GALWAY'S Druid Theatre Company is planning to stage all of John Millington Synge's plays in May 1998. The productions will open on Inis Meain. The festival is expected to focus a large amount of international attention on this, the least known of the Aran Islands.
The Synge festival will commemorate the centenary of Synge's first visit to the island, where he found the inspiration for much of his greatest work. The house he stayed in is still standing.
He wrote of the islanders in his book, The Aran Islands: "There is hardly an hour with them that I do not feel the shock of some inconceivable idea. And then again, the shock of some vague emotion that is familiar to them and to me."
The artistic director of Druid Theatre Company, Ms Garry Hynes, commented yesterday that his plays still chock by their mixture of the extraordinary and the familiar. "Synge is as revolutionary a writer now as he was 100 years ago," she said.
Ms Hynes says that bringing Synge to the west gives the work a whole new energy. Her production of The Playboy of The Western World in 1975 brought Druid to the attention of the whole country: "We had a strong sense of ourselves as people in the west of Ireland, with an affinity with the language and with the writer." In 1983, she brought The Playboy to the Aran Islands, the first time it was professionally staged there, and played to audiences in which there were women dressed in traditional shawls similar to the ones being worn on stage.
The festival will be called "A Story Told Forever", the words with which Synge's Deirdre Of The Sorrows predicts her tragic love story will last. Ms Hynes believes that seeing all seven dramatic works together, with casts picked from the same group of actors, and with the same director, will bring out new resonances in the plays.
The turn of this century has also seen a young playwright looking to the west of Ireland to stir his creative energies. Martin McDonagh, whose award winning play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, is now playing ate the Royal National Theatre in London, while his new play, The Cripple of Thismaan, is previewing at the Royal National Theatre, has set a further two plays in Co Galway's highlands and islands.
Druid Theatre Company, which co produced The Beauty Queen with London's Royal Court, will stage it again with the two other plays in a trilogy towards the middle of next year. A Skull In Connemara and The Lonesome West are both set in Leenane. They have references to the first play, but a different set of characters.
Mr McDonagh (25), the child of Irish parents, was brought up in south London. When he was in his late teens, his parents moved to Lettermullan, Co Galway, and from then on, he spent regular holidays in Ireland.