Can we treat Shakespeare as one of our own? Getting the dirt on DruidShakespeare

It gets everywhere, this soft earth covering the floor of the stage. Throughout rehearsals it has been kicked across the Mick Lally Theatre’s small auditorium in little clumps, crept under fingernails in stubborn crescents and burrowed “into crevices that I won’t mention”, according to one of the cast, who shall remain shameless.

To Druid’s loyal audience, though, it is an oddly reassuring surface, familiar from the theatre company’s heroic cycle of Tom Murphy plays and its JM Synge cycle – described, by his contemporary Joseph Holloway, as a “strange mixture of lyric and dirt”.

Here it has another resonance. “It was decided that we would play on a surface that we are used to and that we are connected to – a surface that made sense to us,” says Garry Hynes, Druid’s artistic director. Francis O’Connor, the designer, adds, “It was about being able to bring an Irish terrain with us on tour, no matter where we went – essentially, being able to play on an Irish landscape on any stage.”

It’s an honest, modest flooring – Druid buys it in bags from a local garden centre. But, like the new DruidShakespeare project, it has a grander purpose: to bring Shakespeare’s history plays unfussily on to home turf: this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Ireland.

If Ireland features in the four plays that make up the Henriad at all – The Tragedy of King Richard II, The First Part of King Henry IV, The Second Part of King Henry IV and The Life of King Henry V – it is as the butt of a joke, as a querulous threat or (as far as the actors are concerned) in the green room, a place to where characters are banished.

About five years ago a long red banner appeared in the Druid theatre foyer, asking, in several languages, "What is my nation?" The line is inherited from a vexed and slurring stage Irishman, MacMorris, in Henry V, but Druid's intention to stage this series of usurpations and successions, politics and combat, and revelry and bravery began much earlier.

“The original spring of the whole thing was this question of, How do we do Shakespeare in Ireland?” Hynes says during a break. Even with regular Shakespeare performances at the Abbey, and most recently at the Gate, it’s not a simple question, as it is weighed down with received ideas and unquestioned references, from carefully laid iambs delivered in received pronunciation to even creakier allusions.

“When British productions use a contemporary language they put the army in British squaddie uniforms,” Hynes says. “That’s grand in the Donmar, but if you do that here suddenly you’re in Belfast, where a squaddie uniform means something entirely different.” Staging Shakespeare on your own terms, then, requires another strange mixture of lyric and dirt, respect and defiance. In short it requires Mark O’Rowe.

Living presence

Hynes first approached the Irish writer to create a new version of the plays several years ago – O’Rowe had worked on

Henry IV, Part

1

for the Abbey in 2002 – but it didn’t take off. “The fact that Mark wrote in verse, and having worked with him on

Crestfall

, it just made total sense that he should do it,” Hynes says. “We wanted to have someone there in the room, to have someone who spoke on behalf of Shakespeare, to offer up arguments. It was to have a living presence for Shakespeare.”

Hynes’s rehearsals for DruidShakespeare are fascinating to watch, conducted in a space at once playful and deadly serious. “Thank God it’s Friday,” the actor Rory Nolan says, “and it’s the end of rehearsals for the week.” There is a brief silence. “You wish,” someone calls back.

Wearing a comically huge belly as Falstaff, the "fat knight", Nolan confronts Garrett Lombard's supplicant knight, Coleville, who resigns from challenge towards the end of Henry IV, Part 2.

As they run the scene again and again each actor offers variations on the jokes. “Can you beat him to death with rhetoric if you don’t use your sword?” Hynes asks.

Occasionally she seeks input from Andrew Wade, a voice director previously with the Royal Shakespeare Company; the room resembles a council of experts, lining the space, ready to be consulted. Druid’s dramaturge, Thomas Conway, studies two texts, scrolling side by side on his laptop, as O’Rowe’s supple edit nudges and challenges Shakespeare’s originals – a feat that has given Conway “a healthy respect for DJs”.

Elsewhere, Marie Mullen glances between her script and a heavy edition of Shakespeare's collected works, clarifying the context of an upcoming scene. This is a blizzard of text, subject to squalls of change. When Hynes and the cast fall into a hum of appreciation for a line not in O'Rowe's version of Henry IV, Part 2 – " 'Tis seldom when the bee doth leave her comb / In the dead carrion" – Hynes makes a note to consult O'Rowe about its restoration. (It doesn't get that far. "The process has had its say in other ways," Conway later explains.)

“I think with some things you just have to step in blindly,” O’Rowe writes to me some days later. “Garry had this mad idea to condense probably 13 or 14 hours of drama into six, and the technical challenge of that excited me. The qualifier, I suppose, was whether I’d have the freedom I’d need to achieve it.”

The process, O’Rowe explains, was more akin to screenwriting. “There’s more cutting and shaping and rearranging and trying to find a through line within narratively dense material than there is when writing a play.”

Once he had settled on an ending, discarding scenes and conflating characters became a much easier process. “If we were to hold on to particular moments or speeches which didn’t help that, then the whole thing would have been compromised, and where’s the point in that?”

Invisibly Irish

Ironically, perhaps, that meant losing MacMorris and “What ish my nation?” Instead everything now sounds unfussily, even invisibly Irish. The cast perform in their own accents, whether playing English, French or Welsh parts – which, given our colonial history, seems like another hard-won neutrality.

“ ‘This production takes an Irish look at Shakespeare’ is the best way I can put it,” says Marty Rea, who plays Richard. “We’re not doing an Irish version. We’re certainly not setting it in Ireland. But there is, over the 40 years that Druid has been building up its own aesthetic, a feel and flavour that can be applied to Shakespeare that makes it so much more exciting.”

To see Shakespeare in our own terms, avoiding the threats of bardolatry and the cultural cringe, seems a step closer to treating Shakespeare as our contemporary, to borrow a phrase from the Polish critic Jan Kott. Hynes and Rea agree that Shakespeare’s subversiveness makes him more their kinsman. “I don’t know how he survived, politically, in terms of what he was writing, in the middle of a seething Tudor court,” says Hynes.

Still, even in staging this epic undertaking in the minuscule Mick Lally Theatre, where the action will spill on to the site of its medieval neighbour the Hall of the Red Earl, they were reluctant to title the project DruidShakespeare. A number of alternatives were suggested: Heavy Lies the Head. What is my Nation? “Then eventually we gave in,” Hynes says. “Because people are going to call it DruidShakespeare anyway, whether sarcastically or not.” That, of course, would be a typically Irish response, not unlike that of the dear departed MacMorris, who said his nation “Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal.”

As a title, a challenge and a fittingly subversive exercise, DruidShakespeare announces a characteristic that is more favourable: the ability to treat Shakespeare as one of our own. DruidShakespeare opens at the Mick Lally Theatre, Galway, this weekened, then tours to Letterkenny, Sligo, Castlebar, Limerick, Skibbereen, New York and Kilkenny