Theatre Review: Big Maggie

Druid Theatre Company | Dir: Garry Hynes There were things I didn’t like about this play. Fairly minor things overall, and I feel churlish picking them out, so in the interests of maintaining a veneer of critical credibility, let’s just fire them out here and then we can get on with things. The tone, first of all, isn’t quite sure what to be… there’s serious drama, but it sits uneasily besides the borderline panto of later scenes. Accents are wont to go wandering in mid-sentence. The performances… well, the performances are solid, but Keith Duffy throwing himself around the stage crotch-first, like David Bowie in Labyrinth by way of Carry On, is almost more than a person can take of a Tuesday evening. There were things I didn’t like. But by the end, I was struggling to keep a hold of them, because more than anything else, this play is … There’s more

Theatre News: Autumn Run for JB Keane’s ‘Big Maggie’

Druid have announced that John B Keane’s ‘Big Maggie’ is set for the stage once more with a run in Galway’s Town Hall Theatre (November 11th - 19th) and Dublin’s Gaiety (November 21st - 26th). Culch.ie have announced that they’re rather delighted by the news! One of Keane’s best, it deals with all the go-to themes of Irish theatre: money, land, and in this case some secretive sex and black humour as title character Maggie, recently-widowed, becomes the steadfast matriarch in the face of her squabbling, inheritance-hungry children. If you’ve never seen or read Big Maggie then we recommend making it your business this time around. It’s ten years since Garry Hynes directed it for The Abbey and it was commended for how well it was brought into the modern day at the time (it originally premiered in 1969). Hynes is once more in the director’s chair for this production … There’s more