Theatre by Brian Friel

AFTERPLAY

I called this piece Afterplay because it revisits the lives of two people, Andrey Prozorov and Sonya Serebriakova, who had a previous existence in two separate plays. Both plays were written by the same author one hundred years ago.

These two people came from very different fictional backgrounds and we meet them again now approximately twenty years after their previous fictional lives ended. Sonya was then in her twenties and Andrey in his early thirties. Now reanimated and reimagined they are middle-aged. They cannot escape their origins of course; those experiences that their creator furnished them with are still determining experiences. Part of Andrey is still an only boy, confused, motherless, reared in a remote provincial town by a domineering father and three restless sisters. Sonya is still wrestling with a difficult estate and is still as deeply and as hopelessly in love with the local doctor as she was all those years ago. But they have had new experiences in the twenty-year interval. And what interested me was what those experiences might be and how they might blend into and adjust those early defining lives.

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. So when I consider the complex life Anton Chekhov breathed into Sonya and Andrey one hundred years ago I believe that that life can be carried forward into this extended existence provided the two stay true to where and what they came from. That means that the godfather has to stay alert at all times to the intention of their first begetter.

Brian Friel

GREAT ACTORS

I have worked with many great actors over the years and the experience of working with them in the rehearsal room is one of the great joys and satisfactions of the theatre.

A great actor mustn’t be confused with a star. He or she may be a star. But that isn’t central to what he is, nor is it something he aspires to. What is it then that makes and actor great? And for convenience I’ll refer to him as he.

First of all his theatrical instincts are so finally tuned that he moves into those plats that offer his particular physical and intellectual capacities their full reach. And he makes those choices most intuitively. So that the plays he chooses to do challenge him but they also affirm him.

When he reads a play, in a sense he reads it with his ears. And what he sees on the page isn’t necessarily the character so carefully described by the author but a version of himself, himself assuming those characteristics and making them his characteristics; sees himself penetrating that character and being suffused by it; so that what will finally emerge will be neither quite what the author wrote, nor what the actor is, but a new identity that draws from the essences of both. That is why we call it ‘creating a part’.

But there is another way in which great actors manifest themselves: they are wonderful singers of the written line – perfect pitch, perfect rhythm. And they can do that because they know intuitively the exact meaning of a that line; and not only the exact meaning but how that lien was composed and why those words and only those words were used. So that not only does he understand the precise composition of a line but he knows that this line is inevitable now because of what was said in the preceding line; and the line that follows will be inevitable because of what is said now. So each of these lines, following necessarily on one after another, generate the necessary propulsion of the text. And the great actor knows all that – intuitively. So that once he understands the engine of the play, he can transform the text into an opera that is indeed greater than the writing and greater than the enactment. That is why great actors are scrupulous with the text. That is why great actors don’t improvise. And that is why writers owe so much to them. We aren’t mute any more.

They bestow eloquence on us.

Brian Friel

MUSIC

I have used a lot of music in the plays over the years – nocturnes, jazz, symphonies, ceili bands, piano accordion.

In some plays the music I chose was in part a gesture to people I loved. For example, I used Tom Moore’s Oft in the Stilly Night in two plays because sixty years ago my father taught that song to his school choir that I was in and we won a cup at the Omagh Fels and he was inordinately proud of us – and of himself. And for months afterwards he would line us up and start us off singing that Moore song. Then he would leave the classroom and cross the school yard and go to the far side of the country road and just stand there - listening to us singing in harmony in the distance. And although I couldn’t see him standing there, I knew that we transported him. And I imagine that that may have been my earliest intimation of the power of music to move an audience.

In a play called Give Me Your Answer, Do! I used Mendelssohn’s On Wings of A Song because my two sisters sang that duet when they were about nine or ten. And even though the piece is clichéd I suppose it evokes for me a time of simpler pleasures and imagined innocence. So that even now I hear their voices, wavering and uncertain, “On wings of a song I’ll wander/ With thee, my sister, I’ll glide”. And I tell myself fancifully it is their unease before the difficult years ahead, just like the difficulties that confront Daisy in the play. But maybe these linkings between fact and fiction are too fanciful.

And I used a song called Down By The Cane-Break in a play called Wonderful Tennessee because it was a song my mother sang; and because the words of the song – the promise of happiness in the Eden of Tennessee – those words echo the theme of the play.

And in Philadelphia, Here I Come! I used a piece of ceili music – or what one of the characters calls a ‘piece of aul thumpety-thump’. And a similar piece – and only more anguished and manic – In Dancing At Laghnasa. And in both plays the purpose was to explode theatrically the stifling and discretions of family life. And since words didn’t seem to be up to the job it was necessary to supply the characters with a new language. Because at that specific point in both plays when the ceili music is used, words offer neither an adequate means of expression nor a valve for emotional release. Because at that specific point emotion has staggered into inarticulacy beyond the boundaries of language. And that is what music can provide in the theatre: another way of talking, a language without words. And because it is wordless it can hit straight and unmediated into the vein of deep emotion.

Brian Friel

AMATEURS

One of the vigours of our theatre has been its roots in the amateur movement. Yeats acknowledged that vigour and tapped into its untutored energy. Indeed the Abbey Theatre used that source until the sixties; and it nurtured the uncertain institution satisfactorily.

What did the amateur movement offer? It offered energy – mental energy, physical energy. It supplied a quick and intuitive imagination. It brought to the theatre a great enthusiasm and an eagerness to show off. Come and look at us because we have a natural talent for performance and it’s all going to be the best of fun and it gives ourselves and our friends a great laugh. And indeed all this was a useful antidote to the vanity and self-regard of the gathering of fifty in the drawing-room and their starchy hostess.

But the days of the amateur having anything to contribute to the theatre are long gone. Because over the years the theatre, like every profession, has become more and more specialised. The amateur’s high spirits are now applauded only in the parish hall. Because now we want our actors to have the finely-tuned bodies of athletes. We insist that they have the same control over their breathing and their voices as the trained singer. We ask that they can dance and ride horses and swim and fence and speak a couple of languages – as well, of course, as being able to analyse a text closely and then interpret it with consummate skill.

And do we have these magnificent creatures? I think they are beginning to emerge. There is still a residue of the amateur traces in our theatre today – groups who had fun putting on plays when they were in college and who stayed together and worked together after college. But the brio and high spirits of the old days is no substitute for training. And today that training is vital. But we have efficient drama courses being taught all over the country. And more and more highly trained actors are available. And I now believe that a great theatre – which is possible only with great actors – is more and more possible here. If these great actors aren’t seduced into film. Which they will be if we don’t recompense them adequately. But that’s another story.

Brian Friel

WORDS

The tools that are available to the playwright to tell his story are few enough – words, action, silence. In the theatre that has engaged me, words are at the very core of it all. The same words that are available to the novelist, to the poet; and used with the same precision and with the same scrupulous attention not only to the exact kernel meaning but to all those allusive meanings that every word hoards. But there is a difference. The playwrights words aren’t written for solitary engagement – they are written for public utterance. They are used as the story-teller uses them, to hold an audience in his embrace and within that vocal sound. So unlike the words of the novelist or poet, the playwright’s words are scored for a very different context. And for that reason they are scored in altogether different keys and in altogether different tempi. And it is with this score that the playwright and the actor privately plot to work their public spell.

But even though these written words aren’t fully empowered until an actor liberates them and fulfils them, when that happens – and if the playwright is in full mastery of his craft - then that theatrical language acquires its own special joy and delight; because what is written to be sung is now being sung. So that the language in its meticulous use and in its accomplished utterance finally and fully realises itself. So that what the playwright wrote – and even as he wrote listened closely to and actually heard – that has now been transferred to the stage, and those words, written in privacy and out of privacy but for public utterance, they are now fulfilling themselves completely. A private wisdom is being proclaimed from the rooftops.

There is not contradiction in this. It is a contrived miracle – well, a trick of the trade. Because the public utterance must still retain that private intimacy where it has its origins. And even though the audience hears what it calls speeches, it hears too the author’s private voice, that intimate language, that personal utterance. And that composite, that duet – the private and intimate set free into public canticle where both voices are distinctly audible – that is what makes the experience of theatre unique. And every time that happens the theatre fulfils itself again.

Brian Friel