Garry Hynes and Tom Murphy are settling old arguments and re-opening the Druid Theatre with 'The Gigli Concert' in their sixth double-hander
AN AIR OF civility hangs like a canopy over the beautiful garden of Tom Murphy's Rathgar home. Garry Hynes is limbering up on the lawn. Murphy, who almost abandoned writing for gardening in the 1970s, is talking about his garden. "It's a bit like a play," he says. "You think you're taming it, but really it's taming you."
The three of us have a brief exchange about the merits of home-grown new potatoes, before both Hynes and I confess to having black fingers; namely, the ability to kill any living thing, no matter how hardy.
This all takes place after an interview that has been a consummately professional, if slightly guarded affair, with Murphy and Hynes sharing their mutual admiration and memories of working together over the past 20 years. Both fiery personalities are mellow in the afternoon shade, laughing about first encounters and shaking their heads at former follies.
Indeed, the only tension in our hour-long conversation comes from me, as I try to work up the courage to ask about the artistic differences that interrupted their productive creative relationship some years ago.
Appropriately enough, our conversation begins with The Gigli Concert, not the production that Hynes is currently directing for the opening of the renovated Druid Lane Theatre, but the original production, 25 years ago, when Hynes and Murphy first met. Hynes says: "I remember reading the long-hand manuscript of The Gigli Concert" - "Really?" Murphy interjects, "my God, my God." - "Oh yes, you gave it to me," Hynes says. "Maybe just after you'd agreed to work with Druid. Because I remember thinking at the time: 'Thank God, I don't have to do that play.' I mean, it was huge; the scale, the ambition, the audacity of it. And then a year or so later, you wrote Bailegangaire, and that was for us, and we didn't have a choice."
By that time Murphy was writer-in-association with Druid, giving the rights of his new work, including the monumental Bailegangaire, to the Galway-based company. Druid was less than 10 years' old and Garry Hynes, its artistic director, was in her mid-20s. To attract one of Ireland's greatest, most established playwrights to work with one of the youngest independent theatre companies in the country was a remarkable and audacious coup.
Murphy remembers the day that he agreed to join Druid as writer-in-association. "I had a workplace in Appian Way [ in Dublin] and she called in, and, bull-by-horns, just asked me would I be writer in residence with Druid. I said yes almost immediately, but that it couldn't be in residence, as I didn't see myself moving back to live in Galway."
"God, I was quite nervous about it," Hynes recalls, "but the idea was really very important to the company. When Druid started off, we were producing some classics and American plays, and that was mixed with work from the Irish repertoire. But what we really wanted to do was new Irish work, but the work we were being sent in wasn't, y'know . . . ", the implication is good enough.
"I had even written a play myself - Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass; well, maybe written isn't exactly the right word," she jokes. "But with Tom, the basis of the association was that we'd look at some existing work and maybe he'd write a new play, and he actually wrote three new plays. [ Those productions] marked the maturing of the company."
Those plays were some of Murphy's finest: Conversations on a Homecoming, Bailegangaire, and its partner-piece, A Thief of a Christmas. What was particularly striking about these plays was that they marked Murphy's artistic return to his Galway roots. Since leaving the city in 1962 with his first full-length play, A Whistle in the Dark, he had written works as varied as the grand epic tragedy Famine, the complex spiritual drama The Sanctuary Lamp, the political murder-mystery The Blue Macushla, and, of course, the operatic existentialist drama The Gigli Concert.
But, as Murphy himself admits, working with Druid marked a homecoming of sorts, the beginning of "a great fertile period in my work . . . I had probably just finished Gigliwhen Garry came to me," Murphy recalls, "and I knew that I needed a change, so that gave me the kickstart. Pretty early on I realised that I was about 20 years older than everybody in Druid, but that didn't dismay me, it rejuvenated me. Of course, I realise the paradox - needing change, and going home - but I'm not sure how conscious that was.
"I suppose for me it has to do with the west of Ireland. I know the word culture is bandied about, but there is an energy bound up in different cultures, and I was returning to the sound, to the culture, of Galway. Having left it more than 20 years before, I was going back. It was tribal."
Indeed, that deep-rooted sense of connection is embodied in the mood, the idiom, the very shape of the work, which can be traced back both to the oral storytelling tradition of rural Ireland and the social structures provided by the Irish pub. Hynes directed the premiere productions of these three plays, as well as Famine, in the opening gesture of their partnership.
It was "one of the craziest, most exciting ventures Druid has ever undertaken", Hynes remembers. "There was no Town Hall Theatre, there wasn't even a black box theatre in Galway in those days. But it's a huge play, and there was no way we could have done it in Druid, so we rented out the Seapoint Ballroom in Galway. We had this huge 40ft-long set, and then we actually went and toured the damn thing."
It was after such experiences that Druid became involved in discussions with the local authorities in Galway about a new theatre space for the city, which would become the Town Hall Theatre, as Hynes explains. "The local authorities decided that Galway had to have a theatre, and a lot of discussion went on about making Druid the resident company, but we decided not to do that as our independence as a company would be gone. Even so, the majority of productions have to happen in the Town Hall, just to break even. Depending on a 90-seat theatre, the finances are horrendous." Both Hynes and Murphy are delighted that The Gigli Concertin particular will be produced in the intimate environment of the Druid Lane Theatre space as it re-opens after being closed for renovations for a year. "I was conscious of the choice of work we needed to open the theatre again," Hynes says.
"If it wasn't to be a new play, we wanted it to be a play that spoke to the rest of the work that we had done, and Tom has been a huge part of that. It seemed sort of the right time to be working with him again, so I trotted up here and prayed that the timing was right."
"Of course, I was delighted," Murphy pipes in. "Quite frankly, I would have loved at some stage to have directed it myself but when Garry came along - I mean this will be our sixth outing together - I thought that would be a better pair of hands." Murphy has of late directed some of his own work - Bailegangairein 2001, Alice Trilogyin 2005 and The Sanctuary Lamplast year - although, as he insists, "I'm just a writer who happens to occasionally direct."
I take my chances. What about the relationship between writer and director in the rehearsal room?
"Well," Hynes begins, "I think it was Tom who coined this phrase some years ago, that 'Garry Hynes prefers her writers dead'. But I don't. I love having a living writer to bounce ideas off. It's a lonely old job directing, so it's great to have someone there who's both involved in the process and outside of the process." As Murphy explains it: "You're outside of the process because as a writer there's this psychological shift that takes place when you hand the play over to someone else. Let's just say, the writer writes the theory and it's up to the director and actors to make that theory incarnate." Murphy has been down to Galway a few times to sit in on rehearsals, and "it's going well", he says, smiling, not giving anything away.
"One of the great things about having Tom as a writer in the rehearsal room is that he genuinely does react to his own work as if he's hearing it for the first time," says Hynes, repaying the compliment. And then suddenly we're back in 1983 again, at one of their original encounters.
"I mean he really does. I remember being at the opening night of The Gigli Concertat the Abbey and I was sitting behind Tom and he was just laughing his head off, like he'd never heard any of this before."
Murphy interjects, laughing again. "Yeah. And I remember hearing the snivelling and crying that was going on behind me. But don't worry, she was crying at just the right moment."
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The Gigli Concert will re-open Druid Lane Theatre (July 14th-25th) as part of the Galway Arts Festival. It will also run at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork (July 28th-August 1st) and returns to Galway to the Town Hall Theatre (August 4th-8th)