It began when two women approached a man in a bar. Thirty years later, Druid Theatre Company is still working its magic. Belinda McKeon hears how life has changed for its founders - and why they adore Synge
Summer 1975, a warm afternoon, the Cellar Bar in Galway city. Ahead of the young Mick Lally stretched three whole months of holidays from his job as a schoolteacher in Tuam. Lally had a plan. Over in England, other lads from Mayo were making fortunes on building sites. The plan was to join them, in a day or so. For now, the plan was to finish this pint.Then, out of the blue, another plan presented itself. "These two young ones came up to me," he says. "I knew them to see. They said they were going to do a play and would I be interested in a part in it. And I said I would, and we just got at it."
Although they couldn't have known it at the time, what Lally and the two "young ones" - recent University College Galway graduates Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen - were "getting at" was the birth not only of the first professional theatre company outside Dublin but also of the company that would become one of Ireland's most widely-acclaimed cultural exports.
Those summer days, when the three worked together on a production of JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, with Lally in the lead role of Christy Mahon and Mullen as Pegeen Mike, were the first days of Druid. Thirty years later, all three look back at the beginning with a mixture of fondness and bemusement. Not too much bemusement, however, given that the company is in the final stages of preparation for DruidSynge, the mammoth undertaking that will see all six plays by Synge performed together for the first time. Hynes is directing; Lally and Mullen will play parts of varying prominence in each.
Coming out of rehearsal, the actors have difficulty extracting themselves from Synge's world to talk about themselves, about their lives, about their experience of the past 30 years. Synge runs deep in the Druid bloodstream. The actors talk of him as if he is a presence in the rehearsal room, guiding them on, overseeing their moves. Even the normally straight-talking Hynes veers towards the mystical when she talks about her sense of the playwright. "Sometimes it is almost as if somebody has spoken to you," she says. "I remember doing Playboy on Inishmaan in 1985 and being outside in the darkness. It was completely dark except for the lights of the hall. And if I believed in ghosts, well, that was the time when one would have walked."
Druid's cocktail of personalities is intriguing. Hynes is frank and businesslike, sometimes to the point of sharpness; in theatre circles she is not someone to be crossed. Lally is unhurried and always approachable but, despite his expansiveness, also deeply shy; today, although he talks a blue streak, he avoids eye contact so firmly that his gaze is fixed on a point almost vertically to his right. And Mullen, her hair dyed a yellowish white for her roles as several of Synge's wily older women, is strikingly friendly, open in conversation, brimming over with the energy of the rehearsal room. Her eyes today seem ablaze, and her words tumble out in a fervid rush.
All three of the founders, as they are known, speak plainly and candidly, but they seem almost to speak different languages. Hynes speaks facts, Lally speaks memories, Mullen speaks instinct and inspiration. They remind you of nothing so much as a family, bound by roots buried deep, understanding one another intuitively but forging their own distinctive paths in this world of theirs that holds them together.
If they are a family, then their home is this theatre, a former tea warehouse in what was, back in the early days, an area of Galway so neglected that it was almost a no-go zone. Leased to Druid by the merchant McDonogh family in 1979, it was fitted out as a theatre by the company members for £8,000, or €10,000, and has been little touched since. The building, as cramped and damp as it is charming, was donated outright to the company by the McDonoghs in 1996, to mark Druid's 21st birthday, and a much-needed refurbishment is planned to begin this year. Meanwhile, the lane that was once Chapel Lane has become known simply as Druid Lane, and the derelict streets that surrounded it 30 years ago have been transformed, in no small part due to the presence of Druid, into a colourful, confident cultural metropolis, with all the faux Irishness, overpriced seafood and surging property prices that concept implies in Galway city.
Although Lally is glad to see the changes ("by and large, the city has improved hugely; this whole area has been done up, and there's great vitality"), Hynes is less impressed, dismissing the surrounding developments as a type of "cultural Disneyland". She is hardly advocating a return to the gaping roofs and boarded-up windows of the 1970s, but the new Galway is a deep disappointment to Hynes, and it's safer not to ask about the influence that Druid's enormous cultural contribution to the city might have played in shaping this streetscape of kitsch and Celticism.
Home for Druid, then, is Chapel Lane, whatever the company members make of the neighbourhood. But home life of a different kind has somehow shaped itself beyond this narrow walkway and these low ceilings, beyond the boards of the stage built largely by the hands of another long-time Druid member, the actor Seán McGinley. Or maybe not. At least not for Mullen, who married McGinley after a long courtship that began when that stage was newly built. So all-consuming was the life of Druid, she says, that it was difficult, for several years, to recognise whether the growing relationship was the real thing or merely a product of the intense environment in which the two actors found themselves.
"There was a sense that we had so much work to do, that there were seven of us in the beginning and that between us we had to do everything," she says. "And there was a feeling that because this thing that we were doing might be good for the west, might be a good thing for us, we ought to give our all. And Seán and myself would be wondering, is there something between us? Is this real or is it because we're locked together like this? And then there would be a couple of meetings of hearts and minds, and then there would be a division again, and it'd all settle down again and get back to normal. But there was always something there."
The realisation came only after the two had gone their separate ways from Druid in the 1980s, meeting up again in London; they were married in Galway, some 10 years after they had first met, in 1990. Even that day was dictated by the demands of the stage. "There was a date on a Sunday where a hotel could take us, and so we took it, and got the priest, and got things printed up, and I went out and got something to wear and Seán went out and got something. And suddenly it was all happening."
Mullen and McGinley were both on stage at the Abbey at the time, in a production of Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun. "We finished a show the Saturday night, drove down to Galway, got up the next morning and got married," she says, laughing. "We had a party, and then we got up on Monday morning, went back up to Dublin and were on stage again on Monday night. And all week we had people coming to see us, and bringing us out, and you had to go out with them, to talk about the night and how great it was, and by the end of that week we were just knackered. I said to Seán: Now I know why people go on honeymoon."
Mullen and McGinley, who is now more frequently seen on screen than on stage (his most famous role remains that of the brutal father in the television adaptation of Roddy Doyle's Family) live in Dublin with their two daughters, 13-year-old Róisíand eight-year-old Máiréad. Do they show any interest in following in their parents' footsteps? "Whatever they want to be, whatever they want to be themselves, they can be," she says. "They're just kids; they just get on with it. They love dancing, and Róisíndoes like the theatre very much. We've brought her to a few things, and she's interested in film, but it's not particularly because of us."
It may come from farther back, from Mullen's own parents, whom she remembers sitting around the table in their Sligo home, talking of John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. "Not in any deep way; they were just mad into films when they were courting, and they'd say: Do you remember your man or your woman?"
Mullen's mother, Peig, who is now in her 80s, still lives in Sligo and goes to see her daughter in every play. "She loves a night out," says Mullen. "But, you know, she has this thing of saying to me, 'You're going to get too tired,' and, 'Are you taking your vitamins?' And sometimes she'll say: 'I didn't recognise you in that.' Or, 'You looked like your father.' Or . . . It's not important. I just love her to have a good time."
Getting enough sleep was rarely possible for Lally when his three children, now in their 20s, were growing up; he combined an active stage life with the television career that left him with the unshakeable tag of "Miley", after almost 20 years in the RTÉ soap opera Glenroe. Combining these separate artistic lives with family life was never easy, but Lally found a way. The secret lay, he says, in his inability to drive. "I never learned. Well, not until I had to learn to drive Miley's van on Glenroe. And I've never killed a cameraman yet." He laughs. "But when I used to be touring plays, it was always part of the deal that I would have a driver." Not a chauffeur, but one of the crew to drive a van back to Dublin every night. "So I saw a lot of the kids. And I always made a point of getting home Sunday, no matter where I was."
Although Lally's days on Glenroe are behind him, Miley still follows him wherever he goes. The association eventually becomes wearying. "I have mixed feelings about it. I never, ever came to terms with the fame thing," he says, looking so much to the right that the Spanish Arch must be in his eyeline by now. "I never sat easy with the recognition factor. People are very familiar to me, and I don't know if I'm polite enough. Sometimes, I'd say, I'm rude. A bit briary. I'd say they walk off thinking: That Lally, he's a quare hawk."
Quare hawks and briary words are just what the Synge project demands, however, so Hynes won't be complaining. Not that she ever has - not, that is, about these actors. "The opportunity to do all of the work together, it's fantastic," she says. "Just to be able to do it here, where we started 30 years ago, with the two people I started to do it with. And with the company of actors that we have, they're just wonderful. Just the sense of all of us on a journey like this, working together over this long period of time. It reminds me that, really, this is the essence of what theatre is."
DruidSynge - a performance of all six of Synge's plays - is at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, from next Saturday until July 30. It then moves to the Olympia Theatre, Dublin and, as part of Edinburgh International Festival, to the King's Theatre, in Scotland
THE DRUID YEARS
1975
Druid is founded by Garry Hynes, Marie Mullen and Mick Lally. The company's first productions include Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Samuel Beckett's The Loves of Cass McGuire and JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World.
1979
After a long search for a place to call its own, Druid persuades Galway merchant family Thomas McDonogh & Sons to lease it a disused tea warehouse on Chapel Lane. The company members themselves turn the building into a theatre.
1985
In a famous production of Tom Murphy's Bailegangaire, Siobhan McKenna gives a legendary performance.
1991
Maeliosa Stafford takes over as artistic director for three years before Garry Hynes returns.
1996
Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane opens in Galway and goes on to play in Dublin, London, and Sydney. The Chapel Lane building is donated to Druid by its owners.
1997
Two more plays from wunderkind McDonagh complete the hugely successful Leenane Trilogy: A Skull in Connemara and The Lonesome West. The trilogy tours Ireland and transfers to Australia.
1998
Beauty Queen transfers to Broadway, where it wins four Tony Awards, including best director for Hynes. She is the first female recipient of this award.
2004
DruidSynge is launched, with a new production of Synge's Playboy, starring Cillian Murphy in the lead role. It traverses Ireland in a tour which includes the Aran islands, so central to Synge's imagination.
2005
The full DruidSynge project, along with a book of essays edited by Colm Tóibín, is to be launched in Galway.