Maeliosa Stafford obituary: Actor and director who left lasting mark on theatre

Born: December 15th, 1956

Died: April 10th, 2023

Maeliosa Stafford, who died suddenly aged 66 in his adopted home of Australia, was one of the most renowned Irish creatives of the last half-century. After a distinguished career as an actor with the then emerging Druid company in Galway in the 1970s and 1980s, he transformed himself after emigrating to Australia in 1988 into one of that country’s most important figures in the arts sector through his work with the O’Punksky’s Theatre Company in Sydney from 1990.

This promoted and gave vindication to the work of contemporary Irish writers in theatre, especially with the plays of Tom Murphy, Conor McPherson, Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh, among others. Stafford and his co-directors John O’Hare and Patrick Dickson gained wide acclaim in an Australia which was changing underfoot and which, arguably, was informed and enhanced by these authors’ dramatic tales from another postcolonial society with close similarities to Australia’s experience.

Martyn Turner

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There was a certain inevitability about his career. Born into a highly literate family in Galway – with his father Seán, a teacher, and his mother Máire, a civil servant and writer whose novel The Green Eagle was once part of the curriculum for Leaving Certificate English – Stafford made his stage debut at the age of five on the boards of An Taibhdhearc in his native city. This was a theatre of which his parents were staunch supporters, as actors, designers and, in Máire Stafford’s case, as a translator into Irish of classic European operas such as Così fan Tutte and The Magic Flute.

After schooling at Scoil Fursa and then Coláiste Iognáid, he started a degree in commerce at University College, Galway (now NUI Galway). It was there, while acting with the student drama society, that his talent was spotted by members of the then-emerging Druid Theatre Company, and in 1978 he was invited to join them full-time.

It was during this period that he met his first wife, Joyce McGreevy, with whom he had a son, Eoghan.

As the memorial card at his funeral in Sydney in April put it, quoting Patrick Kavanagh, “A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes ... and finds that it is his life …,” so it was with Stafford.

It was during Druid’s tour of Australia in 1988 that Stafford met his second wife-to-be, Carolyn Forde, a teacher in Sydney

This was a golden period for Druid and Stafford. The company brought classic European drama such as Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera to Irish audiences. It combined memorable and innovative reworkings of Irish classics such as Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (with Stafford as Christy Mahon), Boucicault’s The Colleen Bawn and the plays of the then almost-forgotten MJ Molloy, The King of Friday’s Men and The Wood of the Whispering, with new Irish work by Tom Murphy (Conversations on a Homecoming, with Stafford as Junior) and Martin McDonagh, in the world premiere of whose The Lonesome West Stafford created the role of Coleman. The company at this time in the 1980s also did memorable revivals of Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark at the Abbey Theatre and Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians. Touring widely abroad, Druid by the end of that decade had secured for itself an international reputation.

[ Máire Stafford: Esteemed actor, director and costume designer ]

It was during Druid’s tour of Australia in 1988, his first marriage having ended, that Stafford met his second wife to be, Carolyn Forde, a teacher in Sydney. This was a deeply propitious meeting; Stafford decided, the following year, to settle in Australia, and the couple went on to have three children: Cian, Aelia and Benen. He also met Dickson (originally from Britain) and John O’Hare. O’Punksky’s is today one of that country’s longest-surviving independent theatre companies.

Deeply committed to Galway, Stafford returned in 2018 to direct a 90th anniversary programme at An Taibhdhearc

In 1990, O’Punksky’s produced the Australian premiere, directed by Stafford, of McGuinness’s masterpiece Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, a play with a profound resonance for Australians due to their deeply embedded folk memory of the sacrifice in the first World War of soldiers of the Anzac Division.

The following year Stafford returned to Ireland for three years as artistic director of Druid, during which he initiated what proved to be a very important co-operation with playwright Vincent Woods, resulting in one of the most acclaimed Irish plays of recent times, At the Black Pig’s Dyke. In 1992, for the Galway Arts Festival, he produced Seán Tyrrell’s version of Brian Merriman’s 18th-century celebration of sexual liberation The Midnight Court, staging it first in a tent on the shores of Lough Gréine in east Clare.

Back in Australia with O’Punksky’s from 1994, the company brought contemporary Irish theatre to a completely new audience on the other side of the world from its origins.

The Gigli Concert, in 1999, won the Australian Critics’ Circle Best Production Award for that year. s, John O’Hare, head of acting at the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin, said this was responsible for getting O’Punksky’s “the seed funding [from 2000] for all our following productions; we were never short of money from then on”.

Deeply committed to Galway, Stafford returned in 2018 to direct a 90th anniversary programme at An Taibhdhearc.

[ Druid takes ‘mortgage melodrama’ to the stage ]

He also worked in film and television, most notably with Sam Neill and Jackie Weaver in Ride Like a Girl (2019) and in the joint Irish-Australian co-production for TV, Drop Dead Weird, with Pauline McLynn.

Stafford is survived by his wife Carolyn and his children Eoghan, Cian, Aelia, Benen and grandchild Banjo and by his siblings Órfhlaith, Fionnuala, Conall and Ruairí. He was predeceased by his sister Niamh, who died in infancy.