Twenty-one years of Druid

ANYONE looking at a list of the early productions of Druid Theatre Company in its first year, 1975, would find it hard to understand why the foundation of the company was a great moment in modern Irish theatre. The plays themselves are, for the most part, the kind of work you would expect to find in any provincial rep: The Playboy of the Western World, The Loves of Cass Maguire (which is revived from tonight at the Town Hall Theatre as Druid's 21st birthday product ion), The Glass Menagerie. It was pretty standard fare for evanescent companies, emerging out of college drama societies, and hoping to keep body and soul together over the summer, before disappearing again into obscurity. Yet Druid not only did not disappear, but revolutionised Irish theatre and, in the process, created much of the best work of the last 21 years.

The fact that Druid's early repertoire looks quite dull is in itself a mark of what made the company distinctive and important. With Druid, for the first time in Irish theatre, the play was not the thing. This is not to say that Druid has been "experimental" or careless of written texts. It is to say that it instinctively placed the emphasis on the essentials of theatre - acting and direction. At a time when pieties about the centrality of the writer were too often excuses for poor standards of production in the Irish theatre, Druid started with the basics, and moved very slowly towards the production of new plays.

In retrospect, Druid is probably the most triumphant case in modern Irish cultural history of how to make a virtue of necessity. The company started from scratch, with no theatre, no money, no associated writers, in a city that had no tradition of professional English language theatre. Its first production - The Playboy - was staged in the Jesuit Hall in Salthill, and its first season was funded, not by the Arts Council, but by Bord Failte. Not for four years did it have a real base, the wonderfully intimate but hopelessly uneconomic Chapel Lane theatre.

But the founders - Garry Hynes, Marie Mullen, and Mick Lally - and the early members, Sean McGinley, Maeliosa Stafford and Ray McBride, turned their deprivations into advantages. With nothing to go on but themselves, they had little choice but to be boldly inventive, and to place all the emphasis on what could be achieved with a stage, a group of actors and a director.

The virtue of such an approach lay precisely in the fact that at the same time the two main Irish theatre companies, the Gate and the Abbey, were struggling with a surfeit of tradition. The Gate was in the throes of a painful and chaotic transition from the Edwards MacLiammoir partnership to a new identity independent of its founders. The Abbey was beginning a complex and difficult process of modernisation. Where both had too much past to contend with, Druid had none at all. Everything - a repertoire, a style of performance, a theatre space, and not least an audience - had to be created. It was a formidable task, but one which could be approached with almost total intellectual freedom.

To that task of creation, Druid's founders brought not just immense talent, but, what is no less rare, a great capacity to develop. And critically, that capacity was collective. The very fact that Druid was originally in a position of relative theatrical isolation, more or less ignored by a theatre world which was still overwhelmingly metropolitan, created a unique sense of interdependence. Garry Hynes's work grew in sophistication and confidence at the same pace as the abilities of her actors expanded. The repertoire was dictated as much by what the actors could do as by any abstract artistic agenda. And as it happened the central core of actors could do an extraordinary amount.

One part of the trick of turning weaknesses into strengths was an ability to turn isolation into a justified arrogance, transforming the fact that nobody in Dublin seemed to care into an opportunity to demonstrate that Druid didn't care about anybody in Dublin. There was a great symbolic row in 1980 over £600 needed to bring the company to Dublin for the first time with Garry Hynes's own play Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass. The Dublin Theatre Festival couldn't manage to come up with the money, so Druid refused to come.

By the time the production eventually got on to a Dublin stage (the Peacock) a year later, Druid had become for Dublin audiences, their appetites whetted by deprivation, an exotic object of desire. It was one of those rows that looks petty in retrospect, but it was also a crucial psychological turning point in Irish theatre. Druid had broken once and for all the idea that there was a metropolitan centre that might condescend to the provincial margins. For the first time in its history, Irish theatre had to start thinking of itself as having many centres. The subsequent development of theatre in towns and cities all over Ireland, and indeed the emergence of a multiplicity of companies in Dublin itself, owes an immense amount to Druid's ability to hold its nerve.

It can be said of Druid, however, that the company only really established its permanence when it went through a period of discontinuity. The original company reached its peak in the four years between 1982 and 1985, with what may well be the finest sequence of productions by any Irish theatre company this century. Garry Hynes's monumental 1982 production of The Playboy - her third for the company - lifted the company both to international acclaim and to a level of artistic confidence that made it clearly the dominant force in Irish theatre.

There was Hynes's brilliant reclamation of M.J. Molloy's The Wood of the Whispering, and her stark, sorrowful production of John Ford's Jacobean tragedy `Tis Pity She's a Whore. There was a series of productions of plays by Tom Murphy, who had become the company's writer in association, including two new works in 1985, Conversations on a Homecoming and the immense Bailegangaire, in which Mane Mullen played alongside Siobhan McKenna, and Druid's integrity of purpose provided a fitting last stage performance for a great actress whose majesty had been for too long the misplaced stateliness of a ruler in exile. In her work with Molloy and McKenna, Hynes came not only to embody the future of Irish theatre, but also to refigure its past.

Inevitably, the very success of that period created opportunities that led to the break up of the first Druid company. Garry Hynes began to direct for the Abbey and the Royal Shakespeare Company, eventually becoming artistic director of the Abbey. Her brother Jerome, the company manager and a crucial contributor to the expansion of Druid, moved on to Wexford Festival Opera. Marie Mullen, Sean McGinley and Mick Lally worked in Dublin, in England, and on television. Maeliosa Stafford moved to Australia after Druid's second tour there.

BUT Stafford returned to Druid after Hynes's departure for the Abbey, and it was he and the company manager Jane Daly who brought the company through the most difficult phase in its history. It may be that only someone as closely associated with the company's history as he was could have afforded to change it so thoroughly. Stafford not only brought in new actors and directors, but he also evolved, in his production of Vincent Woods's superb At the Black Pig's Dyke, a theatrical style that had elements of Druid's early period combined with a bold originality. That production showed that Druid had reached a point where it could be aware of its own history without being imprisoned by it. And it also showed that the company could make an international impact without the presence of its founders. It had achieved a life of its own.

That life is now entering a third phase. Garry Hynes's return last year in the semi detached role of consultant artistic director recognises the fact that the company does now have an independent existence and is no longer synonymous with its dominant personality. A new theatre in Galway, a new relationship with a new writer, Martin McDonagh, and an air of quiet celebration rather than raucous triumph, as the cast and crew of Brian Friel's, The Loves of Cass Maguire, (including all three Druid founder members Mick Lally, Marie Mullen and director, Garry Hynes) prepare to go up tonight, a week before the gala opening next Tuesday in the presence of Druid's patron, President Robinson, suggest that its 21st birthday is being taken as an opportunity to do what theatre does best, to start from scratch and reinvent itself.