Synge (8 page)

Druid raid every available cupboard for the elements of the drama. Use is made of the sparse, rapid flow of language into space of Beckett (Not I comes particularly to mind at times), the comic representation of ideas by objects and the caricatures of agitprop farce, the folk rhythms and stylized dance of Siamsa, mime, and the marvellous music of De Danann. At times, the imaginative simplicity of Garry Hynes’s use of objects such as long sticks is startling and the energy created by the quick succession of forms and methods is irresistible.

This was not simply a matter of testing the ways in which words and images could work together, however. It was also about figuring out how they could work against each other. For Hynes’s mature approach to Synge, as it emerged in the 1982
Playboy
, overturned all notions of him as a figure of continuity who represents an archaic, unified world. It enacted, rather, the electrifying tensions and the coiled-up contradictions within the world he presents. We heard the beauty of the language, enhanced by the fluency of actors who understand it, but we saw the grime and poverty of the characters’ lives. The style was more realistic, less romanticized, than what had gone before – we saw bare, dirty feet rather than the picturesque pampooties that were worn even in the original Abbey production. Yet it was also wilder, stranger and more plugged into the anarchic, carnivalesque comedy of Synge’s imagination. There was a soft, tender yearning and a frantic, compulsive energy. The playing was precisely detailed, with each moment full of deliberation and control, yet it also unleashed all the gothic and grotesque elements of the writing. The characters were rooted and credible, but they also expanded into physical caricatures of themselves.

In that 1982
Playboy
, the actors seemed to inhabit the same stage but come from different planets. Brid Brennan’s Pegeen was still, watchful and, for all her outbursts of bossy rage, intensely innocent. Marie Mullen’s Widow Quin, by contrast, was nonchalant, impervious, avid for a man but too worldly to be hurt, her eyes hungry, predatory but also full of salty humour. Mick Lally’s Old Mahon was a hulking bear, Ray McBride’s Michael James an evasive ferret. Maeliosa Stafford’s Christy expanded and strutted as Sean McGinley’s Shawn Keogh shrank and lurked. And all this human variety created a shifting, unpredictable universe in which no simple chain of events could be traced from cause to effect. In the constant interplay of contrary moods and conflicting impulses, words were not just static poetry but gestures of continual self-invention. The language had restored to it the theatrical energy of people making themselves up through speech. The old question – how do I know what I think until I see what I say? – hovered over every line. Synge’s own paradoxical phrase for the kind of national mood that enables great art – ‘provisionally permanent’ – came to mind, capturing perfectly the fusion of a permanent text with a radically contingent performance that is the essence of theatre.

Just as the 1982
Playboy
drew on apparently unrelated productions like
Island Protected By a Bridge of Glass
, so it was continued in productions of other plays, most immediately the superb 1983 production of M.J. Molloy’s
The Wood of the Whispering
, again directed by Garry Hynes and again featuring Mick Lally, Sean McGinley, Maeliosa Stafford, Ray McBride and Marie Mullen, and the breathtaking 1985 premiere of Tom Murphy’s
Bailegangaire
, with Mullen, Mary McEvoy and Siobhán McKenna. Each, of course, had its own dynamic, but each, too, reminded us that Druid’s Synge is not just about Synge.
Bailegangaire
is a wonderfully original masterpiece in its own right, yet the resonance of
The Playboy
could be felt in two ways. One, most obviously, was the language of Mommo’s story, a Gaelicized English that represented the fullest linguistic flowering in contemporary theatre of seeds that Synge had planted. The other was the absolute confidence with which that production approached the unusual structure of the play, in which the world of Mommo’s baroque narrative co-exists on stage with the more mundane reality of the contemporary action. It is hardly accidental that the split is, again, that between a gallous story and some dirty deeds, or that the brilliance of the production was rooted in Hynes’s evolution, through
The Playboy
, of a theatrical style precisely calibrated to just such a conflict between what we see and what we hear.

If Druid’s Synge is about more than Synge, however, it has always seemed to me that it is also about another, curiously absent figure – Samuel Beckett. On the surface, this may seem a ridiculous suggestion. Beckett was an early presence in Druid’s repertoire: the company presented
Act Without Words II
in its very first season in the summer of 1975, and
Happy Days
the following year. But there have been just two Beckett productions since:
Endgame
in 1981 and
Waiting for Godot
in 1987. Yet it could be argued that there is so little of Beckett in Hynes’s repertoire for the same reason that there are, allegedly, no camels mentioned in the Koran: his is such a constant presence that there is no need to advertise it.

This reticence, however, obscures something very significant. One of Garry Hynes’s great achievements has been, as it were, to reunite the two great theatrical scions of the Dublin Protestant professional class: Synge and Beckett. This process took hold in that production of
The Wood of the Whispering
, which imagined the play almost as if it were a collaboration between Synge and Beckett, the former’s lush, highly charged language spoken by the latter’s homeless, tragi-comic denizens of a fractured and indifferent universe. Beckett, in a sense, was drawn into Druid’s continuing quarrel with the romantic official notion of the ‘beautiful and tradition-rich places of the West’, an argument that has shaped the company’s history from its earliest days right up to and including its staging of Martin McDonagh’s
Leenane Trilogy
. The vision of an unromantic
Playboy
, with its demythologized West was carried through into
The Wood of the Whispering
, where the West was imagined as a broken, Beckettian world. It is not accidental that the epigraph in the programme for
The Wood
was taken from Beckett’s sardonic puncturing of urban nostalgia for a rustic utopia in his novel Murphy:

Oh hand in hand, let us return to the land of our birth, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the – er – fens, the – er – glens, by tonight’s mail-train.

This exposure of an underlying empathy between Synge and Beckett is rooted, paradoxically, in the perception of a different kind of cultural continuity to that evoked by Charles Haughey: a continuity of outsiders. It picks up on one of the angularities of Irish twentieth-century theatre history – the deep feeling that, in a culture that was inventing a settled homeland, the real place for the artist to be was with the homeless, the unsettled, the nomadic.

The affinity between Synge and Beckett that has been illuminated by Druid is a matter both of form and content. Beckett’s mode is all about the gap between story and deed, between words and action – the very disjunction that Garry Hynes has explored in her Synge productions. Think of Winnie in
Happy Days
, sending out a stream of language to reassure herself that she is leading a normal existence while we can see that she is buried up to her neck in the ground. Or of the last lines of
Waiting for Godot
, with their simple distillation of the conflict between what the actors say and what they do:

Estragon:
Well? Shall we go?
Vladimir:
Yes, let’s go.
They do not move.

But there is an affinity of content, too, that is rooted in the early history of the Irish theatre movement. When Shawn Keogh remarks on Pegeen ‘picking a dirty tramp up from the highways of the world’, the image now reminds us of Estragon and Vladimir, and of Beckett’s vision of humanity itself as a dirty tramp on the highways of a careless world. And there is here a chain of tradition. Some of the very first stirrings of the Irish national theatre movement from which Synge emerged used very similar images and settings.
P.T. McGinley’s one-act play
Eilís agus an Bhean Dhéirce,
presented in Dublin by The Daughters of Erin in 1901, and Douglas Hyde
’
s
An Tincéar agus an tSidheóg
, presented the following year, were crucial forerunners of the Abbey. Both dealt with what were then called ‘tinkers’, and both ended with a ‘tinker’ departing the stage with a fierce curse on settled humanity. The image entered the Abbey tradition through the collaboration of Hyde with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in the 1902 play
Where There is Nothing
. This play again attempted to imagine the Traveller way of life as a rebellion against bourgeois smugness, and, indirectly, against the niceties of a respectable Protestant upbringing. The play tells the story of Paul Rutledge, a landlord, who decides to become a Traveller. John Synge, of course, became Paul Rutledge, tramping the hills and valleys of Wicklow. And he turned the rather gauche wish-fulfilment of these early plays into vibrant art in
The Shadow of the Glen
,
The Tinker’s Wedding
and
The Well of the Saints
. Those last two plays, in turn, helped to shape Beckett’s imagination, peopled as it is by wanderers, nomads and homeless refugees from a normality that has ceased to exist.

If all of this seems no more than an abstract historical connection, it has been given flesh in Garry Hynes’s fusion of Beckett and Synge. It is, indeed, embodied in a series of performances by Marie Mullen that runs from the Widow Quin, a woman alone, in
The Playboy
in 1982, to the starkly Beckettian interpretation of Sadie Tubridy in
The Wood of the Whispering
and back to a Synge filtered through Beckett with her Mary Byrne in
The Tinker’s Wedding
and Mary Doul in
The Well of the Saints
in 2004 and 2005. Bold, mischievous, at ease with the flow of words and the stillness of silence, these performances form a living bridge between the contrary elements of Synge’s imagination, the symbolic minimalism that heavily influenced Beckett and the salty mediaeval lustiness that makes Synge’s texts so vividly alive. Mullen’s apparent agelessness (there is almost thirty years between her second coming as Mary Byrne and her first performance of the role in 1976) has given her access to a sense of what is genuinely timeless in Synge – not a vapid flight from history, but an ability to create images and archetypes that transcend it. She has incarnated a Synge at once imperturbably ancient and forever full of youthful vibrancy and cheek. And in doing so she summed up the point of Druid’s Synge: that theatre can do more than one thing at any one time.

Illustration 3:
Islanders on Inishere. From J.M. Synge, My Wallet of Photographs

The first thing we noticed going out to Aran was the light. It was coming from the opposite direction and felt strange. To a person brought up in Dublin, on the east coast of Ireland, the world seems to be turned around a full hundred and eighty degrees when you take the boat from Galway out to the Islands. The white glimmer of sunlight that you expect to see when coming ashore is right there ahead of you on the way out to sea. The feeling of leaving becomes confused with the feeling of going home. It’s like an inverse homecoming, something that must be similar to getting on the plane in autumn and landing somewhere on the far side of the world in spring. On the Naomh Eanna ferry out to Irishmore, it felt as though we were going backwards in time, travelling into the mirror. We were staring into the light over the Atlantic. We could barely see the shape of the three Islands in the distance. We could smell the sea and the diesel fumes and feel the throb of the engines in everything we touched. We could hear the murmur of Irish being spoken around us on the boat and became aware, without saying it openly, that we were no longer facing east, towards London, towards the buzz of Europe, but west, into an older, untouched world.