Wrestling for O'Casey's legacy

Druid director Garry Hynes wanted to stage an O'Casey cycle in the vein of DruidSynge, but when she approached the Abbey, she found they got there first with the rights. Now a war of words is raging between two theatre titans.

FOR GARRY HYNES, 2008 will be defined by two projects. One is the resurrection of a project that didn't happen in the recent past. The other is the death of a project that was meant to shape the immediate future of her Druid company. While she is full of enthusiasm about a season that will be made up of 107 performances in Ireland, England, Scotland and North America, that zest does not disguise a sharp anger, directed above all at the only other company she has run in her 32 years in the business - the Abbey.

Over the last decade, the core of Hynes's work with Druid has been the idea of creating a company to work on a multi-play, multi-annual exploration of a single body of work. The idea took shape with Martin McDonagh's Leenane Trilogyand continued with the internationally acclaimed DruidSynge (The appetite for that project in the US will be partly satisfied by a tour of The Playboy of the Western Worldand The Shadow of the Glenbeginning in October.) For Hynes, this way of working has become essential: "The ability to form professional relationships that go beyond simply the next job fundamentally alters the creative process. It deepens it. And it makes it better."

Druid's next big project was conceived in the context of the approach of the centenary of the 1916 Rising. Hynes put a great deal of her time and thought into the idea of a cycle made up of Sean O'Casey's four Dublin plays, The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars, Juno and the Paycockand The Silver Tassie. "It was very much to do with the fact that there is no other example of a revolution being documented on such an epic scale so close to the events. To me it was one of those stunningly simple ideas that is so obvious that you can't believe it hasn't been done before, that you would be able to narrate the events of the country and the world from 1914 through to 1924."

According to Hynes, she approached the Abbey's director Fiach MacConghail in 2006 with the idea of undertaking this project as a co-production. "I approached the Abbey and suggested that this would make an ideal co-production project. The Abbey has resources beyond what we had, and a relationship with the writer. Druid had the expertise and the proven ability to deliver on major projects of this kind and it seemed to me that that was an ideal and potentially very exciting co-production for the two organisations. It seemed to make complete sense to me, but the Abbey rejected the proposal."

Just before Christmas 2007, according to Hynes, she discovered that the Abbey had in fact gone much further. Druid, which had been in discussion with the O'Casey estate on the rights to the plays, was told quite suddenly that the Abbey had taken the rights to both The Ploughand Juno, making the Druid project impossible.

"We were gazumped by the Abbey. It was pretty disturbing. We were in the middle of negotiation. We were very much taken by surprise to find that the Abbey had purchased the rights to two of the plays, therefore making our plans untenable. And they had done that in the full knowledge of our plans." Abbey director Fiach MacConghail accepts that he had some discussion with Hynes on the O'Casey project, but strongly rejects any suggestion that Druid was "gazumped" (see panel). What is clear, though, is that a potentially very significant project is now impossible and that Hynes's own relationship with the Abbey, where she was artistic director in the early 1990s, is completely severed as a result. "It's very difficult for me. There's huge disappointment for me, but that's what I have to get on with. I started directing there in 1984, and I've always been extraordinarily grateful for the opportunity and enjoyed my work there. But right at the moment, I'd find it very difficult to work in an organisation that behaves in this way."

FOR HYNES, THE episode raises fundamental questions about the role of the Abbey in the broader Irish theatre community. When the Abbey's financial crisis reached a head, she says, the urgency of saving the national theatre with a large increase in its funding meant that there was little time to consider "what the impact of such a significant increase to one theatre would be on the theatre industry as a whole".

"You can't say that the Abbey is over-funded, but everyone else is under-funded. If you take an organisation that is now taking 48 per cent of all the theatre funding in the country, then that organisation is a very big beast in what is a very small jungle. As in any other industry, anything that will tend to encourage monopoly practices is bad for the industry as a whole. It has to be."

Though Hynes is clearly still shaken by the whole experience, she finds significant consolation in an opposing turn of events - a project that seemed doomed but that has become possible again. The company had intended last year to present two companion plays by Enda Walsh, The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom, in repertoire. Funding problems meant that only The Walworth Farce was produced. Its success means, however, that it will remain in Druid's 2008 season, opening at St Anne's Warehouse off Broadway next month, while The New Electric Ballroom will now have its premiere during the Galway Arts Festival before going on to Edinburgh in August. In addition, two new Walsh one-act plays will play at lunchtime during the Galway festival.

The Walsh mini-season will be followed by the re-establishment of Druid's connection with another of its alumni, Martin McDonagh. His early play The Cripple of Inishmaan was a huge success at the British National Theatre shortly after Druid launched him with The Beauty Queen of Leenane, but there is a lingering sense that it has never had a suitably stringent production. Hynes is anxious to explore it, and McDonagh declares that returning to Druid will be a happy exercise in getting "back to basics".

WITH THE SYNGE, Enda Walsh and Martin McDonagh projects of recent years all having continued resonance in this year's Druid season, it might seem that Hynes is reaping the benefits of continuity. She is now 54, and, apart from three years at the Abbey and a year out immediately afterwards, she has been running Druid since she was 22. But she also clearly feels that there is too much continuity, that for all Druid's international achievements, it is still operating within essentially the same order that prevailed in the 1980s, still struggling to do three new productions a year and unable to undertake the extensive Irish tours that it pioneered 20 years ago.

"I try not to let it depress me but sometimes it does. I sometimes look at it through the template of the way funding happens in this country. The Abbey comes along first and gets the most. The Gate comes along next in 1928 and gets the next most. Druid comes along third in 1975 and gets the third most. And Rough Magic comes along fourth and gets the next most. In the ensuing hundred years everything under the sun has changed. It doesn't make sense to me that the same paradigm is being applied."

If all that frustration, anger and disappointment she feels at the collapse of the O'Casey project have any bright side, it is that they seem to be creating a renewed sense of urgency for Hynes. The context of the approach of 2016 is still very much on her mind, and has sharpened for her the idea of a political theatre. It is not accidental that Druid recently hosted a discussion in Dublin with the Free Theatre of Belarus, which works essentially as a guerrilla theatre in a repressive state.

"They make theatre because they have to. They make it as a matter of life or death. When you measure the distance between that and where I'm at in my work, there's too big a distance there. What the implications of that are, I just don't know. Sometimes it does seem to me that things have become so cosy, including me, and including us, and including theatre, that really you just long for something that has a bit of edge. We're all locked into a way of doing things. I think there's going to be a blow-out from that sooner or later, and it's going to leave me and everyone else saying 'Jaysus!' But it needs to happen sooner rather than later. We all need to be shaken up."