Druid Theatre 1975-2025

Marking the 50th anniversary of one of the world's leading theatre companies, this book collects six of its most impactful plays, together in one volume for the first time. Druid Theatre is Ireland's leading theatre company. Since 1975, they have surprised, delighted, and inspired audiences worldwide, touring from their home city of Galway in the west of Ireland to countless other locations nationally and internationally. Under the leadership of Garry Hynes, the first woman to win a Tony Award for directing (for Druid's Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998), the company has revitalised the Irish dramatic tradition by staging exciting new plays and by breathing life into neglected classics. This anthology, published to mark the company's fiftieth anniversary in 2025, celebrates that tradition by gathering six key plays from the company's history. Featuring an exciting blend of established, emerging, and unjustly forgotten playwrights, the book also provides fascinating information about the company's history, with each play being accompanied by a short essay that includes images (many of them never published before) from Druid's archive at the University of Galway. The selection of plays allows key themes from Druid's history to be seen more clearly - to allow readers to understand how the company has so fearlessly charted the boundaries between the realistic and the fantastic, the past and the present, and the individual and the wider society. But it also presents six plays that are of huge value in their own right: these are original and daring dramas that have shaped and defined a half-century of Irish playwriting.