Programme Notes

The Success of Failure

Excepting Beckett (a special case), Brian Friel is the most important Irish playwright to have emerged in terms both of dramatic achievement and cultural importance since the Abbey Theatre’s heyday. On at least one occasion in each of the five decades of his writing career, a play by Friel has gone on from success in his own country to acclaim abroad. Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) followed its breakthrough production by the Gate Theatre at that year’s Dublin Theatre Festival with a nine-month run on Broadway and a lengthy tour of the USA; this pattern of success was replicated two years later with Lovers (1967). In 1989, ten years after its inaugural run at the Abbey, his Chekhovian play Aristocrats broke through to major runs and awards on the London and New York stages.

Translations (1980), the first play Friel wrote for the Field Day Theatre Company (which he co-founded with the actor Stephen Rea), was memorably staged at Derry’s Guild Hall Theatre, drawing the entire spectrum of Northern Irish politics from Sinn Fein to Unionist into the same space long before the Belfast Agreement. Translations went on to tour Ireland north and south and was subsequently produced in London at the Hampstead Theatre; it transferred to the National Theatre, the first Irish play to enter the repertory there since O’Casey. Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) gathered an irresistible momentum in its Abbey Theatre premiere which carried it on to awards in London and New York. And the awards have continued, most recently the Evening Standard Best Play of 2005 for the Gate’s production of The Home Place. No other contemporary Irish playwright has had such international acclaim; no other has written plays whose situations and characters have translated so readily to other cultural and political contexts.

Friel’s plays should not be considered only in terms of success, however. When accepting an Olivier Award for Best Play for Dancing at Lughnasa, in London in 1991, Friel’s entire speech consisted of quoting the late Graham Greene to the effect that success is only the postponement of failure. Friel went on to prove (and arguably test) this maxim with Wonderful Tennessee (1993), a more abstract and philosophical meditation on the themes — women and men, paganism and Christianity, modernity and tradition — that had so engrossed audiences in Dancing at Lughnasa. Wonderful Tennessee closed after nine performances on Broadway, where Dancing at Lughnasa had run for over a year.

Friel could be said to encourage the zigzag pattern of his career by reacting against what he sees as a process of simplification when his plays achieve huge success; their deep- felt emotion is sentimentalized, their political and historic ironies flattened or removed. The next play he writes is invariably a reaction against this process, often a retaliatory farce where the themes of the previous play are ruthlessly satirized — as in The Communication Cord (1982), which reacted to the success of Translations two years earlier. This tendency has prevailed from the beginning of Friel’s career: the success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! with Irish America prompted the savage rejoinder of the returned 70-year-old émigré in The Loves of Cass McGuire two years later. These subsequent plays may have failed at one level, but they enabled Friel to continue the necessary process of searching out new themes and approaches as a writer, to continue his radical questioning.

Two of the most courageous decisions Friel ever made were to give up teaching and to dedicate himself to playwriting. Born, as he himself put it, ‘a member of the minority living in the North’, he moved at the age of ten from Omagh to Derry, where he was to grow up and become a teacher, like his father before him. In 1960, at the age of 31, he abandoned teaching to become a full-time writer — a brave decision for a married man with a growing family. That decision must have been helped by the fact that Friel had a contract with The New Yorker for the short stories he was writing at the time. But he had also begun to dabble in drama, with two radio plays broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland and a first stage play produced by the Group Theatre in Belfast. In 1963, invited by the director Sir Tyrone Guthrie to the theatre Guthrie had just founded in Minneapolis, Friel spent a crucial six months as a visitor, sitting in on the three plays being directed for the opening. One of them, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, directed by Guthrie himself, was to prove strongly influential on the nascent playwright. The sojourn at the Guthrie theatre provided Friel with a two-fold benefit: his ‘first parole from inbred claustrophobic Ireland’ and an insight into ‘the iron discipline of theatre’: ‘I discovered a dedication and a nobility and a
selflessness that one associates with a theoretical priesthood’.

On his return to Ireland, Friel sat down and wrote Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which displayed a confidence and theatrical sophistication beyond anything he had so far written for the stage. The story of a 25-year-old Irishman on the eve of his emigration to the USA had many of the features of the traditional Irish play, especially in its cast of supporting characters. But Friel’s brilliant theatrical innovation of splitting the central character into two — a Gar Public whom everyone sees and who is frequently tongue- tied and a Gar Private who communes only with his alter ego and who is an outrageous
fantasist — lit up and liberated the play. In the director, Hilton Edwards of the Gate Theatre, Friel also had someone who was up to the play’s technical demands (the lighting changes to cue the flashback scenes, for example) and who trusted in its central device; Edwards told his two nervous lead actors: ‘If you believe it, they’ll believe it’.

Encouraged by Guthrie, Friel decided to give up writing the short stories (with which he had become increasingly dissatisfied) for The New Yorker and to concentrate exclusively on drama. Even with the success of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, that was still an incredibly risky move, since a successful play can often be followed by a commercial failure; I have
highlighted earlier how Friel was to experience that on more than one occasion. But he clearly believed he had it within him to become a distinctive, original and groundbreaking Irish playwright. The Brian Friel Archive in the National Library of Ireland is a detailed and painstaking record of what he was prepared to invest in that belief: the numerous versions
of the plays (often very different from their finished form), written and rewritten through draft after draft. Incisions are made with the meticulous scalpel of his ink pen into what would seem perfectly acceptable lines of dialogue and a refined and improved line superimposed and substituted. Each play of Friel’s is written with a high ambition, a self-questioning
perfectionism, a ceaseless experimentation and a determination to break new ground.

Faith Healer

The issues of success and failure are combined in what is arguably Friel’s greatest play, Faith Healer (1979). It failed on Broadway in that year, but was staged to great success in Dublin at the Abbey by Joe Dowling in 1980. And the 2005 Gate production with Ralph Fiennes in the title role went on to reverse Broadway’s earlier unfavourable judgment.
Faith Healer has had several significant productions in the UK and is one of the most theatrically haunting plays in Friel’s canon. At first glance, it might seem undramatic since it never brings any of its three characters into direct dialogue; the setting is virtally nonexistent and the form is monologue, which might as well be read in private or on the radio. But it is the play of Friel’s that most profoundly engages with the act of theatre.

Like Beckett, Friel has reduced the setting and props to a minimum. The tatty banner proclaiming ‘the Fantastic Francis Hardy/Faith Healer/One Night Only’ and the chairs indicate that we are directly present at one of Frank’s performances (the gramophone playing ‘The Way You Look Tonight’ will be turned up for Teddy the manager’s monologue). We come looking for the ‘miracle’ of theatre even though experience tells us and Frank confirms that ‘nine times out of ten nothing at all happened’. His opening monologue raises its audience’s hopes and at the same time shows why they are foolish to be so wooed: it is an act of calculated theatrical defiance. Frank’s pitch leaves the audience free to regulate the degree of its credulity at will but also sets its cap at transcendence — a risky business, indeed.

The audience in the theatre, therefore, stands in for the congregation in a Welsh chapel or Scottish kirk; and the play is a rehearsal of the very process it describes. But in the larger, overarching play that is Friel’s Faith Healer the audience also has a crucial role to play in relation to the interwoven, damaged lives of the three characters. They are telling their life histories, and each of their monologues is shaped rhetorically and emotionally by the same appeal: believe in me and in my version of events. We may do so with Frank’s opening monologue; but when his wife Grace says that ‘Kinlochberie’s where the baby’s buried’ the audience is jolted into a recognition that what we are hearing from each character is a partial and incomplete version of the same events, since Frank has told of their stay in Kinlochbervie without referring to any baby, buried or otherwise.

Part of Faith Healer’s profound theatricality is its engagement with two great Irish dramatic precursors, John Millington Synge and Samuel Beckett. Frank Hardy and the title character of The Playboy of the Western World (1907) have a great deal in common. Christy Mahon works his own brand of faith-healing amid the physically and psychologically maimed community of County Mayo. Frank Hardy’s faith-healing and Christy’s storytelling, by which he transforms himself from a stuttering lout into a walking playboy, are ‘a craft without an apprenticeship, a ministry without responsibility, a vocation without a ministry’ — and, one might add, a religion in need of believers, a theatre in search of an audience. Both plays ask whether Frank and Christy are liars and charlatans or quasi-religious truth-tellers.

This troubling question is bound up with the intense and selfconscious theatricality of The Playboy of the Western World and Faith Healer, as the fiction of the stage space repeatedly gives way before the actuality of performance. Friel’s play is structured as a succession of monologues, in which Frank, Grace and Teddy confront the audience with their versions of what occurred. Synge’s play makes of its cast of characters an on- stage audience who listen to Christy’s escalating narrative performance with increasing credulity, until those claims are tested in succeeding acts. The question posed by both is: how much faith do we invest in the truth of theatrical story-telling?

Faith Healer also has great affinities with Beckett’s Play (1964). There, we confront three characters engaged, while alive, in a triangular adulterous relationship of mutual need from which they cannot free themselves, even in the death-like state or limbo in which they currently reside. And we learn in the course of Faith Healer that two of its three characters are dead. All of them, Frank and Grace and Teddy, are kept animated in a perpetual present by the story they have to tell. Like Beckett’s three characters speaking their interrupted monologues in their urns, each is radically incomplete, both in themselves and the story they narrate. Like Beckett’s characters, too, they remain obsessed by reliving the details of their lives together; as one of the two tramps remarks in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1955), ‘to have lived is not enough for them/they have to talk about it’. Physically each of the characters looks not at each other but out into the dark, at the audience. It is the interaction between the characters and the audience that informs and forms the drama; and it is the audience that is required to participate most in the construction of the plays’ activity and meaning. If Faith Healer is most invested in the act and art of theatre, it is also the riskiest and most radical of his plays in that pursuit. Nowhere are the stakes higher; nowhere is it more evident how much Friel has gambled on this investment; and nowhere does the audience benefit more.

© Anthony Roche

Anthony Roche is Associate Professor in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin;
he is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (2006) and the author of Contemporary Irish Drama,
a revised and updated second edition of which has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan

Distance and Absence

In 1922 the young English novelist William Gerhardie published Futility, a story of unrequited love set in Siberia, which opens with the words ‘And then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into a book. It is the classic way of treating life’. ‘Futility’ might be taken as an analogue of the ‘wasted life’ that is a leitmotif of Russian literature, and, like unrequited love, finds a chilling echo in Brian Friel’s The Yalta Game. Gerhardie’s intimate and immediate appreciation of the Russian psyche or soul ensured that his story had, as its central character, the phenomenon of waiting — the archetypal Russian experience. The past is the history of failure; the present moment is a pinpoint of uncertainty and indecision; the future offers the possibility of hope and expectation, which will probably remain unfulfilled. All that is to be done is to wait and to talk about it, forever defining an event that is yet to happen, forever denying the emptiness and the frustration of failure. Such writers as Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and, of course, Anton Chekhov, honoured the persona of failure in their novels and dramas.

In 1911 the Irish writer George Moore said ‘Ireland is a little Russia’, and there are many common characteristics between the two countries, with a psychological terrain of hope and longing, despair, deferral, unease, wonder, sadness, exhaustion and irony. As Emma Polatskaya has written, it is ‘Russia’s inner state [which] shapes people’s individual
destinies’, and this ‘Russian soul’ — in the 19th century at least — had much in common with ‘Irishness’, not least in the dramatists’ ‘sudden awareness of a wasted life’.

As an Irish playwright, Brian Friel is in a specially apt position to empathize with such writers as Chekhov and Turgenev, with whom he has remarkable affinities. Where Turgenev had written of Russia as ‘that immense and sombre figure motionless and masked like the Sphinx’, Friel has referred to ‘inbred, claustrophobic Ireland’ and the ‘romantic ideal that we call Kathleen’. Under these indefinable presences, the playwright’s job, as Friel wrote when composing Aristocrats (1979), his most ‘Chekhovian’ play, is to deal with ‘the burden of the incommunicable’.

Friel has written of these affinities with 19th-century Russia: I don’t feel at all distant from that world… maybe because the characters… behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever — even though they know in their hearts that their society is in melt-down and the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them. Maybe a bit like my own generation in Ireland today. Or maybe I find those Russians sympathetic because they have no expectations whatever from love but still invest everything in it. Or maybe they attract me because they seem to expect that
their problems will disappear if they talk about them — endlessly.

As Alexander Vershinin says in Friel’s version of Three Sisters, there is ‘a great void, a great emptiness in man’s life’ and he poses the dilemma: ‘We Russians are a people whose aspirations are magnificent; it’s just living we can’t handle’. Life is lived en marge, but it is also lived in default.

Friel has made ‘versions’ of work by Turgenev (a dramatization of the novel Fathers and Sons, 1987; A Month in the Country, 1992) and by Chekhov (Three Sisters,1981; Uncle Vanya, 1998; The Yalta Game — a dramatization and expansion of the story ‘Lady with Lapdog’ — 2001; and the vaudeville The Bear, 2002). In Afterplay (2002) he took the
greatest liberty with characters from preceding plays: Sonya Serebriakova, from Uncle Vanya, meets Andrey Prozorov, from Three Sisters, in a Moscow café in the early 1920s. Apart from his finished works of Translation, Friel has toyed with several other notional ‘Russian’ projects, including a whimsical play featuring a joint production by Turgenev and Dostoyevsky of Gogol’s The Inspector-General, with Gogol in the cast (not a million versts from Afterplay).

Friel brings ‘Russian’ themes into close proximity with those that have preoccupied the modern Irish stage: people who live far away from reality; hopes that are more depressing than inspiring; a lifetime’s experience of emptiness, of longing, of deferral; action (the real world) always taking place elsewhere. Both The Yalta Game and Afterplay have distance
and absence as their themes.

The Yalta Game

The Yalta Game is one of Friel’s most transparent and theatrical pieces of writing. As he himself once said of Chekhov, his plays ‘are not addressed to the rationalizing mind. They are addressed to the poetic and histrionic sensibility. They are free, as music is free, from the mechanical order of the thesis’.

The basic narrative of ‘Lady with Lapdog’ is simple: a holiday seduction in Yalta of a young innocent woman (Anna Sergeyevna) by an older roué, followed by hopeless, doomed infatuation. The play’s title is derived from the seducer’s patter — the invention of spurious and outrageous reflections in order to attract his victim, who then falls prey to the ‘game’ of make-believe itself; the seduction, therefore, when it happens, does not ‘happen’ in reality, and each character can go home to ‘reality’ undefiled. Friel has suppressed much of the story’s detail and added greatly to the character of the seducer, Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov. The ‘theme’, which is the home truth of the play, is that there is in fact no home, no truth, and that the various types of delusion through which we live our melancholy lives are all we have to go on. Unlike the trivia of most lives in Friel’s other Russian adaptations, in The Yalta Game the ‘trivia’ of Gurov and Anna are the passions in which they are imprisoned.

Nowhere previously has Friel provided such a telling illustration of George Steiner’s dictum that we live lives based on selected fictions. In a sense, Gurov and Anna have no existence, since both deny the domestic contexts from which they have come to Yalta, and to which they return merely to endure distance-loving of a largely disembodied kind.
The togetherness for which they yearn, of course, is impossible of realization.

The play is utterly transparent: each is the mirror in which they discover themselves and at the same time the looking-glass through which they pass to find the other. As they pass through each other and back again, each encounter allows them to invent, and simultaneously to be reinvented by, the other. Every gesture or speech or occasion of meeting moves our perception of the characters, and their perception of themselves, towards a moment that will never arrive. It is a completely liminal play because the lovers are forever at each other’s thresholds (both physically and metaphysically) yet never consummating their need to be in and with one another. Yet in this classically ritualistic situation the ritual is denied, so much so that the arrested moment is itself the play.

The climax of most dramas involves a revelation, the unfolding of a secret, the unpacking of a lie. In Russian drama, such a moment may be postponed to the point where it does not happen at all or can be sensed only subliminally as hope survives to be deferred to a more propitious moment. The classic Russian dramatic situation is one of inactive longing
for some kind of livable life, while acknowledging the constant hunger, lack of meaning, the fragmented experience of everyday life. As Gurov says of his ‘real’ life: ‘The bank, colleagues, home, card games, they all subsided into make-believe — they were fictions, weren’t they? And the only reality was the reality in my mind’.

For students of Friel, this is familiar territory. The insistence on the reality of an imagined event began in Friel’s own childhood with a fishing expedition with his father which did not happen — could not have happened — but which was none the less real for all that and written into Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). Here, however, with his dramatic
advantage over the writer of the short story, Friel can appeal to his audience: ‘They were fictions, weren’t they?’ But the tragedy consists in the fact that where previously Friel has used this insistence on the writer’s right to invert the relation between fiction and reality, here the lovers are caught up in a fiction of their own imagining which crystallizes and
confirms the Russian experience: that life is a postponement, an absence.

Afterplay

In Afterplay Friel presents us with a subtle hybrid that oscillates between the serious and the trivial so typical of those Russian themes: the dereliction of everyday life and the agony of imagining. We could probably enjoy the exchanges and the admissions and the near-intimacy of Sonya and Andrey without knowing ‘where they come from’. But when we realize that Sonya Serebriakova is a relict, or refugee, from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and that Andrey Prozorov is the brother of those endlessly yearning Three Sisters, the plot, as they say, thickens.

I do not know of any other play in which characters from two other plays constitute the sole inhabitants of the work currently on the stage. We could mention Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in which the leading players are also appearing in a performance of Hamlet on another stage just behind or beside the one we are watching; or his Travesties, which involves Joyce, Lenin and Tzara in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. These give cause for confusion of identities and purposes; but beyond emphasizing a truly Russian trait — that the real world is probably taking place in the next room — they do not attempt what Friel is moving towards in Afterplay: the afterlife of make-believe, when we discover that we are not characters in someone else’s play but responsible for our own thoughts and deeds.

Friel has said that ‘had I created these two characters in the first place I would feel free now to reshape them as I wished. But they are not mine alone. I am something less than a parent but I know I am something more than a foster-parent. Maybe closer to a godparent who takes his responsibilities scrupulously’. This elegant conceit is so much more than an accidental meeting of two unreal characters. It is a contrived commentary on what happens to people who habitually speak something other than the truth, when they find themselves obliged to admit to reality. Friel has said that Chekhov creates a state ‘where one is alive to the word but even more alive to its echoes and resonances’ and the imagination ‘allows itself to move into those uncharted areas where the greater part of our lives is lived’. So we have echoes and resonances not only of the two plays in which Sonya and Andrey started off, but of all Chekhov’s work and most of Friel’s.

In their flights of invention and improvisation, in Andrey’s stumbling admissions and gropings towards fluency, in Sonya’s astonishing cadences from an ‘other’ life and in her simple failings, we witness acts of faith and acts of betrayal and, as you will hear them say themselves, ‘fables’, ‘fictions’ and ‘lies’ which are the cries of children waiting to be found. And even the saddest and most frightened child has a wry chuckle somewhere buried deep. The truth is the most piercing when it produces laughter as well as tears. We hear the truths more readily if we listen between the lines: as Friel has said, ‘Chekhov is best sensed’.

© Richard Pine

Richard Pine is the author of The Diviner: the Art of Brian Friel (UCD Press 1999) and Director Emeritus of the
Durrell School of Corfu, where he lives