Today marks two years since Graham McLaren and Neil Murray took over as artistic directors of Ireland’s national theatre. They arrived at afractious time. The backlash against the inequality in Fiach Mac Conghail’s final season — a 1916 commemoration programme that featured nine works by men and one children’s play by a woman — was so profound it changed how Irish theatre and the film and television sector regard gender when programming work.
During a break from rehearsals for a restaging of the theatre adaptation of Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, McLaren, who is directing the show, sits down in the basement cafe. Asked how the two years have been, he quips that it feels more like 10; from the outside, it looks like that, too.