On the final day of performances of this ambitious double bill, the sun shines in Galway: there are tourists aplenty, buskers, and people stuffing the cobbled medieval streets of the town centre, largely set apart from the near-omnipresent traffic jams. Inside, the matinee atmosphere is distinctly different. It is cooler, but also convivial, comprising Galwegian theatre fans who have grown up alongside Druid, and are here to pay respects to the company, both past and present. In the interval between stagings, a pro-Palestinian march walks through the old urban centre — a few chants resound, and the noise of the concerted pots and pans produces strange rhythms.
Druid, a touring theatre company, was set up in 1975 at the University of Galway, which was founded in 1845 as Queen’s College Galway. Part of the cultural revolution of 1970s Ireland — encompassing increased sexual and class equality, belated social democracy, and the site of various cultural revivals — a group of actors and directors sought to make something happen, to do it themselves. The company used local venues like church halls (the Jesuit Hall on Sea Road) and the backrooms of pubs (the Fo’castle on Dominick Street) as staging posts before settling on their permanent home, which was a gift from local hardware merchants, the McDonaghs. It is in this space where the double bill is being staged — originally the Druid Theatre, now the Mick Lally Theatre. (The name is a tribute to one of their founder members, who sadly passed. After his beginnings at Druid, Lally was best known for the character Miley Byrne in RTÉ soap opera Glenroe, an Irish cultural icon of the 1980s and 1990s, who went to number one in Ireland’s pop charts with a single called ‘The By-road to Glenroe’.)
Two of the theatre’s founders — Garry Hynes, a director, and Marie Mullen, an actor – are crucial to this 50th anniversary performance. Hynes’ direction of Macbeth takes the text’s sharp, claustrophobic intensity and rolls with it rhythmically, using the space to brilliant effect. Mullen, meanwhile, dominates the performance of Riders to the Sea, the voice of a heartbroken elderly matriarch, in a sad defiance against a world that has deprived her of all her sons. Coincidentally, I am seated next to a brilliant woman named Bernie, a dancer who experienced the early days of Druid. In the late 1970s, the group staged a range of works, including original writing, Anglo-Irish dramas aimed at the tourist market, as well as ‘classics’ of the form (e.g Brecht’s Threepenny Opera was the inaugural performance in the Mick Lally Theatre). The company’s emergence coincided with the beginnings of the Galway Arts Festival and Macnas, respectively, and concurrently, the agit-prop theatre work of Galway Theatre Workshop took place in the city — an initiative of playwright and activist Margaretta D’arcy, sometimes in collaboration with her husband John Arden.
A Play In Two Parts
There are significant crossovers in staging for the two plays: a life-size wooden figure of Christ on the cross overlooks the stage for both, to differing effects. In Riders to the Sea, he looms over the cast, functioning like a metaphysical weight on the already grief-stricken and overworked family of Aran islanders. In Macbeth, the symbol counters the antique supernatural references throughout the text. The crown of thorns on Christ’s head is then claimed as the spoil and marker of Macbeth’s bloody ‘achievement’ — committing regicide, eliminating his kinsmen, and presiding over a chaotic kingdom characterised by paranoia, the populace living downstream from his mad, whimsical violence. In effect, it is Macbeth’s grim repudiation of Christian ethics.
Macbeth’s idea of duty is only to himself (and possibly his family); he has no conception of the health of the nation as our common home. Rather, it is a vehicle only for egotistical self-aggrandisement, with madness, destruction, and war as the means. At the play’s close, the young King Malcolm (played by Druid debutante Emmet Farrell) ascends the cross to replace the crown, asserting something bigger than the whims of an individual. In contrast, Duncan (played by Seán Kearns) seems to carry a solemn contentment, a conception of familial and ritual piety —valuing tradition and the idea of a nation that binds people together, rather than against one another. Macbeth’s ambition enters here, encouraged by the apparition and prophecies of the Weird Sisters. He is characterised as one of many insecure men, suffering from PTSD, or what some in a different era might term ’battle hardened’. Haunted by violence, Macbeth’s tragedy is in the gradual entombment of his heart over the course of the play.
Marty Rea plays Macbeth as an especially neurotic, childish, obsessive and physically tortured being, who cannot turn off the tap after beginning his bloody pursuit of power. The Macbeth-Lady Macbeth dynamic is characterised by a turbulent energy — at times, lascivious and sexual, at others, in effect, abusive and domestically violent. There is love, sure, but a toxic one, characterised by the thin glee they show after the murder of Duncan. The age gap between Rea and Mullen as Lady Macbeth, while appearing curious to some, adds an element of unresolved Oedipal desire to their relationship. Marie Mullen, an icon of Irish theatre, plays Shakespeare’s greatest woman character with a virtuosic, whirlwind intensity: from henpecking and physically dominating her husband early on to committing to being a ‘power couple’ accomplice, attempting to keep up appearances at the dining table, and her eventual madness, as Macbeth forgets her very existence.
By this pivotal point in the play, Macbeth’s sleepless brain careens into a self-absorbed, hallucinatory nothingness. In Druid’s telling, he doesn’t even recognise his wife’s dead body lying on a table. After delivering the ‘out, brief candle’ monologue, Garry Hynes’ direction takes liberty with the text by showing Macbeth murdering his servant after the death of his wife. The cumulative effect is of a leadening weight, and underscores Macbeth’s departure from any semblance of reason into unmoored destructiveness. A different form of masculinity is evident in how Macduff receives the news of his family’s murder from Lennox, before Macduff haltingly demands to be let ‘grieve like a man’, words become impossible to do justice to the soldier’s deep feeling. There is also the profundity of Macduff’s repeating of the line, ‘he has no children’. He cannot inflict the same world-shattering pain on Macbeth in retaliation.
Humour in Riders to the Sea is non-existent; in Macbeth, it is scant. Of course, this is the way of it: we live in serious times. The pissed porter muses (also played by Seán Kearns, inverting the gravitas of his depiction of Duncan) on drink and sexual performance, and there are lame protestations from Malcolm to Macduff when the latter attempts to sway him back to kingly fidelity. The performance of Marty Rea as Macbeth — insecure, uneasy, and at times unhinged in his almost childish rage — at times brings a few awkward laughs, firmly at the tragic hero. The accumulated effect brought to my mind the phrase: ’an emotional punch’.
The staging of both plays is creative and effective, but minimal. The Mick Lally Theatre is a medieval structure. Dirt floors tie the locale of Macbeth with the modern-but-archaic setting of Riders to the Sea. A rusted iron table is common to both. It is used to lay dead bodies on, but also as a scene of work, as well as communal feasting. Overhead, strip lighting marks the shift in scenes in Macbeth. While the musical component is standard, the use of the acoustics is invigorating, with the space functioning like an instrument in itself. The credit must go to the sound designer. The setting of both plays is one of productive minimalism, consciously linking the Druid of now with the company that emerged in the mid-1970s.
It seems an appropriate time to consider these two plays today. They offer different depictions of life during wartime: one an economic war and the other, a civil war. Druid’s play is a vivid, powerful reminder of how seriously the company takes theatre and art as living forms — in light of the conflicts we experience today, and those that stain our common, global humanity.
But in today’s climate, will there be another Druid? Our clubs (the beloved Arus na Gael) and venues have closed, people have moved away, and property prices are continuing to bloat. Galway is still a ‘cultural city’, but it is unaffordable. Of course, these are not ideal conditions for unemployed artist types to spend time honing and developing their craft. The city needs help to be a truly liveable place again. We have lots of ideas and so, in many ways, it’s nearly there. Here’s to a healthy Druid, affordable towns, and the next artistic blast to come from the West of Ireland.