The hugely successful DruidSynge cycle owes its existence to a 'stupid idea' from director Garry Hynes. But, for her, it's always the next idea that matters, she tells Peter Crawley
There have been times over the last two years when the members of Druid Theatre Company would bang their heads against the wall and demand to know: "Who the hell is responsible for this stupid idea?" The idea in question was DruidSynge, the astonishing culmination of a 10-year ambition that first came to life in Galway's Town Hall Theatre when Anne-Marie Duff began to write out Pegeen Mike's list of wedding necessities. It concluded its Irish commitments nearly two years later, out among the ancient stones of Dún Chonchúir, when a young boy presented a portrait of John Millington Synge to a frozen audience as dusk fell on the island of Inis Meáin.
With dates in the Guthrie Center in Minneapolis and the Lincoln Center in New York still to come, it has been a triumph of organisation, of branding, and of performance, one that is easily the most significant achievement of Irish theatre in this young century. Countless minds may have been behind its execution, but the stupid idea could only belong to the formidable Garry Hynes.
"How do you want to do this?" asks the director, slipping away from a chair as her interviewer attempts to sit beside her. This airless boardroom in the windowless basement of a Dublin hotel is professional and sparing; exhibiting little more than it has to, and ready for business. It seems to suit the director well. Though not unfriendly, in interview Hynes exudes a manner that is as clear to read as a warning sign: no small talk, no personal questions, keep your distance. As she takes a seat across the wide table, ready to discuss DruidSynge, the year ahead, and her company's future plans, this, clearly, is how she wants do it.
"It was something that I wanted to do," Hynes says of DruidSynge, with an uncharacteristic stress on the personal pronoun. "I couldn't have thought of anything nicer than having the luxury to immerse myself, one, in the work of a single writer over an extended period of time, and two, for that writer to be Synge, because Synge, canonically, is very strong. There is a vision that is at the centre of his work that tracks through each piece."
As the project became a reality, though, she became haunted by one loudly dissenting voice - that of Synge saying: "But I don't want all of my plays done together."
Hynes chooses to reveal little of herself to the world, but she is content to demystify the process of her theatre. Yes, she admits, the branding was important in attracting an audience, closing the gap between company and author and linking them indelibly in DruidSynge. Yes, there were up to half a dozen mooted titles for the event, ranging from the more prosaic Synge Festival to the less inspiring "A Story Told Forever". And no, following such a project, she is most certainly not worried about what to do for an encore.
"I think the question is wrong, with respect," Hynes frowns. "You don't do anything for an encore. You just get on with the job of making theatre, which is what you're at in the first place with DruidSynge."
HYNES IS NEVER more fearsome in conversation than when she uses the words "with respect" - except for one awful moment in our interview, when a woefully misjudged question about "rescuing" John B Keane from the heritage industry elicits the far more devastating "with all due respect to you again", leading her into a cogent illustration of how Keane actually "rescued" both the amateur theatre sector and subsequently the Abbey's finances in the 1980s, and concluding with a sardonic finality: "So I don't believe John B. is in any need of rescuing."
With all due respect to Garry Hynes, she does withering sarcasm better than anyone I know.
For the moment, however, the wrong question seems worth pursuing. When Hynes begins rehearsals for John B Keane's Year of the Hiker, it will have been nine months since she set foot in a rehearsal room, having opted to place Enda Walsh's forthcoming The Walworth Farce in the capable hands of Mikel Murfi. Opening in Galway in May, Hiker will complete Druid's Keane Trilogy, following Sive in 2001 and Sharon's Grave in 2003. Is Hynes now inclined to approach theatre in terms of cycles and trilogies, in big packages and large-scale events?
"It's not something that comes out of DruidSynge," she responds. "It's something that's been there for quite some time. If there's been one part of the company's thinking since 1975, it has been the fact that whatever Druid does, it should be distinctive. If it is to replicate the experience of theatre elsewhere, but just in another geographical location, then that's simply not sufficient to justify its existence. And in that sense it has always been about - whatever we do now - what is the next thing we do."
Such a process of reinvention and replenishment has guided Druid since 1975, steering it through the gradual break-up of its original company in the 1980s and Hynes's subsequent departure, in 1991, for a controversial tenure as artistic director of the Abbey.
"It was a very important time for me," she says of her three years on Abbey Street. "A very difficult time, it goes without saying. But I learned to look at the world with eyes that weren't Druid eyes, and that changed me."
When she returned to Druid in 1995, the company had changed too. Could it still happen without her?
"I like to think that it could," she says. "I like to think that I could happen without it and it could happen without me."
If Hynes doesn't think in terms of encores, she may have distant thoughts of a final bow. As the company expands, she admits, and produces more work, she intends to direct fewer of its productions.
"There are lots of other people that can bring to the Druid experience different things that I simply cannot provide," she says. "I'm 30 years with the company, so it's very important to provide for the future of the company. It's very important to bring in a new generation of people."
Hence the New Writing programme, which will establish relationships with playwrights and offer Druid to them as "a certain sense of home". Or the ensemble dynamic, which is intended to give "longer commitments to actors and therefore to give them a greater responsibility over their working lives."
"As our modern theatre sector is maturing," she says, "I think we're going to become better at being more hospitable to a younger generation of theatre-makers."
HYNES HERSELF HAS the interests of a mature traditionalist and the approach of a young radical plumbing the canon of Irish theatre, but finding new ways to present it on the stage. These are not impulses, you suspect, that she would see as contradictory.
"No audience is going to thank you by saying: 'That was really rather interesting to see that historical curiosity,' " she scoffs. "They want to be engaged and provoked within the context of their lives at the present moment. That is the job."
The only thing that matters in theatre, she adds, "is the present-tense experience". One consequence of Hynes's determination and passion, her last-minute alterations and seemingly implacable perfectionism, is that working with her can be a tense experience.
"People say I can be difficult and demanding and all of those things," she says. "But actually, for me, it's all about being part of a group of people. It's all about my sense of identity as part of a group of people and it's crystal to why I'm still doing what I'm doing. And why I enjoy it."
SHE RECALLS ONE formative exchange in the rehearsal room, during the early days of the company, when Sean McGinley fumed at length about a production he had seen in Dublin and actively disliked. Mick Lally tried to calm him down.
"Ah, don't be too hard on them, Sean," he said. "They didn't set out to make it bad."
"I've never forgotten that phrase," says Hynes. "And, you know,it's very difficult to do well. The definition of any theatre act is failure, so you have to be very supportive of each other and you have to be part of that group. If you achieve something, it will always be greater than the sum of its parts. Always. By definition."
Hynes doesn't have time for prejudice or hierarchies. Amateur theatre, student theatre and professional theatre have been equally important to her.
Clifden and Broadway are both small communities. She is proud that the same Beauty Queen of Leenane, which, in 1998 saw her become the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing, had also toured to the west coast islands. She does not think in local, national or international terms.
"Lucky for us," she says, "and by dint of our own actions, our audience is everywhere."
Confronted by a media-saturated culture, in which entertainment is as arduous as a trek to the multiplex or as easy as a mouse-click, Hynes remains unapologetically ambitious about theatre.
"What is it that will drag an audience out on a cold night to go and see something that may not be very good and could be tremendously boring?" she asks. "I think it's important to have big ambitions."
And what could be more ambitious than staging eight and a half hours of JM Synge?
"Sixteen hours!" she shoots back.
Hynes uses the same word to describe the ideas behind the Synge cycle as those behind the Leenane trilogy; they were both "ridiculous". Her work with Druid thus far has proven that the ridiculous to the sublime is but a step.
The word that decorates her conversation most frequently, though, is crystal. Perhaps she appreciates its hard and sharp edges, its clarity or invitation towards perfection, the lens that divides one vision into countless angles. It's an interesting way of seeing the world, or of treating the theatre, with all due respect.