Final rehearsals are under way in Galway ahead of the staging of three landmark Seán O'Casey plays, as part of the city’s Arts Festival.
The Druid Theatre Company will present the work during a sold-out run later this month.
The Druid O’Casey project involves the staging of the "Dublin Trilogy", The Plough and the Stars, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, all on one day, with some individual performances scheduled too.
The company’s co-founder and Artistic Director Garry Hynes said the plays have never been performed together before and the plan to present the trilogy has been in the works for several years.
Ms Hynes said: "You’re doing six and a half hours of theatre as opposed to the more conventional two. We have a bigger company, longer rehearsal times and all that, but the energy it releases among us and the audiences is fantastic."
The trilogy takes in the period from the Easter Rising, through the War of Independence and onto the Civil War.
Ms Hynes said that while the production was not devised to coincide with the centenary of some of the events referenced in the O’Casey plays, it is a happy coincidence that this is the case.
She said: "There’s no narrative arc with the characters, but there is a narrative arc with the events. The plays are being performed in chronological order, so you do get a sense of the back narrative of the politics and the fighting of the time."
Sets, costumes, lighting, and sound design have all been devised to take in the scale of the undertaking while ensuring the heart of the works remains centre stage.
Set and costume designer Francis O’Connor said the starting point for his task was to view the three plays as one work in nine acts.
He said this allowed him to find themes and ideas that crossed through all three plays and then use that to inform the design.
Practicalities involved in presenting the three works in one day also fed into the process, to ensure the set could move and be reconfigured across the production.
Technical rehearsals are underway this week, ahead of the first preview show at the weekend.
Eighteen actors are involved across the three plays, many of them taking lead roles in different works.
Hilda Fay, who plays Bessie Burgess in The Plough and the Stars and Juno, in Juno and the Paycock, is excited by the challenge.
She said the trilogy was a massive part of Irish theatrical history and the approach to the process had been "amazing".
She said: "O'Casey is such an important writer to our country. These plays stand the test of time and they’re universal. They’re beautiful works and each character is so unique but I’m so proud to be playing such strong characters and such strong women.
"And he [O’Casey] wrote beautifully for women in terms of their strength and how they pick up the pieces and look after their families. They weren’t the heroes in those times but they were the women who kept everything going".
Ms Fay’s colleague, Rory Nolan, plays Captain Boyle in Juno and Seamus Sheilds in Shadow of a Gunman.
Mr Nolan said: "They’re fascinating plays, with some of the best characters ever written and three of the most famous plays in the Irish repertoire."
He said there is a "box set quality" of seeing the three works chronologically.
"When you put all three together, as we work on them, we’re kind of amazed they haven’t all been done together before.
"O’Casey himself said he didn’t know he was writing a trilogy but he did. He’s writing about the events very close to the time they happened and that gives a remarkable peek into our past as a nation and the stuff that went on around the foundation of the State."
The production forms the centrepiece of this year’s Galway International Arts Festival, which gets under way on 17 July.
Druid O’Casey will tour Belfast and Dublin later in the summer before the company takes the production to the US in the autumn.
