Entertaining Ireland: Druid Theatre Company presents Colleen Bawn

For Garry Hynes, artistic director with Druid Theatre Company, 2014 has begun where 2013 ended, with the joyous revival of Dion Boucicault’s 1860 play, The Colleen Bawn.

Having premiered in Galway before Christmas, the show is in Dublin this week, before completing with dates in Belfast and Limerick. Hynes’s faith in the tension and pathos of the drama is charming, and she ignites the comedy without archly hamming up the ‘Oirishness’.

“You have to find a way to reinvent Boucicault, because we are not the Victorian audience that he was writing for,” she says. “But if you just ham it up, then I don’t see the point of that. Boucicault was one of those people who helped invent the mass audience that has now migrated to film. He was a master entertainer.