UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN
HONORARY CONFERRING
Thursday, 1 September 2011 at 4.30 p.m.
TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY DR EAMONN JORDAN, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin on 1 September 2011, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on GARRY HYNES
President, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.
As critics and commentators account for the history of Irish Theatre from the 1970s forward, key playwrights will be mentioned, as will the crucial work of designers and the essential, defining performances given by many great actors. On the directing front, the name of Garry Hynes will be absolutely central to the telling of that story on so many different levels.
Garry Hynes has been Artistic Director of Druid Theatre Company from 1975 to 1991, and from 1995 to date. Between 1991 to 1994, she served as Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre. Apart from her work with Druid, Garry Hynes has directed nationally at both The Abbey and Gate Theatres, and internationally for theatres like the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Royal Exchange, Manchester, and London’s Royal Court, in New York for Second Stage, Signature Theater and the Manhattan Theater Club, and in Washington D.C. for The Kennedy Center. She has directed work by the likes of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, and the premiere of a work by the esteemed playwright, Arthur Miller.
However, it is her work within the Irish tradition that has established her international reputation most. In relation to this vast body of work I identity four key strands. Firstly, as one of the co-founders of Druid Theatre Company (with Mick Lally and Marie Mullen), Hynes’s early landmark production of JM Synges’ The Playboy of the Western World set new standards in terms of how a performance of Synge’s work might be approached, interpreted, and re-considered. Her ground breaking work on Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the stars on the Abbey stage, remains a constant point of discussion amongst the academic and theatre communities, who recall with great vividness how her production stripped back many of the nostalgic accretions that had often accumulated around the play. What Hynes’s mise en-scéne achieved was to expose the impact of poverty and historic circumstances on the characters in the play. The celebrated Druid Synge cycle from 2005, when the company produced all of Synge’s plays, is a more recent example of Hynes’s sophisticated approach to canonical works and is indicative of the sort of creative intelligence required to generate a cultural event of international significance.
The second major strand to her career is her engagement with new writing. Her work with Tom Murphy for Druid in the 1980s, with landmark productions of Conversations on a Homecoming, and Bailegangaire, not only revitalised Murphy’s career, but set the highest of standards in terms of writing and performance for the dramas which were to follow in the next decades. Her commitment to directing new writing ranges from work by Marina Carr and Geraldine Aron, to (opens in a new window)Lucy Caldwell and Mark O’Rowe.
However, it is with the work of Martin McDonagh that Garry Hynes is most associated. In 1996, her production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, won numerous awards. When the play reached Broadway, playing for over three hundred performances, it was nominated for no less than six Tony awards, winning four in 1998. Garry Hynes’s award for best director is of course a considerable achievement. One begins to understand the extent of that accomplishment, with the realisation that she was in fact, the first woman to do so. Most recently, Hynes returned to the directing of McDonagh’s work, with a production of The Cripple of Inishmaan one that has gone on to win nine major awards over the last three years.
Thirdly, as Artistic Director of Druid, Garry Hynes has fostered and provided a home for one of the most extraordinary current talents, Enda Walsh, whose last three plays with Druid, The Walworth Farce, New Electric Ballroom and Penelope, have been hugely successful with both national and international audiences. Both Hynes and the company have provided an enabling working environment for Walsh just as they did for Tom Murphy back in the 1980s.
Fourthly, Druid’s policy of encouraging new writing is to be lauded, but perhaps just as importantly is the way that Hynes and Druid have reached out to audiences both nationally and internationally, with a touring policy that has brought the work to many venues across Ireland, both traditional and non-traditional ones, and also across America in particular. As Hynes herself has suggested, touring is in the DNA of Druid.
Over the years many of us have attended the visually and emotionally stunning productions that Garry Hynes has directed, whether it is an O’Casey play on the scale of The Silver Tassie, the wonderfully ritualistic production of Tom Murphy’s Famine, or the brilliant premiere of Marina Carr’s astonishing Portia Coughlan. With Hynes’s work there is always an extraordinary sense of vision, clarity of purpose, and of understanding – a vividness to the action, a commitment by the acting ensemble to precision and intensity and most of all to each other. Patrice Pavis talks about the significance of theatre director in terms of rhythm, and it is that sense of an intense rhythm which I regard as one of the defining features of Hynes’s work. The rhythm invites an audience in, attracts the spectator to pick up on the pulse of performance and to engage with the work with the requisite awarenesses, attentiveness, commitment, distinctiveness, and imagination. In effect, what Hynes’s productions achieve is a capacity to give substantial status to the role the spectator in the encounter that is the theatrical event.
Throughout a long, extraordinary career, Garry Hynes’s ability to re-imagine and reposition canonical works, and the capacity to promote new writing, have meant that designers, actors and writers achieve the opportunities, exposure and prominence that their work deserves. These exceptional productions display Hynes’s risk taking, astonishing leadership, making her both an interpreter and collaborator of the highest calibre. Globally, Gary Hynes is celebrated as director of extraordinary vision and skill, with boundless commitment and passion for the art form of theatre, which we are here to acknowledge and celebrate today.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hanc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.