A delightful divorce

Interview some theatre directors and one simple question will often set off a lengthy monologue about a play, actor or artistic goal. Not so with Garry Hynes, the woman whose work as artistic director of Galway's Druid Theatre Company launched Martin McDonagh's career and made Broadway history. Her conversation is such a model of straight-talking economy that you suspect she'd never be penalised for hesitation or deviation on Just a Minute. But she might not reach the 60-second whistle.

We meet at Riverside Studios in west London, where she has been rehearsing My Brilliant Divorce, a one-woman comedy by Geraldine Aron premiered by Druid in Galway in November 2001 with the American actress Glenne Headley and now on Shaftesbury Avenue with Dawn French as Angela, an Irish-born Londoner dumped by her husband. Hynes lights the first of several small cigars and gives this 80-minute piece a characteristically pithy summary. "It's the story of a woman who married very young and is divorced at one of the most vulnerable periods of her life: middle age," she says. "After years of being mother, wife, daughter, I found myself without a role in life." She has to redefine herself and a lot of the play is how she stumbles and comes into her own. "What Ger [Aron] brings to it is a particular comic spin and a certain understanding that gets recognition from men and women of all ages."

Hynes has admired Aron since directing her award-winning exploration of a brother-sister relationship, Bar and Ger, which in 1977 became the first play by a living writer staged by Druid. Galway-born, like Aron, Hynes had directed numerous student productions while reading English and history at the city's university and knew that she wanted a theatre career. "But then, professional theatre in Ireland was completely Dublin-based," she recalls.

In 1975, with a £300 grant from the Galway Tourist Board, Hynes and two university friends formed Druid and mounted a successful summer season in a converted hotel function room. Then, with fortuitous timing, they secured assistance from the Arts Council of Ireland as it was beginning to promote theatre outside the capital. The scale of Druid's expansion since then is easily gauged: an Arts Council grant of £1,000 for 1976, compared to £308,000 for 2003. The company moved into a 350-seat auditorium in 1979 and produced a mixture of new work, revivals and classics, building up a loyal audience and touring to places like Limerick and Cork.

According to Christopher Fitz-Simon, a former director of the Abbey and author of The Irish Theatre, Hynes consistently demonstrated that "her great strength is in reinterpreting plays of the comparatively recent past, such as those by Tom Murphy, and bringing out things that the original productions missed." Murphy's Conversations on a Homecoming was one of three Hynes/Druid productions seen at London's Donmar Warehouse in the Eighties, but it was not until 1996, after Hynes had spent three years away from Galway, that the Martin McDonagh phenomenon brought the company major recognition in Britain and the United States.

Hynes had plucked McDonagh's blackly comicThe Beauty Queen of Leenane from the Druid slush pile and remembers thinking to herself "Here's someone with a strange take on Ireland, who can write dialogue and tell a story." Sell-out runs of Beauty Queen and the other two plays in McDonagh's Leenane trilogy followed in Galway, the West End and on Broadway, where in 1998 Hynes became the first woman to win a Tony for Best Director.

So, as My Brilliant Divorce opens, Hynes will resume preparations for an event that could eclipse the McDonagh years. The Synge Project should see Druid producing all of JM Synge's plays in repertory in 2004-05. "No matter how illustrious your past," she concludes, "the only thing that matters in theatre is what you're working on."

'My Brilliant Divorce' opens at the Apollo Theatre, London W1 (0870 890 1101) on 24 February