THEATRICAL PASSPORTS were written. While audiences were able to see individual plays on separate nights, the project was conceived and designed as one marathon production, to be experienced as one play in three parts. While O’Casey’s plays, now considered Irish classics, are often treated naturalistically, Druid’s production design leaned into the theatricality of both the marathon event and O’Casey’s language and sensibility. Hynes’s direction highlighted moments that felt heightened, performative, and sometimes surreal. PHOTO STE MURRAY
WITH GARRY HYNES
Druid Theatre’s DruidO’Casey project included three Sean O’Casey plays—The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman, and Juno and the Paycock—in marathon performances in New York City and Michigan in fall 2023. The plays, commonly known as the Dublin Trilogy, were originally written separately and staged individually in the 1920s at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. Garry Hynes, Druid Theatre’s Co-Founder and Artistic Director and the director of DruidO’Casey, chose to stage them chronologically, in order of the dramatic events depicted—which span 1915–1922 and encompass Ireland’s Easter Rising, War of Independence, and Civil War—rather than in the sequence that they
Marty Rea, Aaron Monaghan, Sophie Lenglinger + Hilda Fay in The Plough and the Stars as part of DruidO’Casey, directed by Garry Hynes PHOTO ROS KAVANAGH
12 SDC JOURNAL | WINTER 2024
What did the decision to stage the plays in chronological order teach you about them? I’ve done two O’Casey productions in my career before this, and one of the things that’s always worried me a bit about the plays is that unless one does a very modern production or a production totally removed from O’Casey’s ground plans or the period, then you’re forced back into this world of the Georgian tenement or the Georgian House. Knowledge of it has slipped away with time and as a result, the signaling has gone very wrong, because living in a distressed Georgian room would
now be only the recourse of the wealthy. I think that because we were doing the three plays together, I felt able to take the decision to set them in a world that didn’t have to go for those set of references because we had a better chance of creating our own world. A number of things became clear as we really got into rehearsals. Because the plays—to our knowledge, and as much as we could research—have never been seen together, one after the other, they tend to be swapped out one for the other, or certainly Juno and Plough do. And it became very clear as we worked on them how detailed O’Casey’s use of the historic detail of the time was, to distinguish each play. The detail of the historic events fed
Caitríona Ennis, Marty Rea + Rory Nolan in The Shadow of a Gunman as part of DruidO’Casey, directed by Garry Hynes PHOTO ROS KAVANAGH