THOMAS Kilroy's (After CHEKHOV)

THOMAS KiLrOY’S THE SEaGULL (AFTEr CHEKHOV) 1 Jack Gleeson in rehearsals for The Seagull . Photograph: Ste Murray. THOMAS KiLrOY’S THE SEaGULL (AFTEr CHEKHOV) COOLE PARK, GALWAY 6–21 AUGUST 2021 ON DEMAND 5–12 SEPTEMBER 2021 GALWAY INTERNATIONAL ARTS FESTIVAL 2 3 CREATIVE TEAM Director Garry Hynes Set and Costume Design Francis O’Connor Lighting Design James F. Ingalls Sound Design Gregory Clarke Music Conor Linehan Hair & Make-Up Gráinne Coughlan Associate Costume Designer Clíodhna Hallissey Assistant Director Sarah Baxter Director of Photography Colm Hogan CAST Dr Hickey Brian Doherty John Olohan, Eileen Walsh and Marty Rea in rehearsals for The Seagull. Photograph: Ste Murray. Constantine Jack Gleeson James Liam Heslin TIME AND PLACE Peter Bosco Hogan Mary Bláithín MacGabhann The action takes place on the Desmond family estate in the Pauline Marie Mullen West of Ireland, in the 1880s. Lily Agnes O’Casey ACT I The lawn. Cousin Gregory John Olohan ACT II The garden, a week later. Mr Aston Marty Rea ACT III The dining room, a week later. Isobel Desmond Eileen Walsh ACT IV The study, two years later. Cook John McHugh Maid Mary McHugh There will be an interval between Act II and Act III. Jack Peter Shine Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes (approximately) plus an interval. 4 5 THE SEAGULL REVISITED This version was first performed forty student at Trinity in Dublin, Huston years ago at the Royal Court Theatre invited him down to St. Cleran’s in in London. There have been other County Galway where the film director productions since then but this one by was living the life of a country squire. Druid is special not least because of Max loved it. He had the Anglo-Irish the extraordinary director Garry Hynes. gentry in mind when he read his That first production was a very English Chekhov. It just so happened that I had event with some brilliant English the same fascination myself. actors, including Alan Rickman, so then this one is a kind of response to it, a I have been asked more than once to bringing of the play home to the West adapt other plays of Chekhov and I’ve of Ireland and Coole Park. Certainly had to say no, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t I had this setting in my mind when I find a personal route into the material, made this adaptation. Coole was one comparable to my fascination with of the models for the house in the play; the Anglo-Irish and I had exhausted Moore Hall in County Mayo, the home this with The Seagull. My fascination Brian Friel and Thomas Kilroy pictured at the Chekhov House-Museum, Yalta, on a visit in 2008. Photograph: Anne Friel. of George Moore, was another. was two-fold, partly my sense of Irish history but also my reading of Anglo- and the distant, big city, with its It was Max Stafford-Clark, the artistic Irish literature, writers like Yeats and deceptive promise of escape. director of the Royal Court, who Synge, Shaw and Wilde. There were suggested that I might adapt The also the Anglo-Irish novels of the Revisiting the play now has had a Seagull to an Irish setting. He has a nineteenth century, particularly one curious effect as I now see a change passionate interest in Irish history and novel that lies behind this adaptation, in the main thrust of the play. Instead theatre. Indeed, I had already worked George Moore’s A Drama in Muslin. of the centrality of the Anglo-Irish, I with him on my play Tea and Sex and This book gives a vivid picture of life in now see the powerful theme of love. Shakespeare at the Abbey, some time the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ in the West Everyone seems to be in love but this before this, with Donal McCann. Max’s of Ireland during the period in which is a love that only releases destruction. suggestion that the new version be the plays of Chekhov are set. It catches If this is the result of love, can you set in a West of Ireland ‘Big House’ the confusion of the household on the really call it love? had a curious source. His father was eve of revolution, the constant traffic, a distinguished Freudian psychiatrist the mixing of people from different Thomas Kilroy who was advisor on the John Huston backgrounds, the complex relationship July 2021 film, Freud. So, when Max was a between the provincial, rural household 6 7 A STAGE UPON NATURE – KILROY’S CHEKHOV The Seagull was very nearly Chekhov’s to explore moving the setting of the last play. First performed in St. play to the West of Ireland and to ask Petersburg in 1896, it was, in the if Kilroy would write the adaptation. playwright’s own words, ‘a complete Stafford-Clark’s father was a notable fiasco … The moral: one should not psychiatrist who was called on to write plays.’ Chekhov swore he would advise John Huston at his Galway write no more for the stage following home at St. Clerans when working that calamitous opening run of The on his 1962 film, Freud: The Secret Seagull. That changed when the Passion. Kilroy’s adaptation also brings Moscow Art Theatre staged a new a form of psychological exploration production two years later in 1898, to what he termed ‘the condition of directed by Konstantin Stanislavski the colonizer’, culminating in what he and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. described as his ‘fascination with the Cover of rehearsal script of Thomas Kilroy's The Seagull, Royal Court Manuscript draft of the opening scene of The Seagull by Thomas Kilroy. The immense success of The Seagull Anglo-Irish and by the place of the Big London, April 1981. Kilroy Archive, Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. Kilroy Archive, Hardiman Library, NUI Galway. would prove to be of vital importance House in Irish history, and the role of for establishing both Chekhov to the Anglo-Irish in our literature’. the lakeside home of the Desmonds. continued to reverberate after they Moscow audiences but also the Russian names are changed to Irish were finished being told, where families Moscow Art Theatre itself, and all it Kilroy’s literary archive is housed at the names. The original Irina Arkadina now and memories are in motion between would achieve and influence in modern Hardiman Library, NUI Galway, where becomes Isobel Desmond, the leading tradition and change, from The Cherry theatre globally. So much so, in fact, Kilroy was Professor of Modern English actress of the London stage ('Just Orchard to Three Sisters. was the Moscow Art Theatre so when he first worked on The Seagull mention Ellen Terry to her and all hell enthralled to the play’s success, that adaptation. The Kilroy archive, of over breaks loose'). Boris Trigorin changes The Russian peasantry endured much it adopted the white seagull as the fifty boxes of manuscripts, includes the to Mr. Aston and 'the Seagull’, Nina, of the same fate of the Irish tenant theatre’s emblem. first drafts of The Seagull adaptation, becomes Lily. farmers of the mid to late nineteenth which document the development of century – subjugated by a wasteful The play’s journey from Moscow to an idea and of Kilroy’s visualisation of The new setting of 1880s Galway landlord class and who existed through Galway was also quite circuitous. Chekhov’s Russia onto the landscape positions the play both in and traditional means of often subsistence The play was initially a commission of the fictionalised Desmond Estate approaching moments of great social agrarian practice. Yet, the balance of made to Thomas Kilroy from the in the West of Ireland. In Kilroy’s change. Chekhov had a gift of setting power was also becoming unsettled Royal Court Theatre in London. manuscripts we see the first mapping out action within a play that often leads in Ireland, politically and economically. The theatre’s artistic director, Max of characters as well as of landscape to a succession of enquiry long after The resulting financial and social Stafford-Clark, wrote to Kilroy in 1980 from Chekhov’s Russian provinces to the play’s ending. He knew stories decline of many landed families 8 9 Agnes O’Casey in rehearsals for affected their wealth, family ties, faith, darkness and the rising of the moon. and influence. For many of the landed Anglo-Irish gentry, a land clearing also Kilroy’s great achievement is in became a family clearing. capturing the lyrical sentiments of a The Seagull family, with all its complexities, linked The punitive rents could not be paid by to its environment, class, relationships, . Photograph: Ste Murray. impoverished tenants across Ireland of and the rhythms of the language the time. Political and agrarian agitation and memory of the land, rooted in would see the establishment of the what Kilroy described as the spaces Irish National Land League in 1879 between ‘the life of the imagination and in Co. Mayo. A national movement the world of daily living’: was now underway and its effects are mirrored in The Seagull through LILY: Can you see that house in the the ineffective estate management of distance, through the trees? Cousin Gregory. By the end of the ASTON: Yes nineteenth century, a wave of cultural LILY: That’s my home. It was my nationalism and the desire for a new mother’s home, too. I know every theatre of the poetic imagination, inch of this countryside. I know all the like that longed for by Constantine secrets of the lake.

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