Big Maggie

Town Hall Theatre, Galway Ends Nov 19 8pm 25/18 091-569777 tht.ie; Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Nov 21-26 8pm 15-40 0818-719388 gaietytheatre.ie

When everything has gone wrong and all seems lost, you can still rely on your mother. Such is the rather frightening message of John B Keane’s grimly amusing 1969 drama, which gave the world a vision of the Irish mammy so fearsome and indomitable that even the Bull McCabe might have bowed in her presence.

Maggie Polpin, whom we first meet burying her husband with a level of grief usually reserved for spilt milk, has suffered for years: in a loveless marriage, in the vice-grip of the church, in the gaze of an intrusive community. Now she will toughen up her children for an unforgiving world with such unbending purpose that, one by one, they each desert her.

If mothers are, in some way, models for the nation (from Cathleen Ní Houlihan to Juno Boyle) what are Druid saying by reviving this monster of survival and casting someone as steely and vivacious as Aisling O’Sullivan in the role? And if it’s about economic anxiety at a time of lost soveriengty and buckled beliefs, does director Garry Hynes’s casting of popstar/soapstar Keith Duffy in another role provide something of an answer?

Scheduled for an expansive tour of the country, the production’s unapologetic canniness may be a lesson in thriving through tough circumstances. Maggie would be proud. Not that she’d ever show it.

Can't see that? Catch this: Bog Boy, Civic Theatre, Dublin