Ireland in the 1980s was bloody awful, but there was at least one good reason not to emigrate

Irish Times

29-07-2025

The first play I saw was Macbeth at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. It filled me with awe, partly because it was probably very good (the darkly compelling Ray McAnally was in the title role) and partly because I had never before experienced the weird wonder of people being transformed right before my eyes.
I was 13 then. I'm 67 now. So I've waited well over half a century for a staging of Macbeth that sent the same quakes up the spine – until I saw
Druid
's new version in Galway last weekend. With
Marty Rea
as Macbeth and
Marie Mullen
as Lady Macbeth,
Garry Hynes
's production is by far the best I've seen anywhere.
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Riders to the Sea and Macbeth: A magnificent horror unbalancing nature
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Which incidentally brings home a truth we too often take for granted: for all the nonsense we have to put with in Ireland, we are a nation blessed in its artists. The church betrayed us. Governments sold us out for a handful of dig-outs. Our banks became casinos. Much of the media became cynical and self-serving. But through it all there have been brilliant creative people holding fast to the hard core of art: integrity in action.
Druid's Macbeth, coupled in a typically contrary and radiant gesture with
John Millington Synge's
great one-act tragedy Riders to the Sea, marks the company's 50th anniversary. Anyone else might stage a birthday party with cakes, candles, balloons and novelty costumes – and a nice, punter-friendly comedy to keep the box office jingling. Druid give us a fearless and ferocious exploration of evil. This is the splendour of the company and of its indefatigable leader Hynes – they never saw a grain they wouldn't want to go against.
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Garry Hynes and Marie Mullen in the 1970s
Druid was founded in 1975, but really came into its own at the start of the 1980s. This in itself is a triumph of perversity. The early 1980s were bloody awful. The economy imploded. The agony of the H-Block hunger strikes played itself out like a gala season of nightmares. The abortion referendum was another mad parade of a country's tormented obsessions. Statues were moving and the Virgin Mary was appearing in the Munster skies. A young girl died giving birth in a grotto. A teacher was fired for living in sin and a judge said she was lucky not to be living in a Muslim country where she would be stoned to death.
I remember going, in a sceptical mood, to see Druid's production of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World in 1982. Why on earth, in the midst of all these public psychodramas, would a young theatre company want to stage the calcified old drama that had become a national joke?
And then being astounded and electrified by what they were doing with it. They were reclaiming Irish tradition, revelling both in its wild poetry and its dirty realism. Druid was emerging as a kind of national liberation movement – liberating the inheritance of Irish art from prudishness and shame, but also from soft charm and wheedling winsomeness. They were making no apologies and taking no prisoners.
And it struck me then that, although Druid was not overtly political, it was radically engaged. What it was engaged in was (in Martin Amis's phrase) the War on Cliche.
In the North, the great poets (
Derek Mahon
,
Michael Longley
,
Seamus Heaney
,
Paul Muldoon
) realised they couldn't stop the horrors, but they could keep alive a supple, inventive, playful kind of language that stood in opposition to the sectarian cliches that underpinned them.
Druid were doing the same thing in the South – creating a living counterculture in which all the suffocating platitudes, banalities and truisms were thrown into the bullring of their tiny auditorium to be skewered and gored on the horns of precise and truthful performance.
For myself, the existence of that supercharged space up a lane in Galway was one good reason not to emigrate. Druid were gloriously shameless, but they also shamed the rest of us with their relentless commitment to Ireland, their superbly stubborn belief that a basket case could also be a Moses basket, that a collapsing country might also be a place of pure possibility.
Like other Irish artists at the time – from U2 to
John McGahern
,
Eavan Boland
and Druid's great collaborator Tom Murphy – they just got on with being world class by being themselves. As
Jonathan Swift
said when he left his money to build a psychiatric hospital, 'No nation needed it so much.'
The late playwright Tom Murphy at the Druid Theatre
But I've been using the past tense inappropriately. Druid's 50th anniversary is certainly shadowed by loss. The light of some of those luminous actors –
Mick Lally
, Ray McBride, Maelíosa Stafford – has been dimmed by death. Jerome Hynes, whose managerial brilliance was equally vital to Druid's growth, died scandalously young. The sudden loss last Easter of Garry Hynes's wife
Martha O'Neill
hovers over the anniversary celebrations as an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder of the ravages of time.
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Garry Hynes: 'My wife was taken from me in the blink of an eye. My whole life's changed'
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And yet, because Hynes is a great artist, pain and grief are transmuted into defiance. Instead of being a lap of honour, this current Druid production is a magnificent raging against the dying of the light. It is not afraid of the dark. It goes so deep into it you think you have reached its limits – and then it goes further and deeper.
Truly great theatre is a hair's breadth from truly terrible theatre. Rea's Macbeth risks monstrosity. Hynes allows him to conjure a vision that would have seemed excessive even a decade ago: pure evil. He makes that vision both timeless and terribly of our time, redolent of
Vladimir Putin
,
Binyamin Netanyahu
and
Donald Trump
without being reduced to any of them. And it is, in a broad sense, that most countercultural thing in contemporary Ireland: profoundly religious – Macbeth as the Antichrist.
This is the glory of Druid: 50 years is overture. Hynes is more restless, more edgy, more disconcerting and more masterly than she was when the company started. Druid is not taking a bow. It is still headbutting all our complacencies. We come out of the theatre seeing stars.