Garry Hynes in Conversation with Cathy Leeney

CL: Hiya Garry. Everybody knows that you founded the Druid Theatre Company in 1975 wasn’t it.

GH: That’s right.

CL: And so you’ve been one of the first professional theatre companies to come out of student work.

GH: Yes, I would imagine so. The more relevant fact though is that we were the first professional theatre company outside Dublin. That’s the marker.

CL: For you as a director what was it brought you into theatre in the first place – was there a kind of epiphany?

GH: I can’t say there was. If I look for certain events that were life changing, it’s only with hindsight that they are. So, I saw my first play when I was about ten or eleven or twelve. It was J.B. Keane’s Many Young Men of Twenty. It was performed by an amateur company in Monaghan, where I lived then. And to this day I do have an image of the final scene when they marched out the door singing “Many young men of twenty”. So somehow that did stick in my mind. At school as well, I got a play from somewhere, it must have been an old French’s edition, I can’t even remember really what it was about, but I know that I did it with a couple of kids. This was in primary school. There was no such thing as drama or anything like that.

CL: And was there anyone in your family…?

GH: No. No. My parents would occasionally go to things like the amateur drama festivals in Loughrea, in the way that Irish people who didn’t live in Dublin occasionally went to plays. And it was very much in the context of the amateur theatre. That’s where people got their theatre entertainment, at least when I was growing up, which was after the fit-ups and things like that. So I did do that, and then throughout the final years I was in secondary school, I was involved backstage in doing a play that was a non-curricular part of school work – not regarded as particularly important. I was really looking forward to the non-academic side of university life because if you weren’t terribly interested in sports, and I wasn’t, then you had no extra-curricular life in secondary school, and I was really looking forward to things like debating societies, the philosophy society, and just thought this all sounded fantastic and I couldn’t wait to get my teeth into it. And one of the first societies I joined was Dramasoc, probably just because it was the first stall inside the archway or whatever. I went along to meetings there and at one of the first meetings they divided people into those who wanted to direct and those who wanted to act. Of course there was a huge number of people who wanted to act and very few who wanted to direct. But I knew I wasn’t interested in acting. I wasn’t quite sure what directing was, but it sounded better. So.

CL: It’s extraordinary isn’t it?

GH: It is in a way, yes.

CL: And did you have an instinct of what a director did?

GH: I think I had an instinct towards organising, towards groups of people and the organisation of them – I think that was the instinct initially. It is curious, looking back on it, that I did do a play in circumstances where there was no such thing, in primary school. That is a bit odd alright.

CL: And you never wanted afterwards to anything else except direct?

GH: Absolutely not. No I can’t imagine what it’s like to walk on a stage. I have done once or twice, twenty-five years ago in circumstances where there was nobody else, and I hated every moment of it.

CL: And writing? You did some devised work with Druid.

GH: I did yeah, and writing was, I suppose, what I was about in cultural terms during my school years. I wrote a lot of poetry, I wrote some fiction. I was trying to write a book about sailing round the world. I was a complete magpie. I used to take out books that nobody else ever took out in the library and go from one crazy interest to another. I used the reference library in Galway an awful lot. Very few people used it. I used to love the smell of the books. A few years later, for different reasons, in Druid I became involved in writing a couple of pieces but it was really a response to the fact that we didn’t like any of the plays that were coming in to us; we didn’t have any real interest in them. This notion came up about doing a play that matched two of my interests, because history was a huge interest of mine, particularly Gaelic history. That was Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass, which is from an eighth or ninth century poem.

CL: Once you got started then were there other directors in the theatre that you had as mentors, or role models?

GH: No, because I didn’t see much theatre. The first sustained piece of theatre-going on my part was off-off-Broadway theatre in the early seventies in New York. I did see stuff there that really did influence me. Things like Tooth of Crime by Sam Sheperd, the original production of which I saw in the Performing Garage where the audience moved round with the actors. That had a huge impact on me. I saw Joe Chaikin. That really was where the influences started. I came back then and did a play by David Rabe called Sticks and Bones – I did that in university [NUI Galway]. I was auditor of Dramsoc in my second year. My three years in university were dominated by my activities in Dramsoc. I did not begin to have any involvement with the professional theatre community until the late seventies, early eighties.

CL: So you didn’t have mentors as such in the theatre. You invented the thing for yourself?

GH: Yeah. The biggest influences on me were my colleagues. Mick Lally and Marie Mullen and I forged a bond. I had worked with Marie all through college, but not Mick, who was then a teacher and acting in the Taibhdhearc [Irish language theatre in Galway]. In the first few months of Druid we realised we looked at the world in the same way, and we were going to go on with this.

CL: Looking over your work you seem to have been brilliant at choosing brilliant actors.

GH: I’ve been very lucky.

CL: Do you think that casting is the major talent of the director?

GH: I think if you don’t cast well you may as well go home. Casting is the single greatest interpretive act. That and creating the environment in collaboration with the designer. It’s such a fundamental relationship because you can have anything you like in your head but if it doesn’t translate into what’s there in front of you… Directing is really a response to a living thing in as much as theatre is a living thing; it’s the audience watching it at the time. So if that living thing is in some way not living for you, it’s like some trying to ride a bicycle with no arms or legs – you just can’t do it. I’ve been very fortunate. We in Druid have been very fortunate because there was a group of six or seven of us that came together in the early years of Druid and that was the creative force within Druid, these six or seven people, some resources, and a shared passion, that really was everything.

CL: You’ve been working with some younger actors in On Raftery’s Hill [Marina Carr] and it was a fascinating cast. Do you find it very different, now that you work so much on co-productions between Ireland and Britain for example, that wide openness, compared with working with a company of actors?

GH: Things have changed so hugely. The original group of people in Druid created that first ten years,[they were] the foundations of the company. That began to break up about the mid-eighties. Really when you’re working in the Irish theatre, Irish actors are your company. It’s a small group of people and everybody tends to know everybody else and when you’ve been twenty-five years in the theatre, and have worked in most of the theatres, you tend to know all the major people. I’ve been working outside Druid since 1984/85 and I’ve had the opportunity of getting to know other actors. For instance, I did a production in New York earlier this year [2001] and there wasn’t a single person in the entire team that I’d ever worked with before, which was very odd after twenty-five years and actually a wonderful experience. Some terrific actors. One of the frustrating things in the early years of Druid was the element of age. We were all in our twenties and thirties and we had no older actors. Older actors didn’t work with young companies then. The first time I worked with an established older actor I found it very frightening. The fact that it was Godfrey Quigley [laughs] had nothing to do with it, but to work with someone the right age for the role for the first time!

CL: Do you need actors who are willing to work in a particular way? Is that an issue?

GH: No. I don’t think that’s an issue. When you work with an actor you forge a personal relationship with them. And all personal relationships evolve and change and are significant or not in the form of all human relations. There are obvious things that are important to me as a director in relation to an actor, but they’re so obvious as to not be very interesting. There has to be a connection between what the actor is doing in themselves. The really exciting thing about an actor is not the skill – you take that as a given, that the skills are there, to a greater or lesser degree – what’s exciting is the match of that particular personality and the role. I think that mixture is the combination of the skills of the person, the response to the role, the signifiers, the sound, and voice, and tone, and look. There’s also the imagination of the actor in collision with the role. That’s what’s stunningly exiting really, and that’s what creates real theatre. For me it has to be rooted. It has to be connected. And when it comes to actors who are connected to what they’re doing in a real way, the impact of it is powerful. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life just stunned by what goes on in the rehearsal room. They’ve been some of the greatest moments as well as what happens on stage.

CL: It’s hard to describe what good acting is…

GH: Yes, Really good acting is transcendent.

CL: When it comes to playwrights, are there qualities that you look for?

GH: No. Anyone who reads plays for a living knows that ninety per cent of them are dead in your hands by page ten.

CL: Are you looking for some quality of passion?

GH: Oh, I think so. Theatre is an intensification of what we believe living to be. Passion is very much a given. I can’t enumerate the qualities of what I respond to in a play – that’s only to say what makes a good play: it’s dialogue, story and so on and so forth.

CL: When you say about the actor in collision with the role, does that have a naturalistic implication? Is it fundamentally a naturalistic interpretation of character that you’re interested in as a director?

GH: No, because one of the greatest collisions between the actor, who the actor was, and the role, was in something which was eventually a kind of artifice. I think all theatre is artifice; that’s very much a passion of mine at the moment. This was with Siobhan McKenna and Mommo [in Bailegangaire]. Tom Murphy writes this extraordinary play. It’s so hugely ambitious. He creates a plot, if you like, which is an old woman in a bed endlessly telling a story, and eventually the object of the play becomes her grand-daughters’ – that she’s going to finish this story. It’s so incredible. It’s the kind of thing – as an idea – if someone took it to a playwriting workshop they’d call the men in the white jackets. And then you have this actor who is first of all, as I discovered in rehearsal, an extraordinary actor. She is iconic in the theatre, and in relation to Ireland, and she’s playing this iconic role.

CL: Maud Gonne playing Cathleen Ni Houlihan territory?

GH: Yes, but then infused with the brilliance of the writing and the brilliance of the actor. It was extraordinary, and nothing to do with naturalism, neither the play, nor the actor, nor the eventual performance, nor the perception of it by the audience. That’s not naturalism at all.

CL: I remember with your production of Conversations on a Homecoming[1985]. There was a naturalistic impact on the audience – they were in that pub with the characters. And yet the musicality of the rhythms you and the actors created…

GH: To create something natural on stage is as boring as watching paint dry. It’s not about naturalism, it’s about intensification. Conversations is naturalistic and behaviour–oriented. It’s in real time, in a pub, a group of people talking, no changes, no big things happening, just simply people talking. In fact, it’s the most extraordinary condensation. It’s not naturalism at all. Someone who doesn’t understand English could nearly direct a Tom Murphy play in English because if you obey the writing in terms of the sound and shape and feel of it, you will get at the play. It’s in there. It’s actually in the form of the writing as well as in the content of the writing. It’s a wonderful play and I had a wonderful cast. It’s one of my benchmark productions. Indeed within all of us, all of us carry something of ourselves in that play.

CL: In your production of Big Maggie at the Abbey [2000] you seemed to be taking the play in a very different direction, resisting the idea of the play as a slice of Kerry life, and bringing it into something huge and symbolic.

GH: Yes, it’s right to say the production was pulling back from that up-close, ‘slice of life’ stuff. I don’t believe that at all. I think Keane is one of the least naturalistic writers we have. I’d a long time to think about Keane. That was the first play of his I ever did, and I’d wanted to do it. I’d like to do more in fact. Some of the responses that you saw in Big Maggie were responses to the play being one thing when it was done in 1969 [when written]; it’s quite another thing done in 2001. So, for instance, a small specific issue was, if you populated the set with the objects that Maggie would have for sale in that shop, you would have walked into any pub anywhere in Galway now because the Bird’s Custard, the Irel Coffee, it’s all become iconic. It’s all becoming something tourists walk into. It’s all become part of this heritage business. No sooner have we something than we’re reproducing it as art. Everyone in this country is involved in theatre. Everyone is out there selling a version of ourselves. [gesture towards Shop St. ] I don’t know what the real people are doing behind it.

CL: Making computers probably?

GH: Exactly. So that poses a problem straight away. If you go for some sort of realism you’re suddenly part of the heritage industry. You’d find the stuff shipped off the Abbey stage down to Kerry or somewhere. I went to a bar museum in Kerry a few weeks ago. I never saw anything like it in my whole life! It seems to me in Big Maggie, and in The Field as well, there’s an incredible sparseness. He is just not going to make anything easy for us. He just sets it up: boom, buried a bastard, boom, I’m taking over, boom, I’ve a problem with this one, boom, I’ve a problem with that one. There’s no decoration, there’s no support, no softness, no lines. It’s just relentless and it was the sense of relentlessness I was trying to get at. Watching the production and its revival [in 2001] I had further thoughts about it that go beyond what was there.

CL: Did you consider using the coda that Keane wrote for the Abbey production in 1988?

GH: No. It was a wonderful production. I loved it. But as soon as the coda started I stopped. It meant nothing to me. We used most of Keane’s original text as well, [rather than the edited version performed in 1988].

CL: Regarding your earlier work how do you look at it?

GH: I don’t know how to look at it. I’ve no idea what the meaning is now. I’m sure if I were to go to my earlier productions I would cringe and creep out of the hall. It’s impossible to judge what that work was like.

CL: What are the things you are fond of or proud of?

GH: In my own development as a director, the discovery of Synge as a writer was an epiphany, was one of the shock things – completely influenced everything I’ve done since, and continues to. The discovery [we made in 1975] that this was an extraordinary play, the commitment that all of us made, Marie, Mick and myself, that if we last, we will do this again. Which we did do in 1977 and started to begin to get at it.

CL: This was Playboy?

GH: We did it as one of our first productions in 1975 because we wanted to draw an audience. Halfway through we thought this is absolutely fantastic. And we said we’d do it again, which we did in 1977 in the Forecastle. That’s the production I’d like to go back and see. And we did it again in the early 80s. And we did other work of Synge’s. So Synge has been a constant companion. I haven’t done any of Synge’s work recently, and am about to embark now on this plan to do all of them. That’s the major thing for me for the next few years. And then there are plays that are milestones in the development of the company. There was the Boucicault work, which I enjoyed enormously.

CL: Would you like to do Boucicault again?

GH: Yes. I love Boucicault. I love the showmanship. There’s something quite extraordinary about this actor-manager – I’d love to do something about the whole world Boucicault portrayed. And also, the sense of Boucicault as a grandfather of the modern Irish drama movement is something I’m very conscious of. The line from Boucicault to Synge to Beckett is just fantastic.

CL: And into O’Casey too?

GH: Yes, O’Casey too, but I’m hopping off the big stones, d’you know what I mean. Just to see something as pure and extraordinary as the Beckett landscape and see that there’s a direct track through – that’s incredible. Although, any time I’ve done a Beckett play, I’ve done it badly. So. I think it’s the inner landscape for me of Beckett, rather than production thing itself.

CL: What does it mean to you have been awarded honorary degrees [from the NCEA and NIU Galway] and the Tony Award?

GH: It’s nice, I’m proud of the degrees, It’s an acknowledgement of some kind. It’s nice for other people, for my parents. The Tony Award [for Best Direction, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, 1998] was great, no question.

CL: You were the first woman director to win one?

GH: Yes. I remember when I was nominated, people began to talk about the fact that no woman had won it. For weeks I said, “you’ve got to be wrong. These awards are nearly fifty years old”. But in fact that was the case and I think it’s something to do with the fact that Tony awards are for Broadway theatre, a theatre which has always been driven by money, rather than art, as such. In spite of the fact that women in the U.S. have had an influence over and above the influence of women in Irish or British theatre. They founded the regional theatre movement in America. The great lighting and set designers in the early part of the twentieth century were women.

CL: I suppose whether you like it or not, you’re a role model for women in theatre. How do you feel about that?

GH: I don’t think about it. I meet people from time to time and they say, from their point of view, they’re seeing me as somebody who’s led a certain kind of life which offers some sort of ability to imagine to other people. But I’m not conscious of it myself, except where I come up against it from time to time.

CL: You know how the world of theatre works by networking – are you conscious of operating differently as a woman or of creating new kinds of networking?

GH: No, not at all. My life is effectively about the theatre, about the entertainment industry generally. The way I socialise tends to be very ordinary and informal, and networking as such is not something I particularly…

CL: So you keep your professional life separate?

GH: No, I wouldn’t say that. I have a life and to me it’s a very ordinary life. It might look extraordinary from the outside. To me it’s about friendship and a sense of community with a range of people and all of us have grown up in the theatre in the same time, and it’s just very ordinary. There is a response to women, and to what has been achieved there, and the sense that we are a generation – I mean my mother is only twenty-one years older than me, yet my life and her life could not be more different. So I am aware of that. But that comes out of a social, cultural thing of middle-class access – I grew up with an expectation that I was going to university and so on. That gap – it’s just so different. I think an important influence for me was when I was born. I was born in 1953. And as a result, this came out in all the work with Druid. I have an incredibly strong sense of that rural, pre-city, pre-Lemass era kind of life. I was born in a small town in Roscommon. So I have a real sense of it. It wasn’t really direct because it was just the first seven to ten years of my life, so it’s a set of images and feelings. I’m very informed by and influenced by what I would have been told as I grew up. So having listened to that without being part of it, I think that has been very much a creative driving force in a lot of work I’ve done, including things like Big Maggie. The sense of understanding that [world] in some way, of knowing it from the inside and yet being completely distant from it, as my own life has been, that has been a very big influence.

CL: Your work has been an interesting mixture of looking at canonical plays, and then working with new writers as well. Is there anything you’d like to say about the differences between those processes?

GH: In terms of my own development, working with the canon was certainly something I wanted to do, and then gradually as you’ve done that quite a bit, you begin to go on to something new. I wanted desperately to work with new writers. I want to work with plays that have never been done because it is very different, and because of the sense of collegiality and companionship with the writer; it’s a great creative relationship. Well, it has been. It was fortunate for me that the first writer I made a long-term relationship with was one of the best writers of twentieth century theatre, Tom Murphy. That was very important. The process is very different.

CL: When you saw Martin McDonagh’s work first what was it that jumped out at you?

GH: Well, when I read it first it was obvious that here was a man who could certainly write dialogue and certainly tell a story. That was clear. What was absolutely bewildering was what on earth these pieces were? Who wrote them? My mental image was of a fifty-year-old living out in Connemara. I couldn’t imagine. I knew that couldn’t be true as well. Then I saw his address in London, and talking to him on the phone for the first time realising that he was this twenty-four year old, south Londoner, pure bred with Irish parents. And suddenly it did start to make sense. But trying to make these plays work! I mean it was a long time since I had seriously read a play by a new writer that was set in a kitchen, with a sacred heart lamp and all the paraphernalia, and that opens with an old mother in a rocking chair, sparring with her forty year old virginal daughter. If Martin McDonagh had taken this idea to a writing workshop, he’d have been told “We don’t write plays like that anymore”. It was how to make these things work. There’s this issue about Martin and authenticity – the response that his is not Irish life now and it’s not Connemara life. Of course it isn’t. It’s an artifice. It’s not authentic. It’s not meant to be. It’s a complete creation, and in that sense it’s fascinating. The big challenge for us in doing Beauty Queen for the first time, well first of all the choice of the first play [to produce], because I read two plays initially, and then after I’d met Martin, read a third, and then optioned all three. At the time, the board were: “What! Three plays from a new writer who’s never been produced!” There was the decision on which to do first, and then, the decision on how to make this work. How you sit down with this dialogue and this situation and ask the audience to believe in it. How do we believe in it? How do we back it up? And that was fun.

CL: So you are asking people to believe in it in a way, not to take it as an artifice?

GH: No, no, I’m asking people to believe in it for the moment they’re watching it. They never stop being watchers, and we never stop being performers. We all know we’re in the same room. But we’ve done something much more exciting than being sucked into real life, what we’ve done is, we’ve agreed – I mean I always think it’s incredible that a group of people actually pay to go into a room which they can’t get out of very easily, and another group of people force their imaginations on them. It’s incredibly powerful and that’s what we’ve all agreed, “We’ll sit quietly here, and you’ll do this and we’ll pay you”. It’s fantastic. Everybody knows it’s artificial. Even if people think or say “Oh God it was so marvellous. I felt I was there”, it’s still an imagined thing. It’s the imagination. That is the really powerful thing in theatre. But you’re asking them to find it credible to the degree, you know, that they won’t respond with: “Ah come on! This is Synge-song type dialogue. Come on, who’s he fooling?”

CL: With Marina Carr’s work, was that a very different kind of experience?

GH: Yes, it is very different. Marina is one of those people who confidently walks down a road that other people are saying “Don’t even think of going there”. And Marina says “Of course. Let’s go. Of course I’m going there”. She’s an extraordinary, beautiful, young, Irish woman, with extraordinary intelligence and this incredible darkness.

CL: Is this darkness, that is also in McDonagh’s work, is it characteristic of the end of the 1990s and the twenty-first century in Ireland? Is it all tied in with the economic boom, with the notion of the performance of Irishness?

GH: I think it’s characteristic culturally. I’m not so sure that it’s of the 1990s. I think it’s always been around. If you look at a play like Lovers’ Meeting [T.C. Murray], which was the last play I did for Druid before I went to the Abbey; that is a play of extraordinary darkness as well. Playboy is too, and all of Synge’s work is teetering on the verge of the abyss.

CL: And the cruelty? Do you see that as part of the Irish tradition in the same way?

GH: I’m not quoting Marina, and it’s out of context, but I imagine she may have said; “We’re all pagans, we’re all pagans really. We’re all awful and terrible. There’s a veneer of humanity and it is just skin deep. It can blow up in your face immediately if it’s put under any pressure”. That articulates something I feel, and Marina certainly feels it, and I think many other writers would not disagree with that. It seems to me a truism. It’s what a lot of people believe. If you look at The Lonesome West – that McDonagh can make them argue violently over a packet of Tayto as if it’s a hostage in some cowboy film! That’s something about levels of human darkness.

CL: You’ve been very instrumental in developing co-productions between Ireland and the UK, and the US. Is that an important change in Irish theatre?

GH: It is an important change. It’s part of globalisation. From Druid’s point of view we really didn’t get any recognition from Dublin until we went and got fringe firsts in Edinburgh. That was very much why we went to Edinburgh as well. From then on, with Druid, it’s always a search for new audiences. Now it’s become so much easier to define your Irishness out of the fact that you don’t actually have to be on the island all the time to be Irish. I mean, if a play is successful here – as somebody said, “I’m waiting for the Irish play that doesn’t transfer to the west end or wherever”. I think the fact that Irish theatre has been so celebrated internationally is important of course, and it’s been great for the Irish theatre. Every person, regardless of the degree of their involvement in productions that have gone elsewhere, is part of what made that happen. So yes, I do think that’s important.

CL: Is there a downside to that market at all, especially that market in the United States?

GH: I don’t know if there’s a downside other than the degree to which you think it’s important. From our point of view it’s great to get a Tony Award, but it’s absolutely irrelevant really. It’s great for people to have a success on Broadway, but other than the benefits that it brings in terms of acclaim and easier access to things and so on, other than that it’s not at all relevant to what’s going to be happening.

CL: It doesn’t influence your artistic choices then?

GH: I don’t think it does, other than connecting up with other cultures and connecting with other actors, so that things happen that wouldn’t have otherwise. But that’s life.

CL: That question of what it is to be Irish has to change hugely, when you look around you, do you think?

GH: From a wider cultural perspective, and social perspective, I’m deeply concerned with what’s happening, because I don’t know what we’re losing but I do think we’re losing a lot. This town now seems to be a set for a version of Irishness. That’s what it is. There’s a gap between that and what we are. I don’t know what’s happening in that gap and I don’t know how wide that gap is. But it’s worrying. It worries me that the centre of Galway is effectively a tourist centre. It’s not a living centre of a community. It’s brought great wealth, great opportunity, but it seems to me we haven’t even begun to think of the consequences of all this, and it’s getting later and later to be able to do anything about it. I do have great concerns. The degree to which it’s my age – late forties, early fifties – the degree to which I’m beginning to think of something in the past as being better than something now… I’ve no idea.

CL: It’s hard to tease out those different influences?

GH: It is yeah.

CL: You mentioned workshopping a couple of times in such a way that makes me think you don’t see it as a very useful process?

GH: I’ve always been a little shy of the workshop process as absolutely being a valid way into things because, eventually in theatre, you have to get out there and do it in front of a group of people, and that puts a context on everything that’s wholly different. When I don’t have that live thing that goes out there, I’m not so sure the experience is the same. So I’m a little chary of it. Despite that fact, for new work, or for any work, to put a bunch of actors into a room, and hear it aloud, whatever it is, yes of course, that’s valuable and that helps.

CL: Do you think the role of the dramaturg or script editor is one that needs more attention?

GH: Yes, I think the dramaturg can be a great resource, within the rehearsal room, or to a production. As a director, to have a dramaturg who’s coming at the script from a perspective that has nothing to do with the practicalities and has to do with the examination of the text in a wider context. And to say, for example, “This text fits into this context of prose writing”, and so on, that’s a resource I would dearly like to work with.

CL: Looking at the National Theatre now, how do you think its role might change in relation to what we’ve been saying about the extraordinary changes in Ireland? Do you see a change there in the way that the Abbey represents the country?

GH: If you think it represents the country, because I never thought that, whether I was Artistic Director or not. I’ve always thought that the stage of the Abbey is one of the hottest stages in the world, because of the link between it and the growth of the country. I think that the work that goes on on that stage has to constantly use that [quality] for the wonderful resource that it is.

CL: Do you mean an awareness, a political [in the broadest sense] awareness?

GH: Yes. It’s an incredible connection. American theatre would kill for that. It doesn’t have it and can’t have it. That’s the Abbey’s single most important thing. It has two theatres to service. It has to produce something between twelve and twenty productions per year. That’s a powerful obligation and it’s a powerful challenge as well. It does have to keep changing and evolving. As the whole notion of what it is to be Irish becomes more fragmented, the danger to the National Theatre is that it becomes hostage to one or other version of being Irish. It has to keep being multiple and complex, and that’s hard. That’s hard when you’re running a theatrical institution. It presents challenges to everybody, including the board. The person who meets the challenge head on is the Artistic Director, but the challenge is to the Board and the institution as a whole.

CL: What do you think of the idea of moving the Abbey from its current site to the south of the river?

GH: My first response to that is that the current building is completely insufficient to almost everything, so therefore has to change. So that’s a given. What has to drive the idea is to provide a terrifically exciting theatre, but theatres exist within communities, and my concern about the move south-side would be that there’s no community there, and nobody can know for certain what kind of community will grow up there. There is a community here [in Galway]. It may be, at the moment, in a very difficult context, but it’s a context nonetheless. I think a theatre like the Abbey has got to stay in a living space, where there’s multi-dimensional life going on around it. That would be my worry about a move south-side, that it would become a cultural breeze block.

CL: What’s your vision of the future of Druid as a company?

GH: Druid’s first runs were part of the personal drive on the part of a group of individuals. Then, in a very real sense, it was providing theatre entertainment for the people of Galway, who had none, only occasional visits from the Irish Theatre Company, and the amateur drama movement, which was never very big in Galway. So, gradually we grew up with the community; we did our growing up together and changing together. Now, Galway people are swamped by choice. I remember when the [Galway] Advertiser was two to four pages; now it’s thirty to forty pages and every single one of them yelling about something that’s on tonight that you should come to. Therefore, I think the future of Druid is very different. What circumstance and fortune have brought us to a situation where we are a mature theatre institution now, we’re twenty six or twenty seven years old. We’re in a fairly unique context. We’re not a building, in the sense that we don’t have to keep a theatre open. We have Chapel Lane [in Galway] which is our creative home. We have the ability to do things that other people can’t do. What we have to do is find the uniqueness within ourselves and then be faithful to that. So, it’s things like The Leenane Trilogy would be what I think the future is. It’s about theatre not as “What’s on tonight?”, but as what theatre can be. It’s about being able to gather a group of people together and do things that are simply not possible if you have to have a new play on every six weeks. Also, I think culturally we’re unique. The theatre business is national. We’re all a big group of people who live in Dublin, Galway, anywhere, but the history [of Druid], and the connection with the west of Ireland is a very important part of what we are. Druid has to justify itself on the basis of what’s on now, not on what we did. So I think something like the Synge project is precisely what Druid should be doing. Regardless of whether it succeeds or not, for me it’s theatre as an event that we need to restore to audiences. People always respond to an event. We have to feel [a sense of] “Right now this is absolutely where we want to be”. You have that sense of “We’re both alive in this time and place”, that moment is being made intense, not that you’re sitting there as some sort of a receiver of something that’s going to happen regardless of your involvement. The kind of responses and growth that you get when you put a group of people together over a period of time on a project that all of them feel is beyond them, can be very exciting.

CL: That sounds like the kind of quality of experience that most people would aim for in their lives, no matter what work they do. As somebody who has to earn your living, how does the money aspect mesh with that?

GH: Well, it doesn’t, you know. [laughs] It just doesn’t. In terms of provision, it’s one thing to be doing plays when you come out of college. It’ quite another thing when you’re in your late forties, and to begin to realise retirement is officially twenty years away. The fact that theatre continues to be incredibly underfunded. It is an absolute disgrace that culture, which has unquestionably been one of the driving energies of prosperity in this town in particular, but in Ireland generally, – and there isn’t a politician in the country that’s not going to use that cultural beacon – “we’re great”, – and then we actually reward those people so badly. So you have actors, directors, people who’ve made an extraordinary contribution, who are living hand-to-mouth. They’re probably earning less than they did in their twenties and thirties. They’ve given a lifetime to the theatre. It’s so wrong. We should be insisting on some sort of pension process, and some way of looking after the people who have helped to create this wealth. I think that’s very fundamental.

CL: Do you have to choose to do certain work because of financial pressure?

GH: No, I don’t. I’m more fortunate than many others. I’ve been artistic director of an organisation almost all my life. While the money is poor compared to what I might be earning had I gone into another job, or if I were teaching or something, it has always been there for me. I’ve had a regular salary. That’s not the experience of most of my colleagues. For a lot of people in theatre it’s almost impossible for them to make any provision for the future. A pension is a really important part of a financial package for people in almost every other profession and it doesn’t even exist [in theatre]. Nobody even thinks to talk about it not existing in the arts. How are actors supposed to live when they can no longer work? It’s so wrong.

CL: Have you ever been tempted to do an Anthony Minghella, and make a film?

GH: Yes, I’d love to make a film. But I’ve been talking about it for so long at this stage, I don’t know. But yes, I still think I will, in some way, but how or why or what would it be…?

CL: For your own future what’s you fantasy project?

GH: I’m hoping that we’re about to do that, with the Synge cycle. That is a fantasy project. I had a notion at one time of leaving Druid and forming a Synge company for two years. It’s been possible to conceive of that as a dream project within Druid.

[Otherwise] there are notions in my head. There are things I want to express and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to express them, or through what play. There’s a sense of wanting to say something. I don’t quite know what it is. It’s revolving round in my head at the moment. What happens is there is a set of things in there, and you come across a script and you suddenly get a whiff of it again, and it’s not quite that, it’s not quite that. You become a lot more choosy really about what you do and what you don’t do. Doing the Synge project is very important in terms of that. There are other things as well. I suppose I hope that what I do over the next five years will give me access to understand what [those other things] are.

CL: Are you going to do that very early play of Synge’s When the Moon Has Set?

GH: That’s one of the challenges. The play is generally regarded as being very unsatisfactory, and it’s hard to believe that the play was written so close to when Synge was writing a play like Riders to the Sea. Certainly we will have an approach to it. It’s not going to be a matter of just reading it, or publishing it. We will have an approach, but quite what that approach will be I don’t know, but it will be within the context of all of the plays.

CL: And are you just doing the plays? Or will you look at Synge’s other work?

GH: Oh yes, we will absolutely. It’s a whole celebration of Synge’s life and of his influence. One of the things people really respond to is how small the canon of Synge’s work is. It’s eight hours of drama. Eight hours of drama is all he wrote. He’s still the dominant figure of twentieth century Irish dramatic literature, and a dominant figure in world dramatic literature. That’s the frightening thing about doing this cycle. He influenced, effectively, everybody. I think doing the cycle will generate other kinds of responses in other media that will become part of the eventual performances in 2003. Doing the cycle is about the thing itself, but it’s about its impact as well. We’ll be premiering the cycle in 2003. There’ll be an element of it in 2002 and then the full cycle of performances in 2003.

CL: What’s your ideal audience for the cycle?

GH: Everyone. That’s what it will be about. One of the theatre challenges is the connection with the landscape, both mental and geographical. With Playboy, one of the outstanding experiences was performing it on Inis Meain. One of the most important things for Druid has been the touring – playing to audiences outside the major urban centres. And that will very much inform the Synge work as well. What we’re hoping is that the performances will be a set of responses to different circumstances: to performing on Inis Meain, where we’ll premiere the entire cycle, and in Galway, and in other parts of Ireland associated with Synge, like Mayo and Wicklow, and internationally. So what I’m hoping is that we’ll find a way for it to be a kind of communal experience, so that we’re not just making this little box, and putting our production in and packing it in tight, and then we just plonk it down in Aran, plonk it down in America, but that it will be more protean than that.

CL: Do you feel a bit haunted by Synge?

GH: Yeah.

CL: I see him over your shoulder.

GH: [looking behind her] Where is he? That’s a very good description. That’s exactly the way I feel about it. I fantasise about him coming back to life. There’s such an extraordinary strong sense of a person in all of his work. I’ve an incredible sense of him. I remember – it’s the power of the imagination – but I remember when we were doing Playboy on Inis Meain – we tried to get out on a boat all that day and had to turn back and turn back and turn back. We eventually got out hours late and couldn’t unload the set. We just unloaded the door, and some black drapes. And Radio na Gealteachta announced the performance was postponed for two hours because we weren’t ready until then. And we were finally doing it with orange boxes, drapes, and two old-fashioned lights, and candles. There was darkness all around the hall by that time and we saw people coming with flashlights because there’s no public lighting – we saw these pins of light coming. And then inside, and the hot buzz of the play being done. It was extraordinary when the door opened and Shawn Keogh stuck his head inside at his first entrance, you could see the door was covered in wet that looked like rain, but was actually sea spray being lashed to the deck of a boat on the way out [from Galway]. The only place I could be to watch it was literally outside the door of the hall, so with the play going on inside, and the massive stillness outside – I saw John Synge that night. Definitely. [laughter]

Extract From: Theatre Talk: Voices of Irish Theatre Practitioners, edited by Lilian Chambers, Ger Fitzgibbon and Eamonn Jordan (2002)

Cross Reference: Hynes and Abbey, Synge, Carr, McDonagh

See Also: Radical Contemporary Theatre Practices By Women In Ireland, edited by Miriam Haughton and Mária Kurdi and Performing Feminisms in Contemporary Ireland, edited by Lisa Fitzpatrick, and Playboys of the Western World – Production Histories, edited by Adrian Frazier