The Shaughraun review: Druid serve up five-star production at Galway Arts Festival 

Garry Hynes gives the Victorian melodrama a hugely-enjoyable pantomime twist 

Aaron Monaghan and Marie Mullen in Druid's production of The Shaughraun at Galway International Arts Festival.  Picture: Ros Kavanagh 

The Shaughraun, Town Hall Theatre, Galway ★★★★★

How do you follow something like the intense, dark, broody Macbeth that Druid served up in Galway last year? With something completely different: a Victorian melodrama reimagined as a panto that at the same time places its author, Dion Boucicault, among the greats of Irish literature, and – despite his reputation as a “mere” entertainer – finds that he is not out of place there at all (at all).

As such, this is an immense directorial achievement from Garry Hynes, a production that is a riot of clever allusions and sophisticated fun. You could bring a 12-year-old and a professor and both would have a great time.

What WB Yeats famously dismissed as stage Irish “buffoonery and easy sentiment” becomes here the complex strategy of the colonised: a way of dissembling, manipulating the powerful; an evasive role-playing that uses the expectations of the Englishman against him, and his apparatus of power.

Here, that wiliness is embodied by Conn, the Shaughraun, played with nuanced understanding by Aaron Monaghan. He’s an antihero who’s offstage quite often, but Hynes sees him as the animating spirit of the action, and so has him literally setting the scene: dragging about tables and chairs, ladders and so on, to conjure rooms, prisons, or perilous clifftops straight out of a gothic novel.

 The Shaughraun. Picture: Ros Kavanagh 

In contrast is Fintan Kinsella’s Captain Molineux, the English red-coat, marvelling constantly at “you Irish” as he tries in vain to describe them and their country, the anti-England and thus “the most extraordinary” he’s ever known. Brian Friel ran with this in Translations, and Hynes doesn’t have to do much to show how Boucicault’s work is a precursor to that modern classic.

The plot is straight out of a gothic novel too: all escapes and kidnappings, letters unread or undelivered, estates mortgaged and imperilled. Stirring the pot is Rory Nolan as the villain Corry Kinchela, here imagined as a ludicrous mixture of Pozzo from Waiting for Godot and Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races. (He’s only missing Muttley, but we do have Conn’s puppet dog Tatters, who sings during the fake wake. Yes, it’s that kind of play.) 

Do we take it seriously? Of course not. And the ensemble here delivers it all with heavy doses of knowing irony. Indeed, we find ourselves playing at being a Victorian audience, while sharing the postmodern joke.

Megan Cusack in The Shaughraun. Picture: Ros Kavanagh 

Another nod to Friel comes in Francis O’Connor’s sympathetic set: a giant Ordnance Survey map of Ireland. The torn instrument of the coloniser then, enfolding a place too complex and real for such two-dimensional representation. Behind one fold sits Conor Lenihan, whose piano accompaniment takes us from Handel to ballads to hectic silent-film scores, and many points in between.

As we expect from Druid, the ensemble has no weaknesses. Marty Rea plays Robert Ffolliott, returned to claim his fortune, with an almost Anglo-Saxon obliviousness; Jamie Beamish gives the henchman Harvey Duff a cowardly tenacity; and the Cork duo of Eileen Walsh and Megan Cusack bring vigour and wit to the roles of Ffolliott’s fiancee and sister, respectively. Marie Mullen has great fun sending up Synge as Mrs O’Kelly.

This is a hugely entertaining revival, in which Garry Hynes argues persuasively for Dion Boucicault’s central place in the story of Irish theatre.

• Until July 25