FRIEL AT LAST

After twenty-five years, Brian Friel, "the Irish Chekhov," returns to Broadway with his West End hit Dancing at Lughnasa

JULIE KAVANAGH

Theater

In Ireland, Brian Friel is the patriarch of the macho literary pack. Even Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet who has been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, calls him "Daddo." He is recognized as the country's greatest living dramatist, creator of such national classics as Aristocrats and Translations. In America, people still tend to associate Friel mainly with his single Broadway triumph, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which had a run of 326 performances in the mid-sixties.

The reason Friel is not as well known abroad as "Seamus the Famous" is that he chooses not to be. He is notoriously elusive with the media: he routinely declines interviews, and he is uncompromising about having his plays filmed. He has refused several offers to make a "fill-m," as he pronounces it, of Dancing at Lughnasa, his current West End hit, which opens on Broadway this month, even though one bidder is Noel Pearson, the producer of My Left Foot.

Friel cites the familiar complaint: "You have no control. The writer is nobody in the cinema." But all the same, he is allowing Neil Jordan to make a movie of Translations, considered to be his masterpiece, because he admires the young director's work. Friel never allows anyone to cut a line or tamper in any other way with his work. He has what his friend David Hammond, the Belfast broadcaster and musician, describes as "an important arrogance in him," which makes him incompatible with Hollywood. He wrote a screenplay of Brian Moore's novel The Lonely Pas- sion of Judith Hearne, but when he refused to change his (even more) downbeat ending, his version was scrapped.

There was, however, an unexpected bonus for Friel. As a result of the initial discussions, Katharine Hepburn, who was to have starred in the Maggie Smith role, became a close friend and a fan.

"He's entertaining, sensitive, and he's goddamn good," she told me. Friel and his wife stay with Hepburn whenever they go to New York.

"Occasionally the film world is tempting to me," admits Friel, "but I don't need the money. It's easy to live here and it's cheap. As writers, we're tax-free."

"Here" is a rambling white converted Victorian boardinghouse, balanced like a lighthouse above a craggy inlet on the Inishowen Peninsula in the North of Ireland. It is a symbolic location, allowing Friel to live in the republic while retaining a grip on Ulster. Combat-tom Derry (or Londonderry, as the English call it) is about twenty miles from his house in Greencastle, and the border dividing British-owned Northern Ireland from Eire's County Donegal is just minutes away. It is an unsettling contrast. Half an hour before meeting Friel, I saw soldiers on the outskirts of Derry, running and crouching with their machine guns pointed at the road. Yet once you turn down the long drive to the house, you enter a pastoral zone "away from it all," to borrow the title of a Heaney poem. Donegal, famous for the unspoiled beauty of its scenery, has always been an image of possibility for Friel. For the Northern Irish, too, it is magic territory, where people go on holiday. Living where he does stretches Friel's imagination "between politics and transcendence," in Heaney's phrase. This dichotomy is the subject of "Away from It All," in which the poet, in conversation with a friend, chews over lobster claws and aesthetic imperatives confronting every Irish writer: whether to contemplate the "motionless point" or "participate actively in history." The unnamed friend in the poem is Friel.

Stories circulate about how Brian Friel will agree to see a journalist and then change his mind at the last minute, or insist, as Nabokov did, that questions be submitted in writing. But the genial Irishman who comes out to greet me immediately counters his formidable reputation. He is followed by Anne Friel, his wife of thirty-six years, a gentle, engaging woman with a soft Donegal lilt and smiling eyes. Plodding behind is Masha, their geriatric Labrador, named after the middle sister in Chekhov's Three Sisters, a play which Friel, often called "the Irish Chekhov," translated ten years ago "as an act of love."

In the living room, with its wide-angle view of the loch and the shadowy hills of Ulster, there is a piano against one wall. Music is extremely important to Friel—stage directions in several of the plays specify popular songs and classical sonatas—but Anne Friel is the pianist in the family. She is also an accomplished gardener, and has created a romantic terraced garden around which her husband takes me with pride. Even a stranger can see they have an enviable rapport. Anne Friel is always the one to whom Friel first shows his work. "He wouldn't change anything, though," she says, laughing. "He'd change it for nobody."

Friel settles in front of a peat fire, lighting up a tycoon-style cigar. He has an awesome boiled ham of a face, like a Francis Bacon self-portrait. A poet acquaintance likens it to "a four-bar electric fire," and I think how apt that is as Friel's complexion glows through the floating carpet of fug which thickens to a pea-souper as the hours pass. The only evidence in the simply furnished room of his huge London success is what he calls "my Lughnasa clock," a George HI antique which he says is "more pleasurable than the play itself. ' ' But later he shows off a new CD player—bought with the proceeds of his play's long London run—which he hasn't yet used, as he has only a couple of Abba discs, left behind by one of his five grown-up children.

Danting at Lughnasa is an unlikely hit, with its dreamy, Chekhovian pace and a title few can remember or pronounce. (It sounds like "lunacy.") Yet when it moved from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to London's National Theatre in October 1990, it instantly became the most coveted ticket in town. It won this year's Olivier Award for best play, and is still running to full houses. The New York production will feature several members of the original cast, including such superb ensemble actresses from the Abbey as Brid Nf Neachtain, Brfd Brennan, and Catherine Byrne. On Broadway, Alec McCowan will be replaced by Donal Donnelly, who starred in the 1966 run of Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Noel Pearson, who is producer and chairman of Dublin's Abbey Theatre, fell in love with Dancing at Lughnasa as soon as he read it. "I had the same feeling about this as I had with My Left Foot. I rang Friel the next morning and said, 'Not only do I want to open the new Abbey with this play, but I'm telling you it's going to go everywhere.' " Friel's response was characteristically laconic: "Noel, I think your Left Foot has gone to your head."

"He's entertaining, sensitive, and he's goddamn good," Katharine Hepburn said.

Like that film, Dancing at Lughnasa focuses on a large Catholic household, in this case five unmarried sisters scraping a living together in County Donegal in the thirties. The story of their last year together as a family is elegiacally narrated by Michael, the illegitimate son of one of the sisters. The play is set during the weeks of Lughnasa, the Irish harvest festival, named after the pagan god Lugh (pronounced Loo). For Michael, the incandescent memories of that summer are the appearance of his ne'er-dowell father, the hopeless charmer Gerry Evans; the effect on his aunts of "Marconi," a radio endowed with contagious, Dionysian powers; and the return from Africa of his missionary uncle, Father Jack, the character Donal Donnelly will play on Broadway.

In the first act, Friel takes a considerable risk with the audience's attention span, concentrating on the mundane routine of the sisters' life—making mash for hens, collecting turf, knitting, shopping, cooking. Their conversation is humdrum, fragmentary. For about half an hour the play doesn't seem to be going anywhere; there is an edginess in the air both onand offstage. Rosaleen Linehan, who appears as the schoolmistress, Kate, agrees: "The first part is very difficult to perform. It's not till after the dance that the whole play settles. After that we're more relaxed, and the audience settles."

The most extraordinary scene on the London stage is triggered when Michael's mother, Chrissie, switches on the radio. Maggie, standing with her hands in a bowl of flour, is first to respond to the heavy beat of the ceili band. Absorbing the rhythm, she drags her fingers down her cheeks and breasts, streaking her face like a savage. With a wild cry she starts to dance, arms, legs, and bootlaces flying. One by one the sisters follow suit, each one a maenad deranged by the atavistic spirit of the music, all moving in ways that caricature them— like the crude jig danced by Rose, a simpleton, whose Wellington boots "pound out her own erratic rhythm." The circumspect Kate is the last to join in, and her tightlipped, autistic reel is the most strangely driven of all. When the music ends midphrase, the sisters stop as if snapped out of hypnosis, half embarrassed and half defiant. A few members of the audience titter awkwardly, unsure of how to respond. But from that moment on, Friel has both actors and spectators in his thrall.

In subjecting us to what he has described as "the momentous daily trivia" of life in rural Donegal, Friel forces us to share the boredom and frustration of these five sisters quarantined in a rustic kitchen by circumstances and convention. As his friend Seamus Deane, the poet and academic, has written, "The same blend of disappointment and unyielding pressure is found time and again to characterize the experience of his protagonists." The women in Dancing at Lughnasa have surrendered thenyouth and their dreams to a life from which only the dance can release them. Like music, dance confesses what can't or shouldn't be spoken. "Don't talk any more; no more words," Michael's mother tells his father as, later in the play, they perform a wistful Fred-andGinger routine, asserting the triumph of Apollo over Dionysus, which is a central conflict in the play. "When you come to the large elements and mysteries of life," says Friel, "they are ineffable. Words fail us at moments of great emotion. Language has become depleted for me in some way; words have lost their accuracy and precision. So I use dance in the play as a surrogate for language."

Friel has become bolder about allowing himself the freedom to indulge what Seamus Heaney, one of his closest friends, calls "the anti-rational or irrational impulse." Dance, expressing its intuitive, nondiscursive truths, is just one device with which he achieves this. "Stagecraft and plot skills are all in the service of a kind of reverie in Lughnasa," says Heaney. "I thought of Monet, late, watery Monet, and not because of the poppies on the set, but because of the fluency and opulence of the mood painting." It was this hazy quality that led the English critics to label Dancing at Lughnasa a poignant nostalgia play—"a bogside Five Sisters," as The Independent called it. Friel sees it as far more barbaric: "It is about the necessity for paganism," he says, and in his narrative he shows how the old pagan customs still impinge on rural life and Catholic propriety.

The old stationmaster's house is up a hill outside the small, pretty town of Glenties in County Donegal. This was the home of the Mundy sisters, "those five brave women of Glenties" to whom Friel has dedicated his text. One of them was his mother. Dancing at Lughnasa is Friel's most directly autobiographical play. Like Michael, he was seven in 1936, although his parents were married and his father was a respectable schoolmaster. "I had four aunts with those names and an uncle who came back from being a missionary in Africa. My Aunt Rose was a simple girl." Glenties is also where his wife's family comes from; Friel's father was her parents' best man. When the solid two-story house overlooking the now dilapidated station hut came up for sale, he considered buying it, "but I felt it might have haunted me a bit." Knowing what it meant to him, David Hammond chose a different house when he was asked to host a documentary on the playwright. "I had to do a piece to camera, so I stood in front of a house about five miles away. Nobody knew."

The idea for the play came to Friel one night when he was walking along London's Strand with Tom Kilroy, the theater director. Looking at the cardboard-quilted vagrants sleeping in shop doorways, Friel said, "I'm sure some of those are Irish people," and recounted the story of two of his aunts, who lived rough in London and died young as penniless alcoholics. "Write a play about it," said Kilroy.

Those close to Friel say he feels a certain guilt about Dancing at Lughnasa, for he fears he has exploited his family circumstances. But the element of autobiography is just a tracing, which allows him to rework perennial themes from earlier plays: the role of language, the attraction of exile, the hardship of an agrarian life—conventional issues in the Irish theatrical tradition. As Seamus Deane has written, "Irish drama has been heavily populated by people for whom vagrancy and exile have become inescapable conditions about which they can do nothing but talk, endlessly and eloquently and usually to themselves. The tramps of Yeats and Synge and Beckett, the stationless slum dwellers of O'Casey or Behan, bear a striking family resemblance to Friel's exiles."

"When you come to the large elements and mysteries of life, they are ineffable. So I use dance in the play as a surrogate for language."

Friel's disclosure of the existence of the Glenties household is the closest he has come to identifying the whereabouts of Ballybeg, the fictitious setting of Dancing at Lughnasa and most of his plays (Heaney compares it to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County). Ballybeg, as Friel's poet friend Tom Paulin puts it, could be "Ballyanywhere." It is a microcosm of Ireland— the whole island: there is no place in Friel's writing for "the border." But its location is unmistakably western Donegal. It is a bleak, architectural landscape where Irish is the first language and where many Celtic customs and traditions are preserved. Friel chose to base his characters on the people there, whom he once found "completely untouched by present-day hysteria and hypocrisy," though he now admits that that is too romantic a notion. He is a miniaturist and confines his canvas to the local and the domestic. But parochialism, in Friel's hands, is rarely constricting. Because he deals so accurately and so truthfully with the fundamentals of life, he is able to make the Irish condition a universal one.

In County Donegal, Brian Friel is a local hero. Mention his name in Bunbeg, two-boat fishing port fifteen miles from his summer retreat, and the young Cockney owner of the only pub will probably recount how he played in an amateur production of Translations. At Sharkey's Bar and at the Cope shop, further down the road, beaming proprietors offer Irishly prolix directions to his hideaway in Kincasslagh, which is unmarked on any map. I eventually located it at a spot where a dirt track stops at the edge of a cliff. Far below, Atlantic rollers thrash the long crescent of white strand where Katharine Hepburn went cycling at seven every morning when she stayed with the Friels. She loves the lack of ostentation and the privacy of their life ("something I try to have and fail," she said), and, of course, Friel, the hard-drinking, brilliant Irishman, is exactly her type.

Now that he lives by the sea in Greencastle, Friel rarely visits Ireland's West Coast. The house there is kept as a holiday cottage for his grandchildren. Friel is a terrific grandfather, according to David Hammond, and has always been a tolerant and perceptive father. "He gives his children vast freedom—the freedom to make mistakes." Only his daughter Judy is following him into the theater, as a would-be director. Paddy Friel lives in Kilkenny, where she is curator of the castle; Mary is a housewife in Dublin; Sally lives in Canada and works in the hotel business; and the youngest, David, is completing his studies in marine biology at a university in Wales. Although they are frequently drawn back home, none of the children shares their father's affiliation with Donegal. "They don't have that acute sense of place," he says. "They probably feel smothered by it."

For Friel, though, it is "the ultimate fashioning of experience... maybe a substitute for some kind of intellectual rootlessness." There was a time thirty years ago when, like John Millington Synge discovering the uncomplex people of the Aran Islands, Friel consciously integrated himself into the local community, going out with the fishermen and getting seasick "like a stupid townie," feeling his way into the spirit of the place. He drew on that period in wonderful stories like "The Gold in the Sea," first published in The New Yorker in the sixties. Friel wrote fourteen stories in all for the magazine, supplementing the small income he earned as a schoolmaster in Derry.

He dismisses his two collections of short stories as "stammerings from the past," but they are just as fresh, intimate, and evocative today as when they were written. It was the New Yorker stories that prompted Tyrone Guthrie to write Friel a fan letter—the beginning of a close friendship and an inspired creative partnership.

At Guthrie's invitation, Friel spent the spring of 1963 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, "learning about the physical elements of plays."

Through the director, he became aware of the audience and how to move it, as he does so brilliantly in Lughnasa. Friel has described the Minneapolis experience as "a parole" from stifling Derry. Those months in America acted as a catalyst on his imagination, and he came home to write Philadelphia, Here I Come!, the play that secured his international reputation.

Success, however, had a reverse effect on Friel. Friends say that after his Broadway triumph he went into a retreat. He began work on what David Hammond describes as his "hinterland" plays, such as The Gentle Island (1971), which is almost vengeful in tone and renounces the Celtic Twilight values which he had dramatized in the world of Ballybeg as illusory and sham. Friel has always had what Heaney calls a "subversive intelligence," which he explains as "Friel's need to unsettle pieties (in The Communication Cord) and question the stability of myth/memory/history (in Faith Healer, Making History, and Aristocrats)."

It got him into trouble, particularly in America and England, where he was accused of defending the I.R.A. in his angry, polemical plays The Freedom of the City and Volunteers, which retaliate against the British army's butcherings in Ulster. Though their subject is still topical, they are not among Friel's best works. He is a master of nuance and suggestion, and therefore any element of pamphleteering is more forceful when he speaks out in a refracted way. Translations—about the mapping and renaming of Ireland by the English— is a highly political but very subtle play, written with compassion, not bitterness.

"I don't think Friel is vitally and centrally interested in politics in Northern Ireland," says David Hammond. "He was made a senate in Dublin—the equivalent of England's House of Lords—which is unusual for someone who is apolitical. But he only went once and he didn't speak."

'I bet that's a bloody political table over there," remarks Friel. We are having dinner on the harbor at Kealy's Bar, renowned in the area for the fish it serves straight off the boats. Friel has spotted John Hume, the Social Democratic and Labor Party leader, a convivial fellow who has a weekend cottage nearby. Despite his well-known aversion to the profession (he once declared on television that all politicians were rats), Friel likes Hume and speaks of him as "very skillful—in Irish terms a new politician, a committed European with vision." Hume sits at one of the bar's two Formica tables, and is joined by his "henchman," as Friel calls his companion, their respective wives, and a couple of friends. They are there, Hume says, to "talk about the talks"; the next morning the first round-table talks in sixteen years will take place in Derry.

Friel has what Seamus Heaney calls a "subversive intelligence" which he explains as "Riel's need to unsettle pieties."

Kealy's could be the set of a Friel play or the prelude to his story about salmon fishing, "The Gold in the Sea." Sitting around the bar are three or four local fishermen, tanking up before taking the salmon boats out for several nights. A colleague sticks his head in the door and calls, "Half nine, Paddy." But Paddy looks very anchored. Friel has warned about the slow service: "You have to pace your waiting." Jimmy Kealy cooks on two gas rings, but eventually the lobsters and perfectly pink salmon appear. Friel, jovial and relaxed, talks enthusiastically about his friends, particularly Seamus Deane, whose first novel is about to be published and who has just been elected to the Aosdana, the Irish academy of arts. "I think he's the most brilliant man in Ireland. A conversation with him is a kind of epiphany."

Deane and Friel's other good friends— Seamus Heaney, Tom Kilroy, Tom Paulin, the actor Stephen Rea, and David Hammond—are all co-directors of Field Day, the theater company Friel started in 1980 with Rea. The original aim was to take Irish drama to culturally starved areas of the country. Since its inception, Field Day has expanded, and now publishes literary and political pamphlets. Its most ambitious project to date, masterminded by Deane, will be the publication in November (printed and distributed by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Ireland and W. W. Norton in the U.S.) of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, three volumes of poetry, drama, and fiction as well as political, historical, and philosophical articles in Irish and English written between the year 600 and the present day. Deane is overall editor, but the seven Field Day directors and friends have all contributed to the project in some way.

The small literary fraternity in Ireland is both enriching and inhibiting for Friel. The word he uses to describe it is "metabiotic"—which refers to organisms that need other organisms to thrive. So closeknit is the group that the writers—particularly Friel and Heaney—occasionally find themselves sharing the same images, most memorably digging and divining. When Friel sent Heaney the script of Volunteers, the poet was so excited by the coincidence of their both being imaginatively at work on the same Viking dig that he spent a weekend typing and ordering his poems and sent off the manuscript immediately to Faber and Faber. "His tunneling and tapping met my tunneling and tapping and set me on my way with the book." The book was North, published in 1975.

It is nearly eleven when we leave Kealy's Bar, and "the bloody political table" is still waiting to be served. Friel wishes Hume good luck, both with the arrival of the food and with the next morning. "So much hope is pinned on those talks," he says, leading the way out into the twilight-bright northern night.

Since then, the talks have collapsed. Friel is unsurprised. As Deane says, Friel has always been conscious of the recurrent failures of the political imagination in Ireland—"a whole history of failure." But his anger of twenty years ago has mellowed, and he now acknowledges that human nature provides its own consolations. "The Troubles are a pigmentation in our lives here, a constant irritation that detracts from real life. But life has to do with something else as well, and it's the other things which are the more permanent and real."