In Big Maggie John B.Keane plays his own variation on an original Irish dramatic theme . . . if Keane wrote Sive in terms of the 19th century, he has, in this one, brought the tyranny, the desperation and the frustration of the rural Irish matriarch roaring into the top twenties.
Reviewer: Seamus Kelly
February 1969
We meet big Maggie at the funeral of the man she has been married to for 25 years, and from whom she has got nothing but four children and a life of slavery . . . This play is John Keane at his most realistic, looking at Irish life as it's lived in the days when "Knocknagrow" is a sentimental indulgence. It has many of Keane's faults - such as getting unwanted actors off stage with a total defiance of theatrical conventions (and yet, in the context of Keane's reality, the mechanics work with validity).
But it is a full-blooded, salty, earthy play, with a great ring of truth and uproarious with comedy, and it is played (at the Olympia) quite beautifully by Marie Kean as Maggie, with an enormous range from grudging tenderness to spit-fire shrewishness, and by a supporting cast most notably led by Arthur O'Sullivan, Gerry Sullivan, and Liz Davis.
Reviewer: David Nowlan
February 2001
Garry Hynes's new production of John B. Keane's Big Maggie takes a hard line with the playwright's text. Heretofore, this has been a rip-roaring, almost triumphalist comedy romp on behalf of what has been perceived as the down-trodden woman in Irish rural society. This production takes Maggie at the face value the script portrays, as a domestic tyrant who, when her philandering husband is buried, directs her tyranny against her family and anyone else who might try to get the better of her, particularly when it's a matter of money . . . And although it still gets its fair share of the laughs which Keane has embedded in the text, on the assumption that the woman is finally getting control over her life, Maggie herself comes across as a concerned but deeply unsatisfactory parent and person . . . It is not a pretty picture of family life, and maybe its author intended it so, but this production reveals the lovelessness and cupidity that many earlier audiences had not perceived through their continuous laughter . . .
Francis O'Connor's stark grey settings added to the bleakness in David Cunningham's pale clear lighting, and the whole quite properly earned a solid welcome from its audience. This is a Big Maggie the like of which has not been seen before, at least not as clearly as it can (and should) be seen now.