Despite some difficulty deciphering the accents and dialogue, DruidSynge is getting a great reception in New York, writes Denis Staunton
At the end of Riders to the Sea, the first of six plays in DruidSynge, much of the audience at New York's Gerald W Lynch Theatre made a dash towards the cloakroom. They were not looking for their coats - in the scorching July heat, nobody had one - but queuing for earphones designed for the hard of hearing. By the end of the first interval all the earphones were sold out, as more than 600 New Yorkers strained to decipher Synge's words delivered by Druid's actors in the authentic voices of rural Ireland.
"Do you understand it?" a table of the city's most powerful critics asked me as we ate fish and chips at a nearby Irish bar during the dinner break between The Shadow of the Glen and Playboy of the Western World.
Backstage at the theatre, director Garry Hynes was relaxed about what she called the audience's "tuning-in" process.
"That is, I think, quite normal when any play comes from one culture into another. For instance, Americans do not have a problem with not understanding every element of a Shakespearian production. In the same way, I don't think they should have a problem not understanding everything in a play where the language is a poetic kind of language and where it's being spoken in its natural voice," she said.
By 10.30pm, after 8½ hours of love, death and laughter, nobody was thinking about what they missed as the audience rose to give Druid's actors a thunderous standing ovation.
"I couldn't understand a lot of it because it was unfamiliar to my ear but it felt very intimate. That's a sign of great art. . . You feel like one play is talking to the other," American director Ann Bogart said at a symposium on DruidSynge the following day.
The Lincoln Centre Festival, which is hosting DruidSynge, has scheduled the six-play cycle to run in its entirety every other day for two weeks and is not selling tickets for the individual plays.
Hynes has made few changes to the cycle since it was seen in Ireland last year, the most significant of which is the introduction of two children, played by John and Joseph Gaughan, to The Tinker's Wedding, adding a sense of urgency to Sarah Casey's desire to marry Michael Byrne.
Druid's arrival in New York for the Lincoln Centre Festival was enthusiastically awaited in the theatre world, not least because both Hynes and Marie Mullen, who is in five of the six plays, already have a following in the city. Hynes became the first woman director to win a Tony award in 1998 for The Beauty Queen of Leenane, for which Mullen also won a Tony.
At a riotous party he gave for the company on Tuesday, Irish Consul General Tim O'Connor reflected on the extraordinary impact Irish cultural exports have had in the US recently and suggested that creativity was the most important characteristic of contemporary Ireland, both as a producer of stories and of software.
Fears that the transatlantic language barrier had rankled the critics vanished when the reviews appeared on Wednesday morning, led by a rapturous Charles Isherwood in the New York Times: "Ranging across wide emotional territory without missing a beat, it brings alive a milieu that feels both intriguingly remote and utterly intimate, exotic in the eccentric syntax and unruly lyricism of its earthy dialogue - God bless the Irish! - but familiar in its consoling knowledge of the loneliness and despair that are the sorrowful scars of all humankind."
Predicting that DruidSynge would be "the snob hit of the summer", the New York Post's Frank Scheck wrote that theatre-lovers now had an "endurance test to treasure" comparable to opera-goers' delight in Wagner's Ring.
"The large company, performing on a set featuring a dirt floor and looming walls that is only slightly adapted for the various plays, are to be commended for their admirable versatility and endurance. But particular mention must be made of Aaron Monaghan and Marie Mullen, who each appear in five of the six plays. Monaghan is particularly hilarious as the hapless Christy in Playboy, while Mullen . . . seems, with her wildly diverse performances here, to encapsulate the entire spectrum of human existence," he wrote.
Most critics mentioned their difficulty understanding the text, which some blamed on the actors' accents while others suggested that the earth-covered floor of the set may have sapped some of the sound.
Promoters from festivals throughout the world will see DruidSynge in New York, and Hynes says she wants to take the production to the widest possible audience. But despite its success here, she believes a Broadway run is unlikely.
"I think both the finances and the difficulty of that would be pretty high. I'm not sure I can see something like that. I really admire the Lincoln Centre, that they've scheduled it in this way so the tickets are only available for the whole day. That's a very, very big sell. It's a very big ask for an audience to come to 8½ hours of a writer that possibly the majority of people have never seen a production of. All of those practical difficulties are in there as well," she says.