Druid Theatre Company
Three members of the University College Galway drama society founded a company in 1975 and gave it a name that has since toured Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States. Druid was the first professional theatre company in Ireland set up outside Dublin, and with Macnas and the Arts Festival it is credited with making Galway one of the country's cultural centres. Its theatre is a converted tea store in the middle of town.
Checked against the source on 2026-09-19.
Michael Coghlan from Adelaide, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Druid, Town Hall Theatre on the 3D model; tap a pin for its page and directions.
A tea store on a peppercorn rent
Garry Hynes, Marie Mullen and Mick Lally met in Dramsoc at the university and founded Druid in 1975. Since 1979 the company has owned its own building in the city centre, a former tea storehouse of the McDonaghs, one of the city's wealthy merchant families; in the late 1970s the company negotiated a peppercorn rent, fitted out a venue and rehearsal space, and the McDonagh family later donated the building outright.
Murphy and McDonagh
Druid and Tom Murphy have worked together since 1980, and in 1985 the company gave the world premieres of Conversations on a Homecoming and Bailegangaire, the latter with Siobhán McKenna. Hynes left to run the Abbey from 1991 to 1994 and came back in 1995, when she and Anne Butler read an unsolicited script by an unknown writer named Martin McDonagh. The Beauty Queen of Leenane opened at the Town Hall Theatre on 1 February 1996 with Marie Mullen, Anna Manahan and Brian F. O'Byrne, co-produced with the Royal Court in London. Vincent Woods's At the Black Pig's Dyke had premiered with Druid in 1992.
The big cycles
In summer 2005 DruidSynge staged all six of John Millington Synge's plays, from Riders to the Sea to the unfinished Deirdre of the Sorrows, as double bills over two or three days; it opened at the Town Hall Theatre on 16 July 2005 during the Arts Festival and the Irish Times called it one of the greatest achievements in the history of Irish theatre. DruidMurphy, announced in November 2011, put three Tom Murphy plays together as a trilogy with NUI Galway, the Arts Festival, the Lincoln Center Festival and Quinnipiac University. For the fortieth anniversary Hynes directed DruidShakespeare, the four history plays of the Henriad adapted by Mark O'Rowe, launched in March 2015. The model on this page pins the Druid building and the Town Hall Theatre.
Questions people ask
Who founded Druid Theatre?
Where is the Druid theatre in Galway?
What was DruidSynge?
Written from Wikipedia, "Druid Theatre Company" (CC BY-SA 4.0), read on 2026-09-19, and from the OpenStreetMap places on the model. Nothing has been added from memory; follow the source for its footnotes.