Garry Hynes is to direct the premiere of the latest work by the distinguished US playwright, Arthur Miller. Mr Peter's Connections will open at the Signature Theatre off Broadway on 42nd Street, New York on May 10th.
The Druid Theatre director was in New York yesterday for the first preview of her production of Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane. She said of Miller's new play: "It's about a man at the end of his life - a retired pilot - who feels the world is not what it used to be."
The leading role will be played by Peter Falk, well known as Colombo in the long-running TV detective series, a role for which he has won four Emmy Awards.
Miller saw Hynes's production of McDonagh's The Lonesome West in Galway last summer and was so impressed that he approached her to direct his new play. At the time he said he was working on two plays but might not finish either of them.
When Mr Peter's Connections was ready, however, he suggested the artistic director of the Signature Theatre contact Hynes.
"It was a surprise to be asked in the first place - and a very pleasant one," she said. But she is characteristically cautious about the impact this huge break may have on her international career: "I have no idea whatsoever about that. I want to keep the head down and concentrate on the play."
She had always been a Miller fan, she said, but had never directed his work before.
Miller was born in New York in 1915 and has written several plays which are classics of the American theatre, such as Death of a Salesman (1949), which won him a Pulitzer Prize, The Crucible (1953), his indictment of the McCarthyism of which he had been a victim, and After The Fall (1964), a strongly autobiographical work in which he explored his short-lived marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
His links with Ireland date from the marriage of his daughter Rebecca to the actor Daniel Day Lewis.
Garry Hynes (45) has scaled the heights of artistic success in Ireland. Last Sunday Druid was named Best Company in the first Irish Times/ESB Theatre Awards. Her production of McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy was nominated in 10 of the 12 categories.
Druid Theatre Company, which she founded in 1975, was deprived of Hynes from 1990 to 1993 when she was artistic director of the Abbey Theatre. Her time there was troubled - despite triumphs such as productions of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh and Tom Murphy's Famine - and her quick departure underlined the structural problems in the Abbey's management.
Although Druid has toured extensively and Hynes has directed successfully at the Royal Court, where she is an associate director, she cannot yet be said to have a major international reputation. This new development could change all that.