TaitMail Bringing Lughnasa home
Today, August 1, is the day on which the action of Brian Friel’s most celebrated play, Dancing at Lughnasa, plays out. It will open again today, its 35th anniversary, not in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where it had its premiere but almost next to the very house in Glenties, Co Donegal, in which it was set (the main picture shows rehearsals earlier this week).
The fictional town is Ballybeg, the scene for 14 of his 29 plays, the kind of place the playwright grew up in and whose foibles, failings, triumphs and truths he explores both lovingly and critically.
It starts an exhaustive and gargantuan immersion into the works of Ireland’s finest modern playwright, a festival that will present all of Friel’s plays over the next five years, culminating in what would have been his hundredth birthday in 2029. He is in the pantheon with such contemporaries as Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter and has been called the Irish Chekhov – he translated both The Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya. Friel died in 2015 aged 86, but while his renown is undimmed around the world, with Lughnasa revived in London in 2023, in his home country he is all but forgotten.
The rehabilitation is being masterminded by Seán Doran, the former CEO of English National Opera and an award-winning festival merlin who has made popular events from celebrating, among others, Joyce’s Ulysses and the works of Doran’s other hero, Samuel Beckett. With Liam Browne he now runs Arts Over Borders, dedicated to cross-frontier Irish arts festivals.
The full title of the festival is FrielDays – A Home Coming “because” says Doran “his plays have gone out into the world, other cultures are staging them and of course there are translations, but so many people in the country where they were set haven’t seen them here in what I call ‘The Terroir’ (north and south of the political border). So we’re bringing Brian Friel home”.
Brian Friel by Bobby Harvey
FrielDays is a play on the name of the theatre company Field Days that Friel set up in 1980 in Derry with the actor Stephen Rea which first produced Friel’s ground-breaking play Translations, starring Rea, Liam Neeson and Ray McAnally. Friel had his childhood in Derry and lived there on-and-off for much of his life.
The 360 presentations will mostly be presented as performed readings, partly to save on cost but mostly in deference to the language that was so important to Friel, without “the bells and whistles” to divert us. Friel’s work is set in an Ireland without a social border, only political and religious ones, and the festival takes place across the divide, particularly in Donegal (mostly Republican) – which is officially “south” but actually north of most of Ulster - and Derry (mostly Loyalist), close to Eire’s northern-most border.
“He was very detailed about place, but also about time specificity” Doran says. “So we start each performance at the time his script specifies, and we have time travel tickets available – in one you have Act 1 normally but with Act 2 following the next day and Act 3 two days later when the action takes place. Another starts in the script ‘after 8am’ so curtain-up is at 8.30am and Act 2 is at 4.30 that afternoon.”
Born near Omagh in the north the son of a schoolteacher who was later a local Derry politician, Brian Friel moved the 50 miles to Derry aged ten and attended the Catholic grammar school, St Columb’s. In 1950 he qualified as a maths teacher. He was a Nationalist who served in Eire’s senate for a couple of years in the 80s. He didn’t believe in the border, of course, but he was acutely northern, purposely connecting with the loyalist and unionist communities.
At his creative height during the Troubles Friel probably experienced his most profound moment. It was in Derry on January 30th, 1972, when he was marching with others from the Bogside against internment without trial. They were fired on by British paratroopers and 13 civilians died. “It was really a shattering experience that the British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot 13 people…to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is really a terrifying experience” Friel said in an interview. He was at the time writing his play about civil rights protestors, The Freedom of the City, which he then radically rewrote.
His play Volunteers, about political prisoners, was set in Ebrington Square in Derry where the British troops were based at the time of Bloody Sunday, and was another response to that traumatic event. When it was premiered at the Abbey in Dublin in 1975 it was, says, Doran, “scourged, crucified”. It has hardly been produced since, never in this century, “it’s just been consigned, unfairly”, and on its 50th anniversary it will be performed at Ebrington in a co-production with Derry’s Playhouse, staged by Kabosh Theatre.
The savaging of Volunteers was answered in an essay for the Times Literary Supplement by Seamus Heaney, Friel’s close friend – they had both attended St Columb’s but at different times (Friel was ten years older). As it happened, a generation later Doran also went to St Columb’s.
Heaney’s own response to Bloody Sunday was his collection North which will be performed by non-actors in Ebrington Square alongside Volunteers (the two pieces were published within a couple of months of each other), and three other venues, with the speakers including a woman in her 70s who witnessed a tarring and feathering which Heaney describes. Also performing will be a baker, a farmer, a martial artist, a museum worker, a grave digger and a refugee family.
Place was as important to Friel as people, so all the performances will be site specific. Dancing in Lughnasa today takes place in the kitchen of a school 50 yards from the house where Friel’s real-life models, his aunts, lived. Translations, the play about language, colonialism and identity, will be shown in Dunlewey the Donegal's Irish speaking area of Gaeltacht, the Irish actors speaking in Friel’s invented cross between English and Irish Erse, “elephant language”. It will include another trip for the audience, to the deserted Victorian “ghost village” of Glentornan where folklore will be imparted by a seanchai, a storyteller, with the aid of a fiddle player. Faith Healer, first produced by Field Day, will also happen in Glenties in four acts presented on four different sites, with the audience bussed to each.
“The audience gets a connection with the writer, there’s that charged kind of psychic acupuncture, and the work moves closer to an authentic feel that you can’t get in a more neutral space of a theatre or urban environments” Doran says.
Doran founded Over the Borders in 2012 and through connections got the support of the by then ailing Friel. He got to know him well in the year before he died and they were able to plan FrielDays together – Friel sending his children out as “emissaries” to check on running productions and report back. “When he died two months later the planning was in place” Doran says.
Friel’s last full-length play was The Home Place, also the last of the Ballybeg plays and set in the 1870s. It’s the only one of the 29 that deals directly with Anglo-Irish issues and Home Rule. It will be performed in the village of Sion Mills near Friel’s own early childhood home in Tyrone. Brian Friel will truly have come home.