Theatrical Passports with Garry Hynes
In my role as Columns Editor for SDC Journal, I interviewed director Garry Hynes for the Theatrical Passports column, which highlights directors and choreographers ______. This was published in the Winter 2024 issue of the magazine.
Druid Theatre’s DruidO’Casey project included three Sean O’Casey plays—The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock—in marathon performances in New York City and Michigan in fall 2023. The plays, commonly known as the Dublin Trilogy, were originally written separately and staged individually in the 1920s at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Garry Hynes, Druid Theatre’s Co-Founder and Artistic Director and the director of DruidO’Casey, chose to stage them chronologically, in order of the dramatic events depicted—which span 1915–1922 and encompass Ireland’s Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War—rather than in the sequence that they were written. While audiences were able to see individual plays on separate nights, the project was conceived and designed as one marathon production, to be experienced as one play in three parts.
While O’Casey’s plays, now considered Irish classics, are often treated naturalistically, Druid’s production design leaned into the theatricality of both the marathon event and O’Casey’s language and sensibility. Hynes’s direction highlighted moments that felt heightened, performative, and sometimes surreal.
What did the decision to stage the plays in chronological order teach you about them?
I’ve done two O’Casey productions in my career before this, and one of the things that’s always worried me a bit about the plays is that unless one does a very modern production or a production totally removed from O’Casey’s ground plans or the period, then you’re forced back into this world of the Georgian tenement or the Georgian House. Knowledge of it has slipped away with time and as a result, the signaling has gone very wrong, because living in a distressed Georgian room would now be only the recourse of the wealthy. I think that because we were doing the three plays together, I felt able to take the decision to set them in a world that didn’t have to go for those set of references because we had a better chance of creating our own world.
A number of things became clear as we really got into rehearsals. Because the plays—to our knowledge, and as much as we could research—have never been seen together, one after the other, they tend to be swapped out one for the other, or certainly Juno and Plough do. And it became very clear as we worked on them how detailed O’Casey’s use of the historic detail of the time was, to distinguish each play. The detail of the historic events fed into the domestic events in a way that I just was in awe of: the craftsmanship of that. A suspicion that I had—that the plays were first, haunted plays, and second of all, plays that haunted each other—very much affected me in the making of it.
How did you and your design team approach the monumental task of designing three separate plays into one marathon production?
I knew that we were going to more or less follow O’Casey’s ground plan, and I knew we were going to use the profile of the costumes. So then it became really a question of what material to use, what was the nature of the room?
O’Casey is often called naturalistic, but more and more, I don’t find that word useful to describe his work. His work is so performative, so it started to make sense to consciously acknowledge its performativeness by using flats, stage weights, and those kinds of references.
The use of color in the costume pieces (by set and costume designer Francis O’Connor and co-costume designer Clíodhna Hallissey) was striking.
We knew that we weren’t going to go for documentary realism, and I talked a lot about the need to be able to completely embrace the performative aspects: the music hall, the broad comedy, the ability to go from tragedy one second—I mean, [the character of] Bessie Burgess [in Plough], also our Juno, has to die at the end of the play—but I didn’t want that to stop us from absolutely bringing the characters to vivid life. Some of that thinking influenced us to go for a color range that would not necessarily have been available at that time. Say something like Nora’s yellow dress [in Plough]. It’s stunning. She would not have worn something like that. But that’s part of the conscious sense of “this is going to be as theatrical as we think O’Casey was in creating these plays.”
O’Casey wrote such beautiful female characters, who you clearly also have such respect for.
When I think of it, all I can think of is O’Casey’s dedication, I think it’s in Plough, to his mother, where he says, “To the gay laugh of my mother at the gate of the grave.” which I think is rather beautiful and wonderful and sums it up... It’s a wonderful celebration.
I think some of his celebration of women comes from the fact that—I don’t know if he ever said it—but that he was so aware of the awfulness of individuals’ lives and that in some way the women, while they worked incredibly hard and were so poor and so on, they still had a central place in life as mothers of their children, as rearers of a family. Whereas the men, as victims of the capitalist economy, really had so little of anything to give them dignity or a sense of purpose. Somehow I tend to feel that O’Casey felt that too.
How do you think O’Casey’s legacy reverberates in modern Irish literature and theatre? Are there playwrights that you feel are working in O’Casey’s vein?
Let’s put it like this, I don’t think they are, unless they’ve been influenced by O’Casey. Writers who write about Dublin or write urban plays and/or use a Dublin accent can easily be referenced to O’Casey. But what O’Casey does—and working on the plays like this made feel this even more—his influences were extraordinary. He was very much influenced by the music hall. He was influenced by the Irish theatre that he saw, and then the use of music, the use of language—obviously J.M. Synge would’ve been an influence of some kind. Then there was his work at the Abbey Theatre and whatever sort of influence that was to work with those actors on a consistent basis. I just think what he came up with, which has become—people use the word “O’Casey-like” or whatever, which can seem very hackneyed—I think he was extraordinary, extraordinary as a writer.
Garry Hynes is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Druid Theatre in Ireland and was previously Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, Ireland’s national theatre. In 1998, she became the first woman to win the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, for Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
