Irish playwright Brian Friel has built a formidable reputation out of very slender materials. A couple of international hits and a handful of Chekhov translations have won him a mountain of trophies. He’s still best known for his 1990 turbo-weepy Dancing at Lughnasa, which featured five mad Irish birds stuck in the bog with no hope of escape.
His breakthrough play, Philadelphia, Here I Come, written in 1964, tackled the same themes of frustration and longing but in a brighter, lighter tone. Our hero is Gar and we meet him during his last night in Ballybeg (a cobbling-together of the Irish words for ‘small’ and ‘town’), just before he heads off for a new life in the city of brotherly love.
Gar works in a dull and horribly insular shop run by his dull and horribly insular Dad. Mum is dead and a sardonic drudge keeps house for the pair. But will they manage to exchange words of tenderness before it’s too late? That’s the plot. Gar has a pretend friend who shares his bedroom and his innermost thoughts. The script bills them as Private Gar and Public Gar. Two guys named Gar. With this neat and original device, Friel is able to build up a beautifully detailed snapshot of Ballybeg and its population of misfits, despots, schemers and losers. Mind you, the split-personality trick may help with the portraiture but it dilutes the focus of the drama. The final Gar-Dad confrontation is considerably impaired by the presence of Gar’s other self on stage.
Paul Reid does well as the spunky young Odysseus. Valerie Lilley turns in a subtle and amusing performance as the spiky but kind-hearted cleaner. And James Hayes, the silent father, is as motionless and obdurate as a stone circle. Top marks to him. Rob Howell has delivered a huge overtime bill for his work on the set. His angular, clever design features a rash of wall-shelves crammed with suggestive and irrelevant bric-à-brac. And there’s a miraculous soaring rib overleaping the stage and showing bookcases crowded with knackered, and even more irrelevant, hardbacks.
This gong-bothering creation wants to step out of the play and take a curtsey all of its own. Not good. The design should serve the script, not use it as a launch-pad for an independent career. I’m being picky. But I find it easier to resist Friel’s charms than most. I can’t help seeing his tales of escapology from the other end. Those who live in a crowded, exciting city are familiar with the stereotype that Gar (Public and Private) will grow into: the professional exile, the homesick martyr, the garrulous, moist-eyed refugee. Gar is the one who flees his birthplace at 18 and spends the rest of his life boring the metropolis with anecdotes of a hometown that he pops back to every 15 years to check that it’s still as unlovely as he always claims it isn’t. Though he considers himself a rarity in the big city he is, in fact, its defining resident. Capitals are accumulations of small-town fugitives. Eventually he’ll wind up in a refuge for seniors, still babbling about his origins, and by now completely Gar-Gar.
There’s a Corneille revival at Southwark directed by Rada’s acting coach, Sebastian Harcombe, and performed by his recent pupils. Artificiality dominates this mind-bending 17th-century relic. We’re in a mysterious cave where a mysterious sorceress is greeted by a mysterious stranger. The sorceress wears a mysterious veil. And, lo, she whips it off. And, behold, the mysterious stranger is commanded to vouchsafe the meaning of his mysterious visit. And, forsooth, he begs her to reveal the mysterious fate of his exiled son. And, gadzooks, she obliges by mysteriously smiting the floor with a mysterious staff and cueing a lighting change from the guy behind the computer. Darkness falls and the play proper begins.
Several hours of intrigue, romance and homicide later, it finishes. I shan’t reveal the ending but it turns out to have been a dream all along. Or a nightmare. And if the storyline is hard to understand, the diction simply defies belief. Every line is belted out at town-crier volume. And each syllable seems to be accompanied by a peculiar extra phoneme. ‘I have destroyed my son,’ is pronounced, ‘I-uh have-uh destroyed-uh my-uh uh-son-uh.’ This amplified style may be entertaining to teach but it’s more than a little tiresome to watch. And it presents actors with a dilemma: unlearn it or join a company where hamming is the house style. (That’s the RSC, by the way.) The young cast are spirited and energetic, and all of them are exceptionally beautiful. Should acting fail, there’s always the Boden catalogue.
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