IT IS impossible to guess last night's stellar audience, including the President the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, various ambassadors and Government Ministers and a spectacular array of Irish authors and actors, might have made of Brian Friel's new play.
There will undoubtedly by some to claim that he has gone back to some private introspection on the function and the perceived worth of the creative writer in our society and within that artist's family. Such claimants need to be reminded that Friel's best best play, Faith Healer, was vested in just such introspection.
The writer this time is a novelist who has failed to make a financial success of his creativity. The issues of his worth to family and society are more diverse. There is a mentally disabled daughter living indegradation in a hospital basement. There are women who have sacrificed their own autonomy and creativity to support their spouses' art.
There is an ambience of genteel poverty which, theatrically, provides echoes of Chekhov (signalled by the author by early quotations from the Russian master). Not all of these, and several other, issues are followed through dramatically, save to a final assertion in favour of an uncertainty necessary to the artist's life and the lives of those around him.
As usual with Friel, the writing is rich and sometimes dense, and last night the performances and the text came across with less than the necessary theatrical sense of narrative imperative. A director other than the author might have invested the production with more overt theatricality to carry the action along when, under Brian Friel's direction, it seemed to bog down from time to time when the text offered more dramatic opportunities than were capitalised upon.
Yes, we knew that Tom Connolly was competing with Garrett Fitzmaurice for the financial reward (and recognition) that young David Knight could confer by buying the author's archive for his Texas university, and we knew that Tom and his wife Daisy needed the money. But there were too many dramatic diversions along the way which proved distractions from the main intent.
Frank Hallinan Flood's setting does not quite capture the dilapidation of Tom's and Daisy's untended house and garden, and the acting spaces provided do not always allow adequately for the private duologues of members of the family in which the dialogue keeps creatively cutting across the ideas and feelings that individuals are trying to express. The audience ear could be attuned but the eye kept getting diverted.
"Tom Hickey's Tom Connolly established in the opening scene that he was determinedly committed to his daughter's existence yet out of touch with the reality of that existence. This dislocation of purpose continued effectively through the play.
Catherine Byrne's Daisy registered early that she was committed to whatever she thought Tom needed, yet had given up on her ambitions for both him and herself. Darragh Kelly's David combined nicely the ambivalent aspects of the positively mercenary literary agent and the uncertainty of a junior employee of his bosses.
Frances Tomelty was warmly assertive as the supportive spouse of author Garrett (played with effectively false superiority by Des McAleer) and David Kelly and Aideen O'Kelly played respectively falsely and truly as Daisy's effectively has been parents.
In all, it is an interesting evening, bursting with questions and ideas, but lacking in theatrical surprise or narrative thrust. It could be that the text may read better than was evident in last night's production or performance.
