This year Druid Theatre Company marked their 40th anniversary with one of their most ambitious productions ever. The DruidShakespeare project featured back to back productions of Shakespeare’s History Plays and produced huge challenges for both the cast and director Garry Hynes including casting some of the main roles.
According to Garry the hardest decision of all was to have two women play kings.
"We did this with a company of 13 actors. If we had been casting them according to gender, we would have ended up with one woman only," Hynes recalled to TEN from New York. "I felt that that just simply was not acceptable, to spend a year of Druid's work and only have one woman involved."
A new documentary to be screened on RTÉ tonight looks behind the scenes at this hugely innovative production from its premiere at Galway’s 80-seat Mick Lally theatre to triumphant performances in New York City.
Derbhle Crotty and Rory Nolan in DruidShakespeare
Sometimes known as the Henryad, the History plays of Richard 11, Henry 1V, Parts One and Two, and Henry V are, even individually, a mammoth task to stage.
In the Druid production, the Kingly roles were played by one male actor, Marty Rea as Richard II, while two female actors, Derbhle Crotty as Henry IV and Aisling O'Sullivan as Henry V were cast in the other main roles.
It was decided that Crotty and O'Sullivan would not play women as men, they would play the kings as themselves, with no strapping down of breasts or use of other devices.Hynes said that decision to go with gender-blind casting was a risk that paid off.
"Gradually, it led to the process that if women are playing men, then men can play women."
Marie Mullen in DruidShakespeare
Druid ran the plays back to back, amounting to a particularly demanding six-and-a-half hour production. Garry had a modest enough aspiration, and her hope was that when the audience left they felt they had understood most of what they saw.
"The biggest thing was the audience reaction everywhere, " she says. "The amount of people who came to me and who just passionately spoke about how tremendous an experience it was."
Marty Rea as Richard II and Gavin Drea as Aumerle
The cast were selected following workshops which took place in Dublin in September 2014. A few of the actors had some experience of Shakespearean roles but not all cast members.
“I nearly had a nervous breakdown when I started, I couldn’t penetrate it at all, it was like trying to to speak Italian,“ says Aisling O’Sullivan in documentary.
One of the biggest problems, she says, was how the Welsh and Scottish characters would be represented.
"If you use Welsh and Scottish accents you'd be asking yourself `where are the Irish accents?' We decided to use local Irish accents to represent those. I think hearing Garret Lombard speaking the Welsh character Llwelwyn with a Wexford accent is one of the things I most remember about that. I think Wexford is the oddest accent ever. "
Paddy Kehoe
DruidShakespeare, is on RTÉ One Tuesday 15th December at 10:15pm
