The applause started on the island of Manhattan last Sunday night. By Monday, the cheers were taken up on Rathlin Island too, on Valentia, and on each of the three Aran islands where Druid Theatre Company first performed Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane.

The winter before last, cast and crew had battled gale force winds to bring their production to the outlying islands. Now, director Garry Hynes and actors Marie Mullen, Anna Manahan and Tom Murphy had scooped a total of four Tony Awards, New York theatre's best and most competitive prizes.

Beauty Queen's success surprised few who saw the powerfully unsentimental, sometimes harrowing production, first premiered at Druid's Chapel Lane stage in Galway in February 1996.

The piece insisted on a new kind of literacy from Irish audiences, one formed as much by soap opera and MTV as by Irish theatrical canons. That resonance sounds all the more loudly on a New York stage.

But you don't win a Tony merely for being a small Irish company brave enough - or crazy enough - to take on Broadway: if the Tonys are blind to all but excellence, Druid's achievement becomes all the more historic for the huge distances the company has travelled, when other nominees started a subway journey away.

Those distances are not a simple matter of geography: Druid's 22-year commitment to proving that good theatre can be created anywhere has made the company the leading pathfinder in smashing the cultural and financial barriers which once confined the making of professional theatre to major urban centres, and major international stages.

When Druid started, you couldn't even buy a sandwich in the Galway back streets where they performed work by Tom Murphy and Synge.

Now, the area is a cultural quarter, its development fostered by the cultural impact of Galway Arts Festival, the Town Hall Theatre, and, most recently, new film and TV production facilities like the TnaG studios at Baile na hAbhann. Not least among the factors which drove Druid has been Garry Hynes's own ability to take the kind of personal and professional risks most others would not dare. "Safety is deadly in theatre," she believes. Her poker playing skills are legendary. Beauty Queen's world is a place where morality itself is a shape-changer. It is an anthem to lost hopes and last chances, speared by Garry Hynes's uncompromising insistence on confronting the darkest passions of the human heart.

PART of McDonagh's The Leenane Trilogy, the play pillories audience expectations of conventional kitchen sink drama, locking a 40-something woman (Marie Mullen) and her cranky ageing mother (Anna Manahan) into a deadly power struggle for hearth and home.

McDonagh's work fascinated Hynes for the new dimension it brought to the experience of being Irish. "Martin is not an exile, not a returned emigrant but an outsider," she told me. "Being an outsider is important: there's a unique mix of familiarity and strangeness."

Two years after it premiered in Galway, after award-winning runs in London, Dublin and Sydney, as well as that western seaboard tour, Beauty Queen opened at the off-Broadway Atlanta Theatre, where rave reviews won it a transfer to the on-Broadway Walter Kerr Theatre at West 48th Street, thus making it eligible for the Tonys. Now, everyone wants to see Beauty Queen. Movie rights are being discussed; producers are wondering if winning the Tonys will secure permission from American Actors' Equity to allow the present cast to continue in an extended run after the play's scheduled end in October.