Latest news with #BrianFriel
Irish Independent
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
‘Individual fate and collective misfortune,' why Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa endures, even ten years after his death
Brian Friel, who Garry Hynes called 'the father of modern Irish drama', once described himself as being one of the 'small men' of Irish literature. By this he meant one of the 'journalists and writer-teachers and writer-barristers and writer-civil-servants'.
RTÉ News
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
A fox by design, a hedgehog by nature: the tension at the heart of Brian Friel's enduring appeal
As the Gate Theatre's acclaimed revival of Brian Friel's play Dancing At Lughnasa returns to Dublin's 3Olympia this July, Thomas Conway explores the enduring appeal of the Donegal playwright's work. 'a fox knows many things but a hedgehog knows one big thing' - Archilochus Brian Friel may have aspired to the condition of the fox, always experimenting, always pitching in new directions, always breaking the rules. But he seemed equally inclined towards that of the hedgehog, circling the same obsessions around memory and imagination, around what is perceived and what is actual, around the treacheries involved in shoring up our identities on images of the past that are so little to be trusted. His remarkable output of twenty-four original plays and eight adaptations are distinguished for their stylistic variety and restless innovation, and yet they are also unified by recurring obsessions and motifs. In what does Friel's signature abide? Noting his attention to language as the vehicle for drama gets us some of the way there. We hear Friel testify to this absolute commitment to language at the darkest moment of his struggle with the composition of Translations, as recorded in his journal: '…the play has to do with language and only language. …if it becomes overwhelmed by the political element it is lost.' The redundancy of language seduces Friel too, to judge by so many of his plays, Dancing at Lughnasa among them, that go beyond language in their final moments: 'Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.' Also with Friel, the musical and rhythmical aspects matter more in the structuring than more expected qualities such as plot. As such, while he takes on political themes and public issues, he exercises a primary concern with qualities of language and style, with musical shape, with expressing the inner ebb and flow of thought and emotion. Friel's obsessive return to the fraught boundaries between memory and imagination, between remembering things as they were and as we wish them to have been, between recording the past and making things up, is exemplified in his reliance on the allegorical setting of Ballybeg for many of his most enduring dramas. Ballybeg is itself recognisably a place in history and a realm of the imagination. How do we reckon with the fact that fourteen of Friel's plays have Ballybeg (or Baile Beag, as he called it in Irish) as a setting or key point of reference? We need only dig a little deeper to see correspondences between his two most enduring plays set in Ballybeg for evidence of Friel's wider obsessions: Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa, plays written twenty-five years apart, yet seemingly built on a shared bedrock of memory and myth. Why else does Friel insist on a day's outing in a little blue rowing boat on a remote uplands lake near Ballybeg for both plays? Gar remembers fishing with his father from such a boat in Philadelphia, Here I Come! Rose gives an account of a tryst with Danny Bradley in a boat of the same description in Dancing at Lughnasa. Why else does Friel give Gar (from the earlier play) and Michael (from the later play) four childless Mundy aunts? Why does he retain the names of Agnes and Rose for two of those aunts? Memory's betrayals can only be explored, it seems, by means of such a common stock of images and their correspondences; here we see Friel delve into aspects of his own family history and its mythologies. The Mundy sisters, we are told, are modelled on his aunts, and the tensions between fathers and sons explored across so many of the plays reflects aspects of a strained relationship between Friel and his own headmaster father. What partly distinguishes Friel's work, then, is the attention to the deeply personal that ultimately yields a view on the wholly universal: Friel works from his own particular historical co-ordinates and perspectives with such linguistic dexterity and scrupulous honesty that it resonates with everyone's experience. This quest to state things precisely on his own terms also explains one of Friel's more idiosyncratic features. Friel's plays are distinguished by the softening he exerts on their edges only to draw an audience into the hardest of human truths. (For many Irish playwrights, the trajectory is so often the reverse, a spiky exterior hides a sentimental core.) Friel seems to work in a whimsical register initially, only to ensnare us with a devastating consequence, one that knocks us off balance and leaves us re-evaluating the pattern we thought was unfolding. Such moments not only reveal character in a new light; the actions leading up to the reversal need to be rethought. These elusive endings invite us not merely to contemplate the future but to question everything that has gone before. The plays thus begin again in the mind of the audience the moment the curtain descends on the stage. (This may owe something to Friel's experience as a teacher: as the best teachers do, he leads us by simple steps steadily and stealthily to ever more complex perspectives on a shared dilemma. By the time the audience gains a purchase on the complexity at the heart of the action it feels itself hovering in mid-air, where language is both self-sufficient and no longer serves; it is caught in a moment of suspension that precedes a fall from innocence into experience.) Friel's risk-taking is never more apparent than in the theatrical conceits with which he launches the action—the theatrical sleights of hand that sets the language itself in motion. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! a central character is shadowed by an alter ego; the audience are privileged to hear what Gar alone hears from that private self; the audience also, however, looks Gar's alter ego in the eye, something that Gar never manages to do. In Translations a community speaks Irish but the audience hears English; this community can neither comprehend nor be comprehended by the colonists who seek to govern their lives, but they can by the discerning audience. In Dancing at Lughnasa, a child is addressed by his aunts but this child is never embodied by a child-actor—rather, the child's dialogue is spoken by the adult narrator without conceding in any way to a child's vocal mannerisms. This attention to language is matched by Friel's scrupulous tracking of psychological movements in the characters. These conceits are Friel's self-imposed challenges that he meets head-on in the act of composition; the playing out of the logic of these conceits oftentimes gives the plays their dynamism and shape. They are Friel's stylistic responses to the one constant in the worlds he depicts: the reticence and social constraints on language to which the plays bear witness. Nobody in Friel's world is able to speak her or his mind to another character; however, somehow, by these sleights of hand, the audience are vouchsafed these confidences. What a shock it is, then, to discover that Gar's father as likely has his own alter ego shouting into his ear, keeping him awake, shaking his resolve, and his own bank of memories in which he once had a loving connection with his son. Who would have guessed that 'old Screwballs' has his own inner voice goading him to speak and sabotaging his feeble attempts? The actions are invariably positioned within seismic societal change—where one way of life is being overtaken by another. It is here the plays find their characteristic tone or atmosphere. The central characters are seldom defiant or resigned, but wistful and conflicted about finding themselves unable to take sides. They neither oppose change nor promote it outright; they neither defend themselves against change nor look to guide it or others through it. In Translations, Hugh concedes to teach Maire English only to reveal the quisling he has proven to be. In Dancing at Lughnasa Michael tells us that he finds his missing aunts when it is too late to intervene on their behalf. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! Gar fails to decide why he is leaving, but he knows he must leave. These proxies for Friel often presume to cast a backward glance at changes that may yet still be in train. They look to language as a means to get above these changes and to survey them whole, even as they are part of the flux; they discover in language an inadequacy that never quite gets these changes into proper focus. These characters find in language both their single best resource and something that fails them. Dramatic form, as Friel would reveal, is better than all other literary forms for speaking not only through but around language, to its strengths and its incapacities; drama needs words, the very best words, but it also abandons them. Friel achieves a near impossible balancing act between these two conditions in ways that testify to the utmost care he brought to the labour of writing. This attention to language is matched by Friel's scrupulous tracking of psychological movements in the characters. Here we frequently see a pattern whereby a character's taciturnity and brooding silences are broken by sudden outbursts of zeal and articulacy that are then of no consequence and resolve again into brooding silence. These outbursts are absorbed into some greater historical movement and disappear. The march of history is given a location and a form precisely in Friel's mapping of the failures of the individual to make any distinctive mark against it. How is it that Friel should achieve a vantage point where he can see from above whilst being in the midst of the change himself? It seems that whatever the style the fox in him chooses to exploit, the hedgehog in him re-encounters the tidal force of history pulling him into its current. The fox's freedom and the hedgehog's servitude are always at odds, always held in tension, always yielding to new forms developing around obsessive constants. Even in that journal he wrote during the composition of Translations we hear the conflict play out in neither's favour. The fox pulls him in one direction: 'The play must concern itself only with the dark and private places of individual souls.' The hedgehog pulls him in the other: 'But it is a political play—how can that be avoided?' Maybe it is the abundance of forms and styles within something so recognisably Friel's that accounts for the exhilaration we experience in each encounter with his plays. However uneasy and provisional is each balancing act, some measure of what we all need to survive in the face of change is somehow to be found in, and indeed, around these plays.
Extra.ie
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
Gate Theatre to bring classic show to 3Olympia this summer
Brian Friel's classic play Dancing at Lughnasa is set to have a run at the 3Olympia Theatre from June 27 to July 26. Produced by the Gate Theatre, which previously staged the show in a sold-out run last year, the revival marks the first time a Gate show has been presented on the 3Olympia stage in 35 years, since Sean OCasey's Juno and the Paycock in 1990. 'We are thrilled to rekindle our historic relationship with the Olympia Theatre', said Gate Theatre Executive Director Colm O'Callaghan. 'Our strategic vision is that of an 'Open Gate' where everyone has access to great theatre, and playing to 3Olympias summer audiences is a great way to help us realise this and to expand our audience.' O'Callaghan also added: 'Collaborating with 3Olympia also means that our own stage is available to deliver on other key strategic goals such as premiering contemporary international plays.' The critically acclaimed production will be once again directed by Caroline Byrne, and features a cast including Lauren Farrell, Peter Gowen, and Pauline Hutton. Set in 1936 in the fictional Donegal town of Ballybeg, Dancing at Lughnasa follows the lives of the five Mundy sisters. The play originally premiered in 1990 at the Abbey Theatre and has since become one of Friels most celebrated plays. Considered one of the greatest Irish playwrights of all time, Friel's body of work also includes other classics such as Translations , Philadelphia Here I Come! , and Faith Healer . Tickets for Dancing at Lughnasa are on sale now and can be found here.
Irish Times
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Making History Friel review: Everyman production throws a lot at Brian Friel's clunky play
Making History Everyman, Cork ★★★☆☆ There has been no underestimating the attraction of recognisable topography since the melodramas of the 18th century. Richard Brinsley Sheridan sent urbanites roaming Bath's historic terraces and London's theatre district. Dion Boucicault had noble Irishmen diving into Muckross Lake and meeting amid monastery ruins in Glendalough. When, during the Everyman's new production, a group of 16th-century clansmen at their Tyrone base baulk at the decision of Spanish reinforcements to land in Cork, their cluelessness induces laughter in the auditorium. 'I think I heard some mention of Kinsale,' one strategist says. 'Never heard of it,' comes the reply. Everyman: Des Kennedy's production of Making History, by Brian Friel. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski The running gag of Ulstermen struggling with the geography of the south – 'The Ballyhoura Mountains ... they're in Co Cork, aren't they?' – in Making History is an astute observation by the theatre's new artistic director, Des Kennedy, but a bigger swing is being played here: can something be made of Brian Friel's 1988 play, a difficult artefact, conceived during the Troubles, that deflates romantic myths around the Flight of the Earls? [ 'People forget that Brian Friel was a radical' Opens in new window ] This version of Gaelic Ireland isn't what you'd expect. Inside a grand diningroom, a logistics-orientated secretary tries to tick through a list of social commitments – 'The invitation came the day you left. I said you'd be there' – while a smartly dressed Hugh O'Neill, Irish lord and eventual leader of a confederacy against the English crown, prefers the purity of living in the present – 'This jacket. I should have got it in maroon.' READ MORE In this zingy back-and-forth, nicely judged by Stephen O'Leary and Aaron McCusker, Friel's play seems to present these important historical figures as a screwball-comedy duo. Into the mix arrives Archbishop Lombard (mostly a cipher for the play's exposition and ideas, delivered as well as can be by Ray Scannell), who announces that Spain is interested in joining their battle against England. O'Neill's head isn't exactly in the game; to everyone's horror he has just eloped with a Protestant. Everyman: Des Kennedy's production of Making History, by Brian Friel. Photograph: Marcin Lewandowski Locating the disorganised leaders of the Irish rebellion in a drawingroom comedy is the play's radical idea, but it is soon derailed by Friel's insistent metacommentary on how things are remembered – an instinct that often leads to long-winded revelations solicited without tension. Did you know O'Neill still has affections for the English politician who raised him? Or that he once fought against his fellow Gaels? Kennedy's production fights hard to share Friel's vision of history as a conspiracy, with debris from the Battle of Kinsale removed by figures wearing hazmat suits in Catherine Fay's costuming. After fatiguing war reports, the play finds some grit in a relocation to Rome, where an older O'Neill argues with Lombard about how to record the Nine Years' War in a manuscript (Denis Conway and Peter Gowan, making the best of an intellectual debate). 'People think they just want to know the facts, but what they really want is a story,' Lombard says. On that count, Making History isn't one for the books. Making History is at the Everyman , Cork, until Saturday, April 26th
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel review – a solid gold treat
Before he became known as one of the greatest playwrights of the last century, Brian Friel wrote short stories, mainly for the New Yorker. Two collections published in the 1960s were filleted by Friel himself for a Selected Stories in 1979, which is now retitled and reissued – and it is a solid gold treat from top to tail. Friel as a story writer is funnier than John McGahern, livelier than William Trevor. The model perhaps is Frank O'Connor: witty, short tales of country folk sufficiently larger-than-life to be interesting, but keeping one foot firmly on the ground. The stories take place in Friel's stamping ground of north-west Ireland – including in the fictional town of Ballybeg, where many of his plays would be set – and filled with people eager to make a mark. In The Widowhood System, a recently widowed man determines to breed a champion racing pigeon ('With the old woman out of the road and the place to myself there's nothing to stop me now!'); in Ginger Hero, a boy who's taken up cock fighting wants to pit his bird against the local ace. 'Are you mad?' asks his friend. 'That's not a cock – that's an ostrich!' Naturally, the dialogue is spot-on, but Friel captures people expertly in description too. In Foundry House, perhaps the best story here, an old man listens in fearful awe to a tape recording of his daughter's voice that she's sent from Rhodesia. 'Mr Bernard could not move himself to face the recorder but his eyes were on it, the large, startled eyes of a horse.' Friel can switch between modes – tender, surprising – in his characterisation, but the overall tone is comic. In Mr Sing My Heart's Delight, a boy's granny who lives in remote County Donegal asks him: 'Were you in a bus ever? Was it bad on the stomach, was it?' In The Illusionists, argumentative one-upmanship between a teacher and a travelling magician reaches manic heights. The only downside of reading these stories is knowing that Friel stopped writing them to concentrate on his stage work. We wouldn't want to be without his plays, but his prose fiction is just as tremendous. Stories of Ireland by Brian Friel is published by Penguin (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
