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Irish Examiner
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Macbeth/Riders to the Sea review: Druid triumph with 50th anniversary double bill
Macbeth/Riders to the Sea, Mick Lally Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival ★★★★★ As an Aran mother, to lose one son to the sea might be unfortunate, but to lose six? That's verging on farce itself, surely. And this is the trouble with Riders to the Sea. It's hard not to hear in Synge's woe-is-me lines something of the parodic performative misery of An Béal Bocht or similar spoofs. There's not a bit of that comedy on stage in this spare production, thankfully, but it's out there, an offstage echo of irreverence. Still, Marie Mullen does well as old Maurya, allowing a certain modernity to peek out from behind her character's fatalism. As Druid marks 50 years, this feels like a necessary gesture to where the company is rooted, geographically and theatrically. We see Mullen again a few minutes into the main event, the Scottish play, as Lady Macbeth. Marty Rea is in the lead role, and the age gap of this couple, the Macrons of Dunsinane if you will, creates a shifting power dynamic that director Garry Hynes exploits brilliantly throughout. ''Tis the eye of childhood,' Lady Macbeth says as she chides her husband's infirmity of purpose in their regicide. It's as if Marty Rea has latched onto that line, and indeed the play's obsession with eyes. A scene from Macbeth, featuring Marty Rea and Marie Mullen. Picture: Ros Kavanagh In the tiny Mick Lally Theatre, we are arranged like a retinue in an Anglo-Saxon hall, divided into rows by rude planks of wood above the dirt floor. It's intense and intimate, and Rea's eyes shine out at us. Darting and childlike indeed at first: bewildered at the witches' prophecy of greatness. Later, in his mania, they are fixed and burning. And, finally, empty. As Duncan puts it at one point, 'There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face.' Clearly, Marty Rea has other ideas. He gives a superb refutation of that line. The tragedy of his Macbeth is this strange innocence he conveys, his initial unworldliness, his shaken 'single state of man'. All of it tending to make a mother of his wife. It's Mullen's Lady Macbeth who wears the trousers alright, and vicariously wants that crown. Uneasy lies the head that will wear it? You bet. Especially since it's a crown of thorns, literally ripped from atop the same looming crucifix that overlooked Synge's world in the first half of this double-header. In Shakespeare's Scotland, Christianity feels more real, more integrated, compared with the patina over folk beliefs it seems for Synge's islanders. Mullen's Lady Macbeth has a fierce zeal and a confidence won from maturity. In one scene, she barges loudly through a pair of doors, walking in a beeline, full of purpose and literally cutting short one of Macbeth's tortured soliloquies with the clatter. An inspired moment, in a production that brims with them. But of course, it's Lady Macbeth's conviction that wanes, as she's reduced to a guilt-riddled sleepwalker. Macbeth's, meanwhile, grows in his unhinged mania. Rea struts and scrambles, spitting and stuttering on his Fs, as if always on the verge of an expletive, invoking Satan as he summons his servant. Flailing futilely against fate in a way Synge's Maurya would surely recognise. A scene from Riders to the Sea, in Galway. Picture: Ros Kavanagh The ultimate power couple are at the centre of Hynes's interest here, such that there's a notably easing of tension in scenes without them. But some breathing space is welcome across this long evening of theatre. Amongst the excellent cast, Rory Nolan is Banquo, played with a level-headed maturity that contrasts nicely with Rea's Macbeth. Caitriona Ennis, Pattie Maguire, and Emmet Farrell are given great scope as the witches, their hands burning with eye-like wounds. There are echoes of earlier Druid takes on Shakespeare here, certainly in Francis O'Connor's design. But there is an intensity and directness here that perhaps surpasses any of those. It's a production more than worthy of carrying the 50th-anniversary mantle. It transfers to the Gaiety in September, but really deserves to be seen on home turf, in the crucible of the Mick Lally Theatre. Until July 26 in Galway. At Gaiety, Dublin, September 25-October 5
Irish Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Riders to the Sea and Macbeth: A magnificent horror unbalancing nature
Riders to the Sea and Macbeth double bill Mick Lally Theatre, Galway International Arts Festival ★★★★★ It seems unorthodox at a crucial moment in Macbeth that an assassin prowling a castle would choose to speak aloud – not to a person, but to the ground beneath his feet: 'Thou sure and firm-set earth, / Hear not my steps.' It's a line that speaks to Druid who again, after DruidSynge and DruidShakespeare , fill their stage with topsoil: a withered terrain to be exploited for conspiracy. As paranoia grows in Garry Hynes 's extraordinarily accomplished production, we similarly find ourselves unsettled, sorting through a series of prophecies inherited not from Shakespeare's witches but by John Millington Synge . The double-bill opens with Riders to the Sea, Synge's island-tragedy about a household fearing the demise of their seafaring brothers. The dismissive Bartley, played with arms-folded arrogance by Marty Rea , refuses to heed the storm warnings of a mother more knowingly otherworldly than real (in other words: Marie Mullen ). That deafness isn't the only callback when moving into Shakespeare's tale of usurpation, where reports of a world-flattening storm recall Synge's 'great roaring in the west'; the breadmaking ritual of movement director David Bolger becomes witchcraft; and a woman's death cry reverberates as an echo of Aran keeners. Bartley's negligence is an obvious mirror for Shakespeare's ascendant tyrant. A more tantalising comparison may be the watery mass grave observed by Mullen's mother, claiming the 'power of young men floating round in the sea'. This is Macbeth twisted out of human resemblance: a force of nature. Not long after Rea's Macbeth first allows a smile to fall out of his battle-serious face, uplifted by a prophecy of power, he's already second-guessing a murder plot against the king. 'Leave it all to me,' says Lady Macbeth, made frighteningly ambitious and focused by Mullen, and who holds out a dagger for her husband to grip in his mouth like a dog. Remarkably, he seems to be her bitch. READ MORE Together, they perform a riveting cycle of agonised doubt and needy consolation. But even Lady Macbeth becomes horrified by the hellhound she's helped create, and whose obsession stretches beyond where they can enjoy their triumph. Rae's is a Macbeth – increasingly wild-eyed, crawling on all-fours, with strangely drawn-out line-deliveries – whose interpretation of divine rule is to pluck his crown from atop a Crucifixion statue. That isn't the extent of the production's perversion. A scene where he slaughters his rival's family is also an attack on Riders to the Sea, ripping apart that play's sacred life-sustaining bread and family heirlooms. (Hynes's marathon productions have arranged plays in thrilling sequences. She's never cannibalised one of them before!). A line can be drawn between such brutality – made possible by lighting designer Colin Grenfell's miraculously etched shadows and the surprise entrances of Francis O'Connor's set (drawing on the dynamism of Shakespeare's Globe) – and the instant gore of a crimson-bloodied Mick Lally stepping out as a skull-cracked survivor in the company's The Playboy of the Western World in 1982. After all that time little feels sanctified. Unlike Macbeth, Druid's ambition seems too great to freeze in easy prophecy. Druid 's double bill of Riders to the Sea and Macbeth runs at the Mick Lally Theatre until Saturday, July 26th, as part of Galway International Arts Festival ; all performances are sold out. Macbeth moves to the Gaiety, as part of Dublin Theatre Festival , from September 25th until October 5th
