dramatic force to energize its audience’³⁰⁹). On a scale from one emotional extreme to the other, most critics were slightly more bored than they were ecstatic.

In interviews with the media on both sides of the Atlantic, Garry Hynes made a point of stressing Synge’s modernity and relevance to the contemporary world. In a lengthy profile published in The New York Times the week before DruidSynge opened at the Lincoln Center Festival, Hynes explained that the experience of producing Synge’s Playboy in 1982 fuelled in her ‘an ambition to present Synge whole, as a radically modern writer – look at how he shaped Beckett, for instance’.³¹⁰ Randy Gener’s ‘Front and Center’ piece in American Theatre, entitled ‘Synge Our Contemporary’, also emphasized that Hynes’s ‘landmark staging of Synge’s complete works … seeks to restore the writer’s essential modernity’.³¹¹ While a number of reviewers echoed these sentiments and the name of Beckett was often invoked, Synge’s modernity was not, by and large, foregrounded in the press reports. The production’s ‘earthiness’ was much commented upon, given that Francis O’Connor’s set featured ‘a damp dirt floor as gritty as Synge’s characters’.³¹² David Cote thought that Synge’s lyricism conveyed ‘more texture than sense’, but nevertheless found DruidSynge impressive ‘for letting New Yorkers walk around in Synge country for a day. You may even find yourself looking down to see if you’ve got peat on your soles’.³¹³

Often what critics chose to focus upon read as a litany of the usual Irish stereotypes. For Toby Zinman, all the plays revolved around the same issues: ‘Lonesome people search for love; the beauties of the natural world are praised; the Catholic Church fails to provide; poverty is the general condition; drunkenness is the frequent condition; and violence is the normal recourse’.³¹⁴ The Washington Times saw ‘murders, betrayals, unfortunate accidents, beatings, drunken brawls, raging thunderstorms and other assorted bad luck and mayhem’.³¹⁵ The greater part of the critical responses to Druid’s 2006 US tour of the Synge cycle appeared to confirm Patrick Lonergan’s contention that the majority of contemporary theatre-goers do not wish to be unduly challenged, but rather seek confirmation of what they think they already know. DruidSynge in America revealed at least as much about American presuppositions about Irishness as it did about Druid’s interpretation of the plays of J.M. Synge.

Extract From: Irish Drama: Local and Global Perspectives, edited by Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan (2012)

Cross Reference: Hynes and Abbey, Carr, McDonagh

See Also: Playboys of the Western World – Production Histories, edited by Adrian Frazier