Tracing the real people in Brian Friel's ‘first great Irish play'

Irish Times

6 days ago

Brian Friel
had a healthy suspicion of journalists. A reporter once described how, when asked to reflect on the success of one of his plays, he did 'a touching impersonation of an opossum playing dead at the approach of danger'.
Still, in February 1963, when a journalist from the Belfast Telegraph caught up with him, Friel was frank about his work in progress. He was writing a play called The Ballad of Ballybeg but didn't know if he'd ever finish it: 'I have been working at it for six months and so far my characters aren't moving.'
His ambition, he added, was to write 'the great Irish play': 'Such a play is one where the author can talk so truthfully and accurately about people in his own neighbourhood … so that these folks could be living in Omagh, Omaha or Omansk.'
A few weeks later, the 34-year-old left for Minneapolis, where over several months as an 'observer' at the Guthrie Theater he honed his craft. On his return home, he and his wife Anne took their children to the Rosses of west Donegal. And there, near Kincasslagh, which comprised little more than O'Boyle's shop and Logue's hotel (in truth, a bar), the Ballad of Ballybeg became Philadelphia, Here I Come!
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The play spans the night and morning before the emigration of Gar O'Donnell, a young man conflicted about both his imminent departure and his relationship with his emotionally inarticulate father, Screwballs, a county councillor and proprietor of a general store. Philadelphia opened at the Dublin Theatre Festival to a rapturous reception in September 1964. It moved to Broadway in 1966, where it ran for 324 performances and won several Tony Awards, including that for Best Play.
Friel had written his first 'great Irish play'.
Screwballs
Main Street, Glenties, Co Donegal. Photograph: Finbarr O'Reilly/The New York Times
Philadelphia was the first play Friel set in 'Ballybeg'. Among the others are Translations (1980) and his best-loved work, Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), whose run at Dublin's 3Olympia finishes this weekend. And because of the symmetry between Lughnasa's characters and the lives of his mother's people in Glenties, there is a tendency to assume 'Ballybeg' represents that southwest Donegal town.
But then, as Friel intimated to the Belfast Telegraph, Ballybeg is Anywhere. Well, it is Anywhere – and it is not. In Philadelphia, for instance, the stage directions for the shopkeeper-cum-county councillor's entrance are as follows: 'SB appears at the shop door. He is in his late 60s. Wears a hat, a good dark suit, collar and tie, black apron. SB O'DONNELL is a responsible, respectable citizen.'
In notes on characters in an early draft, Friel remarks of Screwballs: 'Aged in his 60s. Hat. Daniel E O'Boyle.' It is a clear reference to Daniel E O'Boyle (1873–1958), the proprietor of the general store in Kincasslagh, who was a county councillor from 1925 through 1950, and who, just like Screwballs, had a younger wife.
The Master
Daniel E O'Boyle with his wife Annie O'Rawe, the daughter of a Falls Road publican, and their son Ted. Photograph: Courtesy of Breandán Mac Suibhne
Daniel E O'Boyle died in 1958. However, at least one other character in Philadelphia was based on somebody who was alive in the 1960s: Master Boyle, who drops into Screwball's to say goodbye to Gar. And to rant about the priest trying to get him fired: 'Enter MASTER BOYLE from the scullery. He is around 60, white-haired, handsome, defiant. He is shabbily dressed; his eyes, head, hands, arms are constantly moving – he sits for a moment and rises again – he puts his hands in his pockets and takes them out again – his eyes roam around the room but see nothing.'
Boyle has a gift for Gar, a volume of his poems: 'I had them printed privately last month.' Public Gar appears genuinely touched. But Private Gar, his alter ego, who has been sneering at Master Boyle, is dismissive: 'He's nothing but a drunken aul schoolmaster – a conceited, arrogant washout.'
Master Boyle may seem a stock character. Indeed, in 1966 Friel himself said: 'All my characters are the stock ones of Irish plays … I use the stock people and then have to make something of them.' Still, young fellows who rocketed from the west of Ireland to college in bright cities sometimes burned up on re-entry. And if the drunken schoolmaster with frustrated ambitions was a stock character in Irish literature, he was a familiar figure in many small towns.
In an early draft Friel named the person who was in his mind's eye when conjuring Master Boyle: 'The local teacher Dominick Kelly, brilliant, mad, touting his book of privately printed poems; years ago he urged Gar to 'clear out' and now that Gar is escaping the teacher turns mean through jealousy.'
Dominic Ó Ceallaigh or O'Kelly (1900–70) was once considered 'brilliant' and he was what people in the 1960s called 'mad'. The son of schoolmaster, he trained for the priesthood, studying in Rome in 1915–18, but abandoned the idea after completing a degree in Philosophy.
Returning to Ireland, he joined the IRA. A severe beating from Black and Tans left him deaf in one ear.
After the Civil War, in which he took the anti-Treaty side, he taught in various schools in Dublin, including stints in Belvedere and Blackrock, before becoming principal of Finglas National School and then, in 1930, principal in Rush.
In 1933, he left Rush to become principal of Dungloe National School, settling in Kincasslagh, where his wife Úna, herself a teacher, was appointed to a position in the local school. Úna O'Kelly (née Turner) was a native of Gortalowry, CoTyrone, where she had been taught by Friel's aunt, Kate MacLoone.
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Anne Friel on her late husband playwright Brian: 'I was crazy about him. He was everything'
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O'Kelly was active in Fianna Fáil, attending ardfheiseanna as a constituency delegate. Indeed, he was master of ceremonies in 1937 at a Fianna Fáil Aeraíocht, cultural festival, on Narin Strand when eight-year-old Brian Friel was among the performers.
And then things came undone. On the morning of July 17th 1939, O'Kelly left Kincasslagh on the mail car to go to his school in Dungloe – it was the holidays – and when he arrived home at 4.45pm he clearly had drink taken. He took his dinner, and then at 6.00pm said was going to get the paper at Daniel E O'Boyle's, a stone's throw from the house. After 15 minutes there, he crossed the road to Logue's.
On arrival home at 10.00pm, 'very drunk', he picked a row with his wife when he was unable to tune the wireless. Then he viciously attacked her, punching and kicking her unconscious. A priest was called to administer the last rites to her. According to court records, O'Kelly called him a 'baldy-headed bastard' and ordered him out of the house.
Arrested in Belcruit on July 24th, O'Kelly was removed to Sligo Gaol and brought to court three days later, charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on his wife and indecently assaulting one of the maids, a young girl. A trial date was set for mid-October and O'Kelly remanded in custody.
Catherine Walsh (as Madge), Shane O'Regan (Gar Public), Alex Murphy (Gar Private) and Seamus O'Rourke (Screwballs/SB O'Donnell) in a 2021 production of 'Philadelphia' at Cork Opera House. Photograph: Michael Mac Sweeney/Provision
However, on August 17th he was released on bail to Letterkenny Asylum. In October, a doctor testified in court that he was unfit to plead: 'He was suffering from a certain amount of depression and confusion, and a certain amount of loss of memory.'
Press reports at the time show the judge ruled O'Kelly was 'not of sound mind' and returned him to the asylum. There he remained until February 1941, when a jury deemed him sane. He now pleaded guilty to three charges relating to the assault on his wife; the indecent assault charge had been dropped. The judge sentenced him to three months in Sligo Gaol.
Úna O'Kelly, meanwhile, moved with their children to Ramelton, north Donegal, where her brother Seán was an established solicitor, and resumed her teaching career.
By 1943, Dominic O'Kelly was back teaching, at the Prior School, a Protestant secondary school, in Lifford. He taught there until 1948, when he returned to primary teaching in CoSligo as principal of St John's Well and then, in 1950, of Geevagh, a three-teacher school, moving a few years later to Claremorris, Co Mayo. After a car hit him in 1959, he retired early to Downings, north Donegal.
O'Kelly knew no shame. Since his release from prison, he had been a regular contributor of verse to the regional press, especially the Derry Journal
.
In 1960 he published, like Master Boyle, a collection of his poetry, Sky, Sea, Sod. It was available from the printer, the Donegal Democrat, and from himself for 10 shillings and sixpence. His short introduction alludes to his 'undermined career' and there is a marked note of grievance in several poems, notably the 30-verse 'Death by Despair (How a Man Might Die in a Mental Hospital)', which includes his self-pitying account of his attack on his wife.
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'Glenties is the stage': Brian Friel's Donegal
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Dominic O'Kelly died in 1970. An obituary in the Derry Journal lamented the passing of a man of 'giant intellect', a 'most lovable and entertaining character', and a 'poet of outstanding genius'. Preceding it on the very same page was an interview with Friel on plans to make a film of Philadelphia. Friel alone likely got the irony.
Other characters
Translations: Brenda Scallon and Liam Neeson in the original production of Brian Friel's play in the Guildhall, Derry, in 1980. Photograph: Rod Tuach
The solicitor who represented O'Kelly in 1939–41 was Pa O'Donnell (1907–70) of Burtonport, a UCD-educated lawyer, who was subsequently a Fine Gael TD (1949–70) and minister for local government (1954–57). Although not mentioned by name in Friel's drafts, might O'Donnell have been the model for the UCD-educated Senator Doogan in Philadelphia? Perhaps.
Certainly, other Rosses notables inspired characters in Friel's 'Ballybeg' plays. In a draft of Translations, for instance, Friel describes the Ballybeg hedge-schoolmaster as 'a kind of dissipated Eunan O'Donnell'.
Eunan O'Donnell (1923–99), who had an MA in Classics, had established a fee-paying secondary school in Dungloe in 1956. And when free education was introduced, and it was decreed that Dungloe was to have a vocational school, with an emphasis on the trades, not a secondary school, with an emphasis on academic subjects, he left to teach in Gonzaga in Dublin.
In the play, Hugh O'Donnell, the Greek- and Latin-speaking hedge-schoolmaster is uncomfortable with the incoming national schools. He remembers, how, in 1798, he and Jimmy Jack, a 60-year-old who knew the classics and not much else, had marched, with the Aeneid in their pockets, before getting drunk in Phelan's pub in Glenties. There, overcome by the desiderium nostrorum (the need for our own), they resolved to march home. 'And that was the longest 23 miles back I ever made.'
Glenties, before the road was straightened in recent years, was 23 miles from Kincasslagh.
So Ballybeg isn't Glenties any more, Toto, it is Kincasslagh?
No, Dorothy: Ballybeg is Anywhere, but populated in Philadelphia and Translations with characters modelled on people in the Rosses where Brian Friel holidayed from the 1950s.
Breandán Mac Suibhne is a
historian at the University of Galway. He is writing a book on the individuals on whom the characters in Dancing at Lughnasa are based.
A new 35th anniversary production of Dancing at Lughnasa opens on August 1st at St Columba's Comprehensive School in Glenties, near the house in which was play was set.