Garry Hynes: On the Road to Inishmaan with Martin McDonagh
When Irish director Garry Hynes brought her Druid Theatre Company’s production of Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane to New York in 1998, she did it with a bang. First the play, her New York directorial debut, was a smash success at off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company. Then it transferred to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre, scoring half a dozen Tony Award nominations. Finally came the icing on the cake: Hynes won the Tony for Best Director of a play, making her the first woman in history to be honored with the prize. Ten years later, she’s is back at Atlantic, bringing her Galway company’s acclaimed production of another McDonagh play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, to New York audiences. Hynes took time from her globe-trotting schedule to explain how she discovered a little-known playwright who went on to receive four Best Play Tony nominations while winning one Oscar for his 2006 short film Six Shooter and being nominated for a second one for his In Bruges screenplay.
Martin McDonagh, Druid Theatre and I have gone on such a long and eventful journey together that sometimes it is hard to believe that there was ever a beginning to it. This journey began soon after my return, in 1995, to Druid as Artistic Director after an absence of four years. One day I was dutifully sitting in my office reading through the unsolicited scripts that had been sent into the company in the previous year.
Duty turned suddenly to excitement as I read first one and then two more plays by a writer called Martin McDonagh who had an address in London. The language seemed so exciting that I started to read one of the plays aloud. Within minutes I was cracking up with laughter and sheer delight at the extraordinary richness of what I was hearing. I raced down the stairs to the main office to ask who this McDonagh guy was and what did we know about him? Very little, as it turned out, except that since he had first sent the plays to Druid he had gotten an agent and maybe had a play broadcast on radio in Australia.
Radio? Australia?
A few weeks later I traveled to London to meet a shy, rather handsome young man in a small teashop in Soho, called Maison Bertraux. It’s the best teashop in London and I’ve had many a first meeting there with people with whom I’ve gone on to have long working relationships. It must be their tea!
After about 20 minutes conversation with Martin, I suggested to him that we option for production all three of the plays he had sent into us. This was a more or less unprecedented commitment to a young unproduced writer, but Martin greeted the suggestion with total equanimity, as if to say “Why wouldn’t you?”
Why wouldn’t we indeed?
Twelve years later, I was passing through Leicester Square Underground station, again on my way to meet Martin to discuss casting The Cripple of Inishmaan. This time around, the same underground station I had passed through on the way to that first meeting was now plastered with huge posters for In Bruges, Martin’s first feature film, and I thought of all that had happened in the intervening years. Thousands of performances of Beauty Queen and subsequently all three plays together as The Leenane Trilogy with The Royal Court Theatre, who became our co-producers on the project, Broadway transfers and a clutch of Tony Awards, tours the length and breadth of Ireland and internationally and a set of relationships forged between writer, actors, director and others that have given all of us some of the best times and the greatest fun of our lives.
When, about 18 months ago, Martin and I began discussing a new production of Cripple of Inishmaan, we knew we wanted an ace Irish American company and a show that could play both sides of the Atlantic. With the agreement of American and Irish Actors Equity and a co-production deal with our old partners Atlantic Theater Company, we got both. Cripple has been earning standing ovations for its brilliant company of actors, first in Ireland, the UK and now in New York.
Then and since, people have often asked of Beauty Queen, “Surely you knew you had a certain hit on your hands?” Well, the truth, of course, is that we didn’t have any idea of how successful it would be. Our experience and instinct told us that this was a terrifically written script, but one can never account for the process whereby that script turns into that living thing that is going to connect with a live audience for what can sometimes be a very long two to three hours. In that rehearsal room then and, as I was reminded all over again with Cripple, Martin displayed the most profound and visceral understanding of how the mysterious process of live theater performance works.
The only sadness along the way that we lost Tom Murphy, the original Ray Dooley in Beauty Queen. Tom was reasonably quiet and self-contained in the rehearsal room but I remember once when we were rehearsing his last long explosion towards the end of the play. Over his protests I decided he could play it a lot faster than he was doing and told him I was putting him on a stopwatch with that speech from now on. The Druid rehearsal room walls have yet to recover from Tom’s invective and I can hear it to this day from heaven. Go raibh dheis Dhe ar a hanam dilis.