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Martine Pelletier University of Tours, France Brian Friel: the master playwright 135 BRIAN FRIEL: THE MASTER PLAYWRIGHT Martine Pelletier University of Tours, France Abstract: Brian Friel has long been recognized as Ireland’s leading playwright. His work for the theatre spans almost fifty years and his reputation has expanded well beyond Ireland. In January 2009 Friel turned eighty and only a few months before, his adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, opened at the Gate Theatre Dublin on 30th September 2008. This article will first provide a survey of Brian Friel’s remarkable career, trying to assess his overall contribution to Irish theatre, before looking at his various adaptations to finally focus on Hedda Gabler, its place and relevance in the author’s canon. Keywordsds: Brian Friel, Irish Theatre, Hedda Gabler, Adaptation, Ireland. Brian Friel has long been recognized as the leading playwright in contemporary Ireland. His work for the theatre spans almost fifty years and his reputation has expanded beyond Ireland and outside the English-speaking world, where several of his plays are regularly produced, studied and enjoyed by a wide range of audiences and critics. In January 2009, Brian Friel turned eighty and only a few months before, his adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler,1 opened at the Gate Ilha do Desterro Florianópolis nº 58 p. 135-156 jan/jun. 2010 136 Martine Pelletier Theatre Dublin on 30th September 2008 as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. This article will first provide a survey of Brian Friel’s remarkable career, trying to assess his overall contribution to Irish theatre, before looking at his various adaptations to finally focus on Hedda Gabler, its place and relevance in the author’s canon. Brian Friel was born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on 9th January 1929. His family moved to Derry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland in 1939, where his father soon became involved in local politics, as a member of the Nationalist Party. Friel’s mother’s family had roots across the border, in County Donegal, and the young Brian spent many holidays in and around Glenties, his mother’s “home place”, which Friel was to transmute into his emblematic fictional Ballybeg, the chosen location of so many of his dramatic works.2 Both the wild landscapes of rural Donegal and the sectarian, divided city of London/Derry shaped Friel’s mental geography and were to exert a lasting influence on his sensibility and imagination. Brian Friel went to Maynooth to study for the priesthood but gave up after two years of what he called “an awful experience” (qtd. in Lennon 9) and instead became a teacher, like his father. The critic and journalist Fintan O’Toole has convincingly argued that Friel’s recognition that he could not become a priest led to his embracing writing as a career within which he could embark on a different spiritual quest (“Tracing a Rocky Path from the Past” 4). Now married to Anne Morrisson and with a young family, Brian Friel started to write short-stories in the late 1950s and enjoyed real success with that medium, writing for American magazines, notably The New Yorker, and also having two collections published in 1962 and 1966.3 Brian Friel gave up short-story writing in the mid 1960s to devote himself entirely to drama. His early radio plays, and his first major stage effort, The Enemy Within, attracted the attention of Sir Tyrone Guthrie, an immensely innovative director and a Monaghan man, who invited him to Minneapolis in March 1963 to spend a few months in the new theatre he was launching there.4 This very fruitful “apprenticeship” allowed Friel to have his first direct experience of the business of theatre, as Brian Friel: the master playwright 137 opposed to playwriting as a more literary pursuit, and upon his return to Ireland he went on to write his first major play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, the success of the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival. Philadelphia displayed several of the qualities Friel was to keep developing, and it has remained an important play in Ireland where it is still performed regularly on major stages. Thematically rather conventional, with a plot hinging on a difficult father/son relationship, the grief and vulnerability of a boy whose mother died in childbirth, the boredom of small-town life, the lure of emigration to the US, it contains many ingredients that could have been found in various plays of the 1950s. The major breakthrough was the dramatic device of a character split between two protagonists and actors, Gar Public and Gar Private. In this way, Friel dramatised most effectively and illuminatingly the schizophrenic condition of a whole culture as well as making full use of a wonderful theatrical device that energised the stage business and enlivened the dialogue. This split character can equally be seen as something of a red thread in Friel’s understanding of the individual as defined by fragmentation, an incapacity to experience wholeness or ontological integrity. The ability to find a form adequate to this condition of existence is very much a hallmark of Friel’s artistry. In the wake of this early success, Friel wrote several more plays in the late 1960s, though none matched Philadelphia in terms of popular appeal: The Loves of Cass McGuire (which did also transfer to Broadway), Lovers, made up of two short plays, “Winners” and “Losers” and the darker, deeply disturbing Crystal and Fox. These plays, which all very much focused on different types of love and relationships, were followed in the late 1960s and through the 1970s by works that tackled more openly political and social issues. The Mundy Scheme (1969) saw Friel venture into political satire. This play occupies a place apart in that it is the only piece the author has refused to have reprinted or produced since the original, very short run at the Olympia Theatre. For all its real flaws (and Friel is his harshest critic) The Mundy Scheme provides evidence that the playwright could move from the 138 Martine Pelletier humour present in the early plays to a darker, more savage comedy, critical of the whole emerging political culture of the new Ireland. It cannot be doubted that Friel was in part reacting to a more sombre and violent context as Northern Ireland was plunging into open and extreme sectarian violence. For Brian Friel, himself a member of the disenfranchised Catholic, Nationalist community of the North, such tragic events could not but have a profound effect, on him personally but also on his writing and imagination. The outside world was impinging on the private, inner core. The Gentle Island (1971) still eschewed dealing directly with the “troubles” but after Bloody Sunday (30th January 1972), Friel penned The Freedom of the City (1973), his first play to address forcefully the deteriorating situation in Northern Ireland. The play was staged in London with a talented Irish actor, Stephen Rea, in the role of the mercurial Skinner and this first meeting between the two men would pave the way for a later fruitful partnership. Volunteers (1975), a much unjustly neglected play, kept a strong focus on contemporary violence with a prison setting this time south of the border in the Republic and an intertextual dialogue with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Both The Gentle Island and Volunteers are also evidence of Friel’s growing fascination with the role of stories and storytelling, the lie and the consoling fiction an individual or a community may tell himself/itself and others. Further probing the elusiveness and unreliability of memory, Living Quarters (1977) owed a huge debt to Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and marked an effort to move away from the overtly political while pursuing the earlier inquiries into the dubious nature of “fact”, in the private, as well as the public spheres. 1979-1981 proved an amazingly fruitful period for Brian Friel with the premieres of no less than three exceptional plays, Aristocrats, Faith Healer and Translations. Aristocrats, the first of Friel’s plays to be labelled Chekhovian by critics and audiences, was based on his short- story “Foundry House” and further explored fraught father/children relationships, this time in a Big House setting. Faith Healer occupies a Brian Friel: the master playwright 139 place apart in the Friel canon. Composed of four monologues delivered by three characters, two of whom are already dead, it is a theatrical and emotional tour de force which many contemporary critics failed to appreciate. It took the superb, awe-inspiring impersonation of Frank Hardy by the late Donal McCann in the Dublin production for the play to be recognised for what it is, a masterpiece. Translations saw Friel venture for the first time into the “history play” genre. Translations proved the starting point of a major evolution in Irish theatre and intellectual history with the launch of the Field Day Theatre Company. Brian Friel and Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea decided to put together an ad hoc company and persuaded the Mayor of Derry to lend them the (in)famous Guildhall as a theatre space; after the Derry première, the play would tour Ireland, North and South, bringing theatre to small towns and in the process largely ignoring the partition between the North and the Republic, thereby making a clear political statement as well as an artistic intervention. As Translations was performed to huge acclaim and audiences, Friel and Rea decided Field Day should have a board of directors. Poets and critics Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin, poet Seamus Heaney, and musician and folklorist David Hammond were co-opted, giving the company a deliberate Northern slant and the potential to expand its activities outside of the theatre–which they soon did.5 Field Day went on touring for several years and Friel wrote four of the plays produced, becoming in the process of co-chairing the company, more directly involved in the business of the theatre, its day- to-day workings, exhilaration and niggling disappointments.
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