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Friel is the Irish playwright
that everybody outside Ireland knows.
He is very much established as the father of Irish theatre.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
He treated success and failure alike.
He never revelled in success.
Brian is one of the great storytellers.
What you don't forget is what it was like to be talking to him.
And sitting at a table with him.
He was lovely. Grumpy.
Like every older Irish man I know. Grumpy and lovely.
He was a showman but he was very, very shy as well.
But a few jokes and away he went, y'know?
(HE LAUGHS)
Packed houses every night. Packed. Wherever we went.
Brian completely reinvented
what theatre could be.
(SHE SCREAMS)
Really he was an experimenter all his life.
Brian was not just a playwright of his time.
But a playwright of his culture.
REPORTER: "Meryl Streep was the star
of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, set in Donegal."
He said, 'We must speak to ourselves
and if others wish to overhear us, they're welcome.'
I'm at Brian's study. That's Ralph Fiennes with him.
That's Meryl Streep.
That's Tom Stoppard.
Now at this stage Brian was on his last months.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
I've everything rearranged. Nothing was there
that Brian would have had there. He wouldn't have been caught dead.
That's the Tony Award thing.
Well he wouldn't have had them up. Not at all.
Not at all, not at all. No.
I don't remember what he had on the wall actually.
But I've everything that I want to see on the walls.
Yes. Aye. That mattered to him.
His funeral is there in the middle of it all as well. (LAUGHS)
It's such a lovely photograph.
It was a lovely sunny day.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
FRIEL RECORDING: "There are of course, what are called the facts.
And since some people value the tidiness they seem to afford,
let's have the facts first and be done with them.
I was born in Omagh in County Tyrone in 1929.
My father was a principal of a three teacher school outside the town.
He taught me.
In 1939, when I was 10, we moved to Derry.
I was at St Columb's College for five years.
St Patrick's College, Maynooth for two and a half years.
And St Joseph's training College for one year.
From 1950 until 1960
I taught in various schools in and around Derry.
And since that time I have been writing full time."
Brian's family had taken a house just across the road.
I used to play the piano so I would be there,
playing an accompaniment for anybody.
People enjoyed it because there used to be a regular...
...crowd that would come and they'd all do songs.
I don't ever remember Brian singing, funny but, cos he'd a lovely voice.
It was Tenor and his voice was trained.
And that's where I met him first.
Oh, he was the life and soul of dances.
And he used to do the MC and he'd sing.
And he's play the mouth organ and he played the guitar.
He was a man about town. (LAUGHS)
V/O: Newly married and teaching in Derry,
Brian had begun to write newspaper articles,
short fiction and essays for radio.
Experimenting with different forms
as he tried to find his voice.
Brian was a short story writer
almost before he was a playwright.
He had this contract with the New Yorker magazine.
And that was a huge deal to get that contract because,
you know at that stage in the late 50's/early 60's
he and Anne are living in Derry.
He's teaching and he's gonna give up teaching to be a full time writer.
And the thing about the stories as well
is that they weren't written and then forgotten.
I mean the work, the plays actually draw quite significantly
on the stories.
For example, this one, in November 1961
has the story 'The Foundry House' in it.
And 'The Foundry House' of course became 'Aristocrats'.
But nothing was wasted. It was all there
to be used, to be brought back to life.
To be transformed when he gave himself over full time
to the theatre.
FRIEL RECORDING: "I found myself at 30 years of age
embarked on a theatrical career
and almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of play writing
and play production apart from a modest intuitive knowledge.
Just like a painter who has never studied anatomy
or a composer with no training in harmony.
So I packed my bags
and with my wife and two children
went to Minneapolis in Minnesota
where a new theatre was being created by Tyrone Guthrie.
And there I lived for six months."
That's me. That's my daughter Mary
who's got a teddy bear of sorts and that's my daughter Paddy.
It's the first night of one of the plays in Minneapolis.
We had no income.
All our... All our finances went into this trip.
But we were foolish probably and young.
Tyrone Guthrie was probably the most important theatre director
in the world, the English speaking world.
He knew Brian's work, the short stories
that Brian had written in the New Yorker.
And Guthrie invited him to come to Minnesota in Minneapolis
as an intern, as an observer.
Someone who would just sit around
and watch how plays were put together.
Guthrie could work magic.
I think Brian just thought it was amazing
that the audience were enthralled by what they were seeing.
He came away from that and attempted to write plays that...
...nobody else had ever done before.
He would experiment and he tried in every play almost...
...to do something different.
FRIEL RECORDING: Those months in America
gave me a sense of liberation.
Remember, this was my first parole
from inbred, claustrophobic Ireland.
And that sense of liberation conferred on me
a valuable self confidence.
And a necessary perspective.
So that the first play I wrote immediately after I came home,
and that was 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!',
was a lot more assured
than anything I had attempted before.
(LIVELY MUSIC)
Think back to that opening night of 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!'
in Dublin in 1964.
I mean when the lights go up on the stage,
it's another Irish rural kitchen.
Traditional fare, y'know? Here we go again.
And then you have Gar Public and Gar Private.
And Irish theatre has changed.
Shall we have a little read of it?
Shall we try you being Private for a minute, Charlie?
Okey-doke. And you Public? Yeah.
Here was a play about a young man
who was about to leave Ireland
and all the reasons that he was about to leave Ireland
were encapsulated in that one night
the night before he left.
The genius of Friel
was to divide that into the public and the private self.
The public self, a bit like Brian himself
was diffident and not out there and gregarious.
But the private self was witty,
sharp, intelligent. A very alive figure.
There's something really important about that idea of walking around
with a secret version of yourself inside, isn't it?
I can think of three times where I've seen a play
or read a play and been envious of...
...some technical idea in the middle of it.
And two of those three times
the plays were by Brian.
I don't think anybody before then
had thought of having two actors playing one role simultaneously.
Remember, you're going.
At 7.15 you're still going.
He's nothing but a drunken oul schoolmaster.
A conceited arrogant washout.
Aw God, the creator, the redeemer of all the faith.
Get a grip on yourself. Don't be a damn sentimental fool.
# Philadelphia, here I come.
Moira and Una and Rose and Agnes and Lizzie.
(US ACCENT) Yes sir, you're gonna cut a bit of a dash
in them there states.
Great big sexy dames and nightclubs and high living.
And films and dances and...
Cathy. My own darling Cathy.
# Where bowers of flowers bloom in the Spring.
I can't. # Each morning at dawning everything is bright and gay.
# A sun-kissed miss says don't be late, that's...
Come on, sing up man!
I... I...
# That's why I can't hardly wait.
# Philadelphia, here I come.
That's it laddy buck.
(TOGETHER, SINGING) Philadelphia, here I come!
This is extraordinary stuff.
While he's very much established
as almost the father of Irish theatre
and certainly in the eyes of people
from outside this island -
really, he was, I think an experimenter all his life.
I always just thought he was the bee's knees
as a playwright.
And he knew that I thought that.
And with courteous reciprocity
he said something nice about my work.
So you know we had a good basis for our friendship.
And 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!'
was just so effective.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
Every single part of it is a critique
of Irish society in the early 60's.
That forced thousands upon thousands
upon thousands of people to emigrate. To get away.
The stifling nature of church and state.
The stifling nature of small town Ireland.
NARRATOR: 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!',
is set in the fictional small town of Ballybeg,
an imagined version of Glenties in Donegal
where he spent his childhood holidays.
Brian would use Ballybeg as the creative landscape
of his plays throughout his career.
Ballybeg, it's the anglicised version of 'baile beag'. Small town.
Ballybeg doesn't exist, y'know? It's not on any map.
'If I had to spend another week in Ballybeg,
I'd go off my bloody head.'
He spent his summers in Donegal
with his mother's side of the family, the McLoones.
Glenties was a special place
in both his imagination
and his heart.
In the fields and houses
and families of Ballybeg
he was able to create
a theatrical world
that connected with his emotional and inner world.
I think it's just one of his great achievements.
NARRATOR: In 1966, 'Philadelphia, Here I Come!'
transferred to Broadway.
FRIEL RECORDING: And when the curtain fell
after that second of mental adjustment, they clapped and cheered
and called 'Bravo'.
And standing limp at the back of the auditorium
I didn't give a damn what the critics would say.
Happily, they were rapturous next day.
They paid us the highest compliment they knew.
They said briefly that we were a hit.
NARRATOR: Brian struck gold with his first play
to be produced on Broadway.
But following it up with a second hit proved more difficult.
Cass Maguire which came after Philadelphia...
That bombed very quick. And you see Guthrie was great
because he said you just have to rise above.
Y'know, this was his phrase.
And get up and start again.
So he learned that pretty early on in his career.
But I think it was the best thing ever
because if he'd had another hit after Philadelphia
which was a terrific hit in New York
I think he would have said goodbye to me. (LAUGHS)
Very quickly. (LAUGHS)
It would have been a different life, yeah.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
Let me take this little treasure chest.
This this actually came from the Friel household.
After Brian died, Anne and the family
very generously gave me this.
And in these drawers are a range of letters
from other people to Tyrone Guthrie
who of course was such an influence on Brian's career.
I put some of Brian's letters
in here as well.
The humour comes across certainly.
I mean kind of impish humour is all over them.
And he signs off "TT".
Now "TT" is Totus Tuus in Latin.
Totally yours.
Now we all, Brian, all of us went to St Columb's College.
We all learned Latin.
So on one level you could think well that's just a homage to the Latin.
But actually Totus Tuus was also
a song by Dana...
...to mark the papal visit of 1979. (LAUGHS)
And that's what Totus Tuus is about.
Brian was very encouraging.
The first project that I did was a drama, 'Tush A Bye Baby'.
And Brian sent me this lovely wee card,
just straight after.
He wrote to people all the time.
Y'know he would drop wee cards, that was his thing.
he did his correspondence in the morning.
But he kept in touch, y'know,
he was somebody who really connected with people.
And he wrote "Dear Margo, wonderful news from Gweedore
and so well deserved. Terrific. Do it again.
(LAUGHS) Very best, Brian".
And it was that do it again thing that really was inspirational
y'know that he believed you could do something.
I remember my father talking about Brian Friel when we were children.
He used to go to the Waterside Chapel. He and his wife, Anne.
And I remember him pointing him out to me one day and saying
that man there is a vey great man you know.
Derry people claim Bran Friel.
I am quite chauvinistic about the fact that Brian comes from here.
And wrote about here and understood this place
and understood how people thought.
"You're a Derry man born and bred. That's right."
REPORTER V/O: Paddy Friel, schoolmaster
and father of the playwright Brian Friel.
"Has it been your experience that your students
have been able to get a fair crack of the whip?"
"Well, the very fact that they are Catholics
is sufficient to debar them from employment
in the corporation."
"I've heard since I've been here
a rather peculiar fact and that is that the Guild Hall
which is the centre of the corporations activities
here in the city is exclusively a Unionist employer.
Is this so? That is quite correct.
There's not even a Catholic...
...cleaner employed in the Guild Hall.
It's policy to keep Catholics
out of the Guild Hall itself."
"We are demanding homes, employment, freedom of speech
and freedom of assembly."
"We do not wish bloodshed or violence."
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
ANNE FRIEL: That was the first march really.
October the 5th, 1968.
I can see Brian, I can see myself.
And they've spelt the word 'equal rights' wrong
on the big poster.
We then left the thing
and went through and I remember at the time thinking
what are all those police doing at the back of the marchers?
And we went on up and up the steps
to Spencer Road and came down Spencer Road
and over the bridge without knowing that anything had gone wrong...
...with the march.
Thinking that the police let them go
or I don't know how we thought it was going to end.
And it was only when we came back to the City Hotel reception
that we discovered it had gone mad. Crazy.
(SHOUTS AND SCREAMS)
It was because the cameras were there that time
and it photographed police
treating people pretty badly.
That that's how it got all the publicity then
and started the whole thing. The protests. The civil rights protests.
(SHOUTING, DRAMATIC MUSIC)
I'll tell you why you march.
Because you live with eleven kids and a sick husband
in two rooms that aren't fit for animals.
Because you exist on a state subsistence
that is about enough to keep you alive but too small
to fire your guts.
Because you know your children are caught in the same morass.
Because for the first time in your life
you grumbled and someone else grumbled.
And someone else.
And you heard each other and became aware that there were hundreds,
thousands, millions of us all over the world.
And in a vague groping way,
you were outraged.
FRIEL RECORDING: The Northern situation is basic
to everything that one does I think, Hugh. And if you are as I was
a member of what is known as the Northern minority,
I think you're conditioned from, almost from birth.
Now I have tackled it only once directly,
In a play called 'The Freedom of the City'.
But I still think that's true of all the northern writers.
If it's not handled directly
it certainly, it informs everything they write
and it informs all their attitudes.
'Freedom of the City' is set in 1970 in Derry,
in the aftermath of a broken up
civil rights march, a banned civil rights march,
which was broken up by the police
and the British army.
Loosely based on the events of Bloody Sunday -
which I was present at actually - it was on a big civil rights march
during Bloody Sunday which was the 30th January 1972
thirteen people were killed--
were murdered by the British army.
And one man died later of his wounds.
And Brian's play 'Freedom of the City'
is his own imagined version
of three of the civil rights demonstrators
breaking in to the Guild Hall in Derry.
So it was a very symbolic play in that sense.
Lily is this Catholic woman, married woman,
working as a cleaner.
Mother to eleven children.
Living in abject poverty.
There's a great maternal warmth to her.
A great colloquial turn of phrase. So from an audience perspective
like you'd say oh, I know her!
I know what she is.
The police surround the building.
And at the end forces them to come out.
And they come out and they're shot.
He needed an audience to feel
the vulnerability and the...
...you know because they were going to die.
Each of the three characters, Michael, Skinner and Lily
speak after the moment they have been shot.
And with Lily you get this wisdom
and self awareness that she hasn't displayed
throughout the entire play. And it's to his credit
of his bloody genius that it doesn't jar.
'In the silence before my body disintegrated
into a purple convulsion, I thought I glimpsed a tiny truth.
That life had eluded me
because never once in my 43 years
had an experience, an event, even a small unimportant happening
been isolated and assessed
and articulated.'
'And the fact that this, my last experience
was defined by this perception
this was the...
...culmination of sorrow.
In a way, I died of grief.'
Now I'm reading that smiling because I think it's the most...
...insightful thing I've ever read.
The fact that this, my last experience
was defined by this perception.
It was the culmination of sorrow.
To at 43 to look at your entire life
and that moment afterwards go
ah, not once...
...and then to die again of grief.
Oh! Delicious, delicious.
Awful. Awful.
And in that moment
because he's allowed you to fall in love with her,
you die yourself of grief.
It was really an extraordinary political play that...
...was not what Brian had been used to writing.
He's so controlled normally there's a slight sort of...
...he's angry in this.
I was doing 'Freedom of the City'
directed by albert Finney in the Royal Court
and that's when I met Brian
and it was really the combination of those two great men
made this an incredible experience for me.
And the great thing about Albert
who is a wonderful man of the theatre you know
When he read it he said we have to do this now.
This is happening now. This happened...
...a few months ago.
We have to do it now.
NARRATOR: The Royal Court in London premiered the play
at the same time it opened in Dublin.
But it was not well received.
The plays depiction of the British army
and the judicial report into their role in Bloody Sunday
was condemned as sheer propaganda
far fetched and unbelievable.
There was an actor playing a British soldier in it
and I remember talking to me and saying...
...oh, he says, I don't believe a word of it.
No, they must have been doing something, those people.
I mean it's a very big learn
for an English audience.
It's not a surprise
that the public didn't go for it.
And then we had some bomb scares.
And that was enough to empty the place.
"When you get the British army moving into your agent's office
and asking questions about your ringing back to Belfast
to ask questions about you or when you get threatening letters
you are really astonished. I found that I was being threatened
by all kinds of people and all kinds of institutions
and it seemed disproportionate...
...to the statement I had made."
In those days the New York Times
they either made or broke a show.
You know? None of the other papers really counted.
So the critic there was a man called Clive Barnes
and he was an Englishman and Brian was very uneasy
about an Englishman reviewing this play on Broadway.
He just dreaded it.
And all of the review just was...
...the English couldn't have done...
...the British would never do anything like that.
Then it closed. And that was tough.
After the great successes on Broadway,
there was a period then when his plays
weren't successful in New York.
I mean 'Freedom of the City',
you know, it bombed on Broadway.
When you would go to those openings
there would be a list of interviews
all lined up for you the next day
and for the next week.
If you're a failure, they're all cancelled.
That's it, y'know, so you've gotta get used to the brush off.
And I remember one time he said he was sitting on a cushion
on the floor and all the money men were there.
Waiting, waiting, waiting for the reviews to come in you see.
And who the hell is this author anyway he says. (LAUGHS)
One of them was saying to the other. And he put up his hand
and said "I'm the author".
And then it didn't work. The play didn't work.
They almost kicked him out, he says.
Aw, it was awful. A humiliation.
Oh, no things were very lean for a long time
in the 70's.
One play after another.
Wasn't doing very well.
INTERVIEWER: "Where are you going from there?"
FRIEL: "I have no idea at all. I'm...
...a bit lost at the moment and very confused."
There was a kind of a lean period
where, I mean they were perfectly good plays
but they just didn't seem to capture the zeitgeist
or whatever it was. I'm thinking of plays like
'Volunteers' or 'Living Quarters'.
Plays that just didn't take.
And that must have been very difficult for a writer.
To have to deal with that because you must begin to wonder
have I lost the touch?
Is the muse as it were deserting?
And then I think the real feeling
of failure on Broadway
was when they did 'Faith Healer'.
NARRATOR: The story of an itinerant healer
his wife and manager as they travel through remote villages
offering cures to the sick and the desperate,
this new play was like nothing Brian had ever written before
and broke all the rules of conventional drama.
Nobody in Ireland would touch it.
It was four monologues which first of all was different.
And then it was too scary for actors.
Only then, for some reason or other
James Mason wanted to go back into theatre.
He was at that stage at the height of his film career
But he undertook to do it in New York.
But the theatre critics just said that's not a play.
Monologues. That's not a play.
So it closed after three weeks.
And it would have closed much earlier only James Mason
didn't take any salary.
He didn't want to leave with only working for... I mean they can close
in three days there if they want to but it ran for three weeks.
I was artistic director of The Abbey at the time
and Brian came back, we were doing 'Aristocrats',
his play, here. And Brian came back and he was...
...pretty devastated by the experience.
And I'd read the play and thought this is a masterpiece.
I mean it was just, it was so unusual.
The monologue form.
The almost Rashomon
kind of three different versions of the same story.
I just thought we have to do it.
And I said it to Brian.
I remember we were sitting in The Plough Lounge
across the road from The Abbey
and I said we have to do this Brian
we have to do this play. "Oh no, no, no.
I don't know that I could take the devastation of it again".
And then about two days later, he called me.
And he said "If you can persuade Donal McCann
to play Frank Hardy,
we should do it".
Brian knew that this was the man
who could find the core of Frank Hardy.
The complex, dark
the balance between that and the showman.
And we did it here at The Abbey in 1980.
And it transformed the history of the play.
It suddenly was recognised
as the masterpiece that it is.
'Faith healer.
Faith healing.
A craft without an apprenticeship.
A ministry without responsibility
A vocation...
without a ministry.'
His innovation as a playwright
was blinding.
I mean, y'know when we did 'Faith Healer'
and I read 'Faith Healer' and I thought
'No!
It's just not possible. How can you do that?'
Four monologues, no plot, no dialogue,
no action, just storytelling.
How do you keep an audience engaged?
And I used to watch Donal McCann,
the most brilliant Francis Hardy ever.
And every night he entranced me.
But it was the quality of Brian's storytelling.
'I walked across the yard towards them.'
I played in 'Aristocrats'
and I played Grace in 'Faith Healer'.
And both those women, y'know Grace particularly
she was so hurt, so damaged.
I sort of love all here sort of... she's very precise.
And her legal mind.
And the choice of language
and words that she uses and that she self corrects -
a lot.
And he sometimes writes very long sentences
with lots of parentheses.
And that to me,
suddenly you start to float
and it really is a bit like the way I'm speaking but better,
where it's somebody's train of thought
and you're going with that train of thought
and she doubles back on herself and then... And I just...
I felt that was revealing so much of her state of mind.
"Anyhow, that's where the baby is buried
in Kinlochbervie in Sutherland in the north of Scotland".
"Frank made a wooden cross
to mark the grave and painted it white and wrote across it -
'Infant child of Francis and Grace Hardy'.
No name of course because it was stillborn.
Just 'Infant child'.
And I'm sure that cross is gone by now
because it was a fragile thing and there were cows in the field
and it wasn't a real cemetery anyway.
And I had the baby in the back of the van and there was no nurse
or doctor, so no-one knew anything about it
except Frank and Teddy and me.
And there was no clergyman at the graveside.
Frank just said a few prayers that he made up.
So there is no record
of any kind.
And he never talked about it afterwards.
Never once mentioned it again.
And because he didn't, neither did I.
So that was it.
Over and done with. A finished thing.
Yes.
But I think it's a nice name, Kinlochbervie.
A complete sound.
A name you wouldn't forget easily.'
I just think it's...
It's... It's just so moving
that she not been allowed...
to name her child.
And so she names...
She sort of gives the name of the place...
..this weight...
and power I think is...
is just so beautiful.
You could follow the emotional journey of that woman so easily.
That's what he did, Brian, all the time.
He presented us with the interior lives of his characters.
You know most times, actors have to invent backstory.
Because writers don't give you much so you invent your own.
But with Brian, you know,
you had a wealth
of detail about your character. Always.
"You can take the entire script
and you can cut out on every single line
you can lose, on every single page you can lose two lines. Yeah.
Two lines every single page which means
that you're gonna cut the play by three quarters of an hour.
Now if you do that,
you then have to start re-rehearsing the entire play."
He used to always say "I don't let the play leave my desk
until I'm certain
that that is what I want to say".
And he would talk about the music of the first production.
That the music of the first production
defined the play very often.
Now he doesn't mean just music as... he means the way the actors...
the way the whole thing came together.
And you did not dare
to change a word
or a comma even.
And I remember we were doing a play
at one point and this young actor
she was very young and very inexperienced.
And she said, "Brian,
I've been working on this and this line doesn't work."
Again, everybody in the room
people dived for cover, y'know.
And Brian looked at her over his glasses
and said "It's your job to make it work."
He wanted as much control as he could have.
He wouldn't change any of them, y'know.
He would freak if you did.
(LAUGHS)
NARRATOR: Brian would gain more control
of the production of his plays
when he and Stephen Rea set up their own theatre company
called Field Day in 1980.
I'd always wanted to have a company.
A friend of mine drove me to Muff.
Where Brian lived at the time.
And when I said "Look, I think there's some money
in the Arts Council. Is there ANY chance
you could write a play for us?"
And he says "Well, I'm writing one at the moment".
About, eh, place names.
Eventually he sent me I think the first act
of 'Translations'.
And I knew it was a masterpiece.
And I knew that unless he had a nervous breakdown
the rest would be a masterpiece as well, y'know.
"I think ideally if we cut twenty minutes off it,
I think we'd be..."
Stephen used to arrive with a plastic bag
with his belongings in it. Like he was a kid brother to Brian
at the time, he really was. They were such pals.
The kids used to call him 'Grumpy'.
He never... (SHE LAUGHS)
Y'see we'd have a meal, we ate in the kitchen
and Brian would be washing dishes. Stephen never got up
to lift a cup away from the table or do anything ever.
He just sat there and you see these two kids
were made lift and everything.
No, they didn't approve of him at times.
But he was the best of craic, he really was.
And then we got on so well together.
'I must say to you that if at any point
you feel that the organisation which is teetering into being
will not do your play justice
and you want to withdraw it
and give it to someone who will
I will understand and not be offended. (LAUGHS)
I may cut my throat but that's all.'
'There is no reason why you should sacrifice your work
for some hare-brained scheme.
Well it wasn't a hare-brained' scheme.
It was a moment that was...
...where we completely...
...got what our responsibility was
in terms, as artists.
For the place where we lived.
"Stephen and I formed a company,
got a company of actors together.
And we're going into rehearsal in a few months time."
I mean working with 'Field Day' was a terrific experience.
Y'know, I was young at the time.
And just to be caught up in this atmosphere.
There had been nothing like it in Derry.
Here was this theatre company who were going to
put on a play set in a hedge school in County Donegal
in the 19th century and they were going to do it in the Guild Hall,
of all places.
Everybody was aware that they were doing something pioneering.
I knew in so many ways
it wasn't just the thoughts and the ideas -
it was trying to turn this space that so wasn't a theatre
into a theatre.
But I remember the firs time I met Brian.
I was so, so shy. And both he and Anne
just looked me intently in the eye and welcomed me.
And ever since that it was like you were a member of their family.
I liked him but I was wary of him, y'know?
Because he's a playwright, he's a famous playwright.
And certainly he was there
in the rehearsal room every day, y'know?
Smoking, y'know. Watching.
"Let's go on. I'm alright, yes I'm happy. Huh? Yes."
NARRATOR: Outside of the rehearsal room in Derry,
political tension and violence
continued to blight life in Northern Ireland.
FRIEL: "Well the bomb scares make the place
make the enterprise somehow surreal in some way.
It seems kind of strange putting on a play
when you're surrounded by a revolutionary situation."
I will never forget as long as I live,
that opening night of 'Translations' in Derry.
The helicopter was up hovering up above
and you were searched going in to the Guild Hall.
The front of the hall was full
of guests from the political arena.
I remember Martin McGuinness was in the front row to the right.
And Marlene Jefferson who was the first female mayor of Derry
was sitting in the front row and everybody wondered
what she would make of the play.
And she, you know, she was a Unionist.
But she... an enormously generous woman.
And you know first nights as you know
are kind of awkward and I wasn't sure how it'd go on.
And Marlene...
...was in the front, she stood up.
And gave us a standing... Everybody had to rise with her.
It's like Handel's Messiah, y'know.
And it became a triumph at that moment.
It was one of the most magical nights ever
I've experienced in the theatre.
And it was really wonderful for me to be there.
One of the few times I say it to be there on the first night,
because I really had no idea
about what I was going to see.
So I just was transported.
'So what do you think? Yes. Are you happy with that? Yes.'
NARRATOR: Set in 1833,
the play tells the story of what happens
when a group of Royal Engineers
arrive in the Irish speaking community of Ballybeg,
and begin translating the local Gaelic place names into English
for the first ordinance survey of Ireland.
And you look at that line again "Remember words are signals".
I just found this the other day. This is the original...
...script, working copy of 'Translations' that each of is got.
And when I found it the other day, this just great...
(GASPS)...struck me in the heart, y'know. The memory of it.
'Translations' is an example
of how he dealt with the political question
in a more oblique way but yet it was so direct too.
You know, the fact that it talked about
the removal of the Irish language and it's impact on people
and how you feel this terrible sense of loss
among the community in Ballybeg.
The only thing now you need to add into that is his pain.
His personal pain. Mm, okay. From the top? Yeah. Okay.
'Yes, it's a rich language lieutenant.'
'Full of mythologies and fantasy.
And hope and self deception.'
'A syntax opulent with tomorrows.'
'It is our response to mud cabins
and the diet of potatoes.'
'Our only method of replying to...
...inevitabilities.'
As Friel said to me himself
it's all about language.
And I said, what? The play? 'Translations'? The theatre?
'No,' he says. 'Everything.
Everything is about language.'
And that has stayed with me.
And that we were offering language as...
...a solution to...
... the terrible, terrible things that were going on
in this town and in this part of Ireland.
"People say 'Oh, you belong in the tradition of Irish drama.'
Which is, they say then, Farquhar, Wilde, Shaw, Sheridan, so on.
And in fact these were all Irish dramatists
who went over and acquired a voice.
An English voice so that they could be more acceptable
to English people.
I think what Yeats did for us on this island was that he said
you don't have to do that, you can stay on this island...
...speak to your own people in your own voice...
...and find some kind of completion in that."
LIAM NEESON: It certainly was a statement, y'know?
And what a statement it was with this extraordinary play.
The changing of place names,
these historic place names, Irish place names into English.
'Machrel buide. Ta. Machrel buide.'
'Croch na mona. Croch na mona.'
And Brian, with 'Translations' certainly
found the words
and certainly words that the play's based on.
What's the right word to translate
that Irish into English?
'Ma raibh ceatog?'
LIAM NEESON: And there's Yolland
trying to find the right words of love
to express to this woman who's speaking in Irish.
It's just beautifully intermingled, y'know?
'Lis na na?'
'Lios na ngra.'
Such brilliant playmaking.
These are two people, neither of which speak the other's language.
And one is speaking Irish, the other is speaking English.
But we are actually hearing both in English.
'Don't stop. I know what you're saying.'
'I would tell you how I want to be here.'
'To live here.'
'With you.'
'Always.'
'Always. Always?'
'Sorry what is that word? Always?'
'Yes, yes, always.'
And it's only a master craftsman like Friel -
could first of all dare to think of that -
and then actually
make it work so brilliantly.
The two participants can't actually understand each other
but the audience understands both of them.
That was so deft and simple and dramatic
and effective and moving.
(SINGING FROM THE VAN)
NARRATOR: Field Day's goal was to take the play
to Irish audiences in small towns and villages
all over the country.
'Translations' has become a modern classic.
It's appeal to audiences around the world
has led to productions from London and New York
to Minsk and Mumbai.
STEPHEN REA: This is us touring with 'Translations'.
Not everybody is there. I dunno, Big Liam's not there.
Oh, he's probably in the pub.
We were just like a little touring group.
With this fresh, new, vital play.
Barnstorming around Ireland. One night stands.
Going round village halls.
Entertaining people but with something rather special.
We were on the road for a long time
and there was wearing and tearing
and y'know, you didn't have big deal dressing rooms, y'know.
And I walked in
to what was where we were supposed to be changing
and Roy Hanlon who was Scottish, y'know?
He was lying on a table, trying to rest.
And I says - Ah Roy, how are you?
And he looks at me and he says -
'Did you ever get the feeling your career was moving backwards?'
(LAUGHS) He did.
Ah, dear.
That's the pure actor response to being on the road.
And as we went round Ireland, he and Anne would come and visit us.
And it was like your parents coming to see you, d'you know?
To make sure you were alright
and give you courage to keep going cos it was hard, y'know.
He loved actors. He really did, he loved their company.
He admired them enormously for their courage.
He would come to...
..every opening night he could or certainly send a telegram.
Which I thought was so classy
and so amazing.
He was lovely. Grumpy.
Lovely, like every
older Irish man I know. Grumpy and lovely.
And pressing a fiver into my hand to go up and get him a brandy.
(LAUGHS)
STEPHEN REA: He was a showman.
But he was very, very shy as well.
But a few 'deochs' and away he went, y'know.
(LAUGHS) And he was great fun.
Yeah, that's a good line, shy man and a showman.
That's it for me, yeah.
In later years Brian,
had a kind of an aversion to directors.
He said a certain point
that we were like bus conductors, he said.
We were told we couldn't get rid of bus conductors,
we got rid of them and buses still ran
and they were perfectly... So we could do the same with directors.
Which I found a little disconcerting,
considering that I had just finished doing a play with him
when he said this.
Brian had his opinions
and he was marked by having
very specific, unchanging positions
on very many things.
Including of course the role of the director.
Which he famously called
'a bogus job.'
That he didn't see the need for them.
Theatre had survived without them up to a hundred years ago.
And really there was something bogus
about the whole role of the director.
So you want to bear that in mind
when you're directing Brian's plays.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
NARRATOR: Brian wrote a dozen more plays after 'Translations',
always pushing at the boundaries of theatrical convention.
But it was a return to Ballybeg
and his childhood memories of Glenties
that brought him global recognition
and an international hit late in his career.
FRIEL: "I feel that I'm in someway...
...haunted by my own past in some kind of way."
"By childhood memories and by...
...loves that never happened and loves that didn't flourish
and angers that were misplaced and misdirected."
"So that I think
this is one of the perks
of literature is that you can recreate your life
as often as you wish."
'Dancing at Lughnasa' was a phenomenon.
It was a phenomenon here, it was a phenomenon in London,
it was a phenomenon on Broadway.
It ran on Broadway for a long time.
It won the Tony. It won the Tony for it's director,
and Tony nominations for many of it's cast.
It truly was a phenomenon.
He was with Tom Kilroy in London
and he was walking down the Strand.
And there were all these...
...virtually every door in the Strand, even today
had these sort of cardboard quilted vagrants.
And Brian said to Kilroy...
...I'm sure there'll be Irish people among them.
And then he told him a story of his aunts.
Two of whom he believed to have been
vagrants sleeping on the street.
And Kilroy said, you must write a play.
He had whatever facts he had which were very few,
I presume.
And then entered into an imaginative
recreation of those people.
And created the play which was 'Dancing at Lughnasa'.
FRIEL: "When I was a boy
we always spent a portion of our summer holidays
in my mother's old home near the village of Glenties
in County Donegal."
"I have memories of those holidays
that are as pellucid, as intense
as if they happened last week."
"I remember in detail the shape of cups hanging in the scullery.
The pattern of flags on the kitchen floor.
Every knot of wood on the wooden stairway.
Every door handle. Every smell.
The shape and texture of every tree around the place."
Friel sets it in a kitchen,
of the Mundy sisters, these five sisters.
And this is probably his most autobiographical play,
because his mother was one of the sisters
and the four sisters were his aunts.
Like she's letting out something pagan
something wild in her.
And all his characters seems to have that
so there's kind of a pleasure in that isn't there.
NIAMH CUSACK: The reason I wanted to play Maggie
was because of the dance.
She's been making the bread and she's been told this story
about Bernie O'Donnell dancing with this young man
that she, Maggie has been in love with,
but never got near.
And you sort of feel that she never let that show.
And she's finished the story and Marconi's, the radio starts up.
(MUSIC PLAYS FROM THE RADIO)
'Maggie turns round.'
'Her head is cocked to the beat. To the music.
She's breathing deeply, rapidly.
Now her features become animated by a look of defiance,
of aggression, a crude mask of happiness.'
'For a few seconds, she stands still, listening.
Absorbing the rhythm,
surveying her sisters with her defiant grimace.'
'Now she spreads her fingers which are covered with flour,
pushes her hair back from her face.
Pulls her hands down her cheeks
and patterns her face
with an instant mask.'
(SCREAMS)
'With this too loud music, this pounding beat
this shouting, calling, singing,
this parodic reel,
there is a sense of order being consciously subverted.
Of the women consciously and crudely caricaturing themselves.
Indeed, of near hysteria being induced.'
To me it was the most powerful
depiction of
the savage pagan aspect of dance
that I've ever seen staged
since Stravinsky and Nijinsky's 'Rite of Spring', you know,
which is in ballet repertories.
And there again that's...
It's something that wells up and bursts out
and it's as if the dance
was expressing something
that they couldn't contain it anymore.
You know they're very...
...restrained simple lives.
And whatever their unhappinesses were
was buried and then this explosion of dance.
It gives me goosebumps to think about it.
What he said to me is that 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.'
And because dance
is sort of the art of suggestion
and it's all about nuance
and it's all about what can be expressed without words.
REPORTER: "It's a far cry from Hollywood Boulevard
but Main St, Glenties was about to get a visit
from one of the biggest names in film."
"Meryl Streep was the star of the show
and the show was a special screening of her latest movie
Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, set in Donegal."
ANNE FRIEL: Aw, she was great. She came to Glenties.
And she was lovely.
I think he thought this softened it up a bit,
from what the original thing would have been.
But that wouldn't have been a success maybe
if it hadn't been (LAUGHS), yeah.
Cos they really had a tough time, those girls in the play.
The original play, y'know, their lives.
It wasn't all gentle.
(BIRDS SINGING)
There's a yearning that I think touches
a lot of human beings.
You know there's something in his plays
which is about reaching for love.
For being part of something
that I think we all recognise.
Friel's plays couldn't be more specific
to a time and place.
That makes the universal.
That's why there's ten thousand million,
trillion productions of Lughnasa,
because it speaks to everybody.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
He opened things up in a way
that has had a major impact
on younger writers and younger directors and younger actors.
Everybody knew who he was and everybody acknowledged
his mastery at what he did.
So yeah, he certainly has been
hugely, I think, influential.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
When he was very old, I was in Ireland.
I just wanted to make a pilgrimage
to Brian in Donegal.
And had this delightful day with Brian and Anne.
Brian was very pleased, he really was.
Way back, the two of them were in New York
when 'Philadelphia' went on,
and 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern' went on.
So Brian had been following his career all along.
Brian is one of the great storytellers,
so we had this wonderful talk together.
I suspect I did most of the listening.
What you don't forget is what it was like to be talking to him.
And sitting at a table with him
He died the following October.
(GENTLE MUSIC)
(CLOSING THEME)