WITH The Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh made the most brilliant debut in modern Irish theatre since Tom Murphy and Noel O'Donoghue's On the Outside 1959, a parallel given added poignancy by O'Donoghue's untimely death in the summer.
McDonagh, like Murphy, seemed to emerge fully formed with a miraculous gift for dialogue, an eerie command of black comedy, an apparently instinctive sense of theatrical form and the kind of unsettling vision that marks a true original. Turning kitchen sink naturalism inside out, crossing O'Casey and John B. Keane with Joe Orton and Harold Pinter, inventing a kind of post modern melodrama McDonagh used his own unsettled relationship with London and Leenane to give a whole new meaning to the redundant cliche "Anglo Irish".
Aside from the quality of the writing, the play also summed up in other ways the best things about Irish theatre in 1996. It marked a new beginning both for Druid, in its 21st anniversary year, and for Galway's Town Hall Theatre, whose opening production it was. Its director Garry Hynes had a remarkable year and her work with The Beauty Queen of Leenane and The Loves of Cass Maguire for Druid, and Marina Carr's Portia Coughlan at the Peacock, was arguably her most consistent and confident since the mid 1980s. Marie Mullen, in both the former plays, was one of the finest performers in a year dominated on stage by women, Dearbhla Molloy's Phaedra at the Gate and Derbhle Crotty in Portia Coughlan being the others.
With Marina Carr, indeed, emerging as the most important female playwright in Ireland since Lady Gregory, through the latter play's cold delving into a knotty, incestuous rural society, 1996 was a good year for women in the Irish theatre. It may be too soon to suggest that the gender gap in Irish theatre has disappeared, but it has never been so narrow.
Joining Martin McDonagh in brushing aside any feeling that, in an increasingly technological culture, theatre might mean little to twenty some things was John Crowley. With his bold and tough production of Derek Mahon's translation of Phaedra at the Gate, the reworked Double Helix tore Bickerstaffe and his haunting, sorrowful Abbey production of Six Characters in Search of an Author, he consolidated his position as a director of extraordinary range, command of form and intellectual ambition. Together with Martin McDonagh, Derbhle Crotty and Marina Carr he gave tangible shape to the feeling that a formidably talented new generation has come into its own.
The combination of vigour and sophistication they displayed suggested that Irish theatre could yet match Silviu Purcarete's breathtaking production of Aeschylus's Les Danaides at the National Basketball Arena, 110 actors playing over a stage area of 8,000 square feet to create a work of almost religious intensity and the best visiting production in any Dublin Theatre Festival in the last 15 years.
