Derbhle shines in Druidshakespeare

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

DruidShakespeare has been the hottest ticket in Galway for the past two weeks, now Druid Theatre has announced its return for just four performances, from June 16-20, before it continues a tour which sees it visit New York’s Lincoln Festival and Kilkenny Arts Festival.

It’s returning to Druid Lane’s Mick Lally Theatre and there will be no better venue in which to see this memorable production and to get so close to this talented band of actors.

Central to the success of DruidShakespeare – Richard II, Henry IV (Parts One and Two) and Henry V – is Derbhle Crotty, a familiar face with the company.  Her performance as Henry Bolingbroke, the disobedient cousin of Richard II who is exiled, returns, overthrows the king and claims the crown to become Henry IV, is stunning.  Derbhle features in three of the four plays, firstly as Bolingbroke and later Henry IV. And in the final play, when Henry IV is dead, she plays the French herald Montjoy.

She is exhausted, having been up at daybreak for a visit to the American embassy to get her visa for New York.

Despite that, she is warm, chatty and fully of enthusiasm about this production, which some people members of the audience “have compared to Game of Thrones”.

Linguistically, the project is a huge challenge, says Derbhle. “You have to reach into every corner of every word”, because with Shakespeare, every word counts.

“You find you practise a different way of thinking it and speaking it – and you have to practise it, because it doesn’t come naturally. But other people around you are doing it too and that makes it easier.”

Given that Richard II, in which she has a central role, is spoken entirely in verse, it’s no wonder she adds that “it’s like keeping a tiny ball in the air with just your breath”.

Derbhle has performed in Shakespeare before, but it’s been a while. While working in London she played Ophelia in a production of Hamlet at the National Theatre, and Lady Macbeth in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Hamlet. In Ireland she played Paulina in A Winter’s Tale at the Cork Opera House.

But this is a different creature, both in size and because of the approach taken by director Garry Hynes.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.