Plays by the acclaimed Irish dramatist Brian Friel, who has been referred to as an “Irish Chekhov”, have been performed in London, Dublin, on Broadway and elsewhere. Now an ambitious five-year project is bringing the works home to “the terroir, the communities and the landscapes” that inspired them, culminating in all 29 running across counties Donegal, Derry and Tyrone – places that Friel lived – during the centenary of his 1929 birth.
The late playwright, who died in 2015, was notable in the pantheon of 20th-century Irish writers in that he lived in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland all his life, rooting his works in both.
FrielDays – a Homecoming will feature readings of his notable works, including Dancing at Lughnasa and Philadelphia Here I Come!, as well as those rarely staged, according to Seán Doran, the artistic director of Arts Over Borders, which is organising the huge event.
Community halls, churches, schools – “the landscape covered or uncovered” – will be stage and set. “It’s using landscape in a sort of psycho-geography that helps trigger the plays in a more heightened way,” Doran said. A different village or town will be used for each “so it’s county-wide, cross-Border wide”. Each site “has to have the memories and the layering of past and connectivity to the texts you are about to witness”.
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The first year, 2025, will include Dancing at Lughnasa – for which Friel won a Tony award and which was made into a film starring Meryl Streep – Translations, Faith Healer, The Home Place and the lesser-known Volunteers, which “Friel particularly loved”, Doran said, but which was castigated in London and Dublin.
So purist is the approach that each performed reading by actors will happen in the season, or month, in which Friel set them. “In presenting them within the terroir they have come out of, you are strengthening that sense of place in time for the audience,” Doran said.
Some performances will enable the audience to watch in real time. For example, Translations, which is set over several days, will have a small number of tickets for the first act on Wednesday, the second on Friday, and for the third on Saturday.
Further symbolism will include a “hedge school” running alongside the plays. Named after the secret schools that operated in the 18th and 19th centuries for Catholics when their education was banned, these will distil themes from the plays. Audiences will be bussed deeper into the countryside to the school, at a secret location.
Friel’s themes include exile and emigration, but, Doran said, “Irishness is the overarching theme. And re-evaluating the past into the present, that haunts all of us, through playwrighting”.
Written post-internment, Volunteers features prisoners on an archaeological dig, one that did happen at Wood Quay, Dublin, on the river Liffey before developers built a five-star hotel. “We’ll be doing that at Ebrington Square, Derry, the former British army barracks on the water,” Doran said. It will be set up as an archaeological dig site, “so it will really catch the liveness of a real setting”.
During Faith Healer, which follows the main character Frank as he travels around Celtic villages, audiences will be bussed to different venues between the four acts. Starting in Glenties, the town in Co Donegal on which Friel’s fictional Ballybeg is believed to be based, the audience will move up into the Blue Stack mountains, then on to the coast, and finally back to Glenties.
In some cases, the audience will be crossing the Border in between acts, the message being “to see the Border not as a divider but as a binder”, Doran said.
Translations was written in English but features characters who speak Gaeilge, thus the performances will take place in the Gaeltacht – Irish-speaking areas. The audience “will arrive in an environment, be it a pub, where Gaeilge is being spoken, but the play they will see will be in English, so they will be in the milieu of the two languages,” Doran said.
Five plays will begin in 2025, and more will be added each year with the aim that, ultimately, all will be running during the year of the centenary.
Arts Over Borders already runs annual Friel festivals. The vision and ambition of this new project was daunting, Doran said. “We evaluate the canon. And it’s only through the seeing and the being with and the living with that this can be done. – Guardian
Tickets are available at artsoverborders.com
