I first met Brian and Anne in the late 1960s in Mary Lavin's home in Bective, beneath the Yeats pictures and over one of those splendid, loquacious dinners which Mary often put together so that one writer could gain something from meeting another. Brian was already famous with the first productions of Philadelphia Here I Come, The Loves of Cass Maguire and Lovers. His experience with the Broadway producer David Merrick was the specific reason why Mary engineered my meeting with him.
A short time before the dinner, a review by Irving Wardle of my own play, The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, at the Dublin Theatre Festival had appeared in the New York Times. Within days, a very powerful New York agent called Lucy Kroll descended upon me in Dublin bearing a letter from the same Mr Merrick offering a "first-class" Broadway production of the play. I hadn't a clue how to handle any of this. Mary, who understood all too well the nature of such Greek offerings, decided that I should meet Brian and get myself sorted out.
What followed on that evening in Bective Abbey was a master-class in how to negotiate the shark-infested waters that lap the front steps of theatres around Times Square. For the first time that evening I heard the brilliantly pitched theatrical anecdotes and the hilarious mimicry delivered by the private man behind the plays. Far more important than relieving my anxieties of the moment, it marked the beginnings of a 30-year friendship. (I never went anywhere, of course, with Mr Merrick, nor, indeed, with Ms Kroll but, as Mr Porter once put it in one of his Broadway lyrics, "it brings back a memory".)
Part of the profile, then, of Brian Friel the playwright would have to include this mastery of the business of theatre, how the business actually works from first word on the page to last touch of paint to the scenery and first spoken line of dialogue. He knows this nitty-gritty process inside-out in all its gruesome, glorious detail. It is a knowledge born out of a demanding love which is always controlled by a clear-eyed, wry observation of why theatre so often fails to deliver on what it promises.
His pace quickens at the approach of rehearsals of a first production. He often talks about that peculiar excitement, quite unlike any other, of those early days of pre-production when the dates are set and the first casting offers go out. For a few days, perhaps, anything seems possible, the ideal cast and the perfect production, before reality intervenes once again and you get on with what's available to you. He loves the sweaty rehearsal room and its camaraderie where everything is on the line and actors have to learn how to build the kind of courage which makes performance possible on a stage.
I cannot think of another playwright who can give as much to this tricky process of trying to bring a play into being. This has to do, partly, with the fact that he comes to rehearsal with a very finished text. The energy, then, is completely focused on bringing that text to stage life. You can understand his impatience with some directors and even with the claim of directing itself as a creative activity. Ironically, this reservation about the role of director lies behind his own forays into directing his own work with Molly Sweeney and Give Me Your Answer, Do. It was simply a way of extending the role of the writer into making sure that his own production style was accurately realised upon stage. The kind of production required of a Friel play is written into the text with as magisterial an authority as that found in Beckett's stage directions. As with Beckett you tamper with these Friel directions at your peril.
Not all playwrights have these innate, theatrical-business skills. They are immensely practical skills which give him, for instance, a laser reading of managements and all their machinations, or of actors and what they are or are not capable of, or of audiences and what they can and cannot absorb in the "two hours traffic". Once a show has opened before a live audience, he will, if he is so disposed, give you an unerring forecast of its future prospects, the length of its run and whether or not it will make the grade. He has little time for critics and he often asserts that he has no critical capacity himself but, in fact, there is no more astute judge of theatre around the place. Everything he has to say about theatre, however succinct, is a form of theatrical criticism at its most enlightening.
The paradox, of course, is that all this sense of the public nature of theatre is to be found in a writer who values his privacy more than anything else, who genuinely dislikes the hullabaloo of first nights and all the attention which someone of his stature attracts in public. It is as if the public side of the man is totally expressed in what he offers to the stage. The rest is private.
These theatrical-business skills also inform the actual writing of the plays, making them exceptionally well tuned to the practical activity of staging. As with the plays of his admired Chekhov, actors love Brian's work because they sense, at once, that they are somehow at home within these marvellous stage vehicles. The plays challenge actors in highly specific ways, of course, but they also offer a kind of security and comfort (as is also true of Chekhov); the support which actors feel from the use of well-made props or well designed costumes. Nothing is going to give way unexpectedly. Everything is there for a purpose and the purpose is always theatrically germane. This security offers actors in a Friel play a kind of liberation which can actually raise the level of their acting to unexpected heights. It is as if the actor is being protected by the firm structure of the piece and guided by a theatrical wisdom in the writing and is therefore freed to risk effects in the acting that might otherwise be too much, too demanding on top of everything else.
OVER the years I have had the benefit of this wisdom myself, often on one of those characteristic Frielian postcards - concise, often hilarious, gems which always hit the nail on the head. This might have to do with one's own current predicament in theatre or about some other current theatrical argy-bargy heard about on that grapevine which seems to run from Greencastle to every point in theatreland, from Moscow to California. How he keeps up with so much is a mystery to me.
Perhaps because we have occupied different kinds of theatre what he has had to say about my own work has always been of special value to me. I do want to mention one such moment where his support has lifted me out of a bad fall. But, on this occasion of celebrating his work I particularly want to describe other occasions over the years where I was privileged to watch him at work.
I have a number of his plays in typescript which he has sent to me but none is as precious to me as the first draft of Faith Healer. This is partly because it allowed me to follow him over the months in the process of developing the text and partly because of the status of that text itself. This is one of the great theatrical texts of our time in the English language.
The play started life as a single monologue. That first draft is more or less the same as the first monologue of Frank in the encounter in the yard with McGarvey and the wedding guests. In the rewriting, this ending was detached, as it were, from that first monologue. It was then expanded, becoming the second monologue of Frank, which now ends the finished play. In the space between the two monologues of Frank came the other two new monologues, of Gracie and Teddy. The versions of stories throughout contradict or modify one another but never to the point of cancellation. On the contrary, the energy that is created is Blakean, without closure, because it is based upon one of the universal paradoxes of creativity, the combination of the beauty of art and the squalid character of the artist, in this case the transcendent heights to which Hardy's art aspires and the squalid shit to which he descends as a man. The mystery is in the connection between these two extremes.
In the rewriting, too, Brian unearthed the two haunting stories upon which so much turns - the miracle-making, if such it can be called, in the old Methodist hall and the bloody miscarriage at Kinlochbervie. I remember reading that first draft of Frank's monologue and thinking, as you do before all great writing in draft form, that the possibilities of it were endless, that a final structure would, indeed, give it a finished quality but that its echo would continue off in different directions into the shadows, defying finality. In his reworking of that first draft he remained true to the inexhaustible promise of that first sketch; in rehousing it he retained that sense of human life as something which cannot be fully circumscribed by any one story, by any one artistic form, however finished its effect.
As a writer he is a connoisseur of human failure. The vitality which makes the plays so widely loved, the music, the humour, the shared emotions, the sheer charm of the writing, is built over a dark perception of the human capacity to fail in all things, especially in the most important ones. The laughter and the dances, the moments of intimacy and love, the movement towards some kind of poise or grace at the end of the plays; all this is made even more precious by that shadow of imperfection which the Friel vision holds in place with unrelenting gaze.
For this reason, the production of Faith Healer which made the most memorable impact upon me was not the obvious, defining one of Joe Dowling with that great performance of Donal McCann. Instead I remember a production which by all ordinary standards must be described as a failure but for this very reason, perhaps, managed to tap into the play's essence in the strangest possible way. The actor playing Frank Hardy, a great actor, as it happened, was displaying personal failure up on that stage and a chilling identity was forged between the role and the damaged man who was performing it.
Patrick Magee played Frank and Helen Mirren Gracie in that doomed production at the Royal Court in 1981. I was in rehearsal at the time with Max Stafford Clark in the same theatre with my version of The Seagull and I managed to watch most of the pathetic few nights (six, I think, in all) that Magee survived before he was sacked. I have never been so frightened in the theatre. Most of those nights Magee was so drunk that he barely made it into the spot on stage. But as soon as that infernally seductive voice began, Frank Hardy was present, a Frank Hardy who was carrying failure on his back like a great bag, unable to straighten up and desperate to stagger back into those wings and away from this place of cruel witness. There will be other remarkable performances in this role because it will always attract great actors but I think no one will catch the stricken faith healer in quite the way that Magee did.
To compound matters, Mirren was giving a performance of matching power and you ached for even one respite to allow these two performances to speak to one another. It never quite happened because of the real danger that Magee was about to fall head over heels into the front rows of the stalls. She continued on in her own space, a porcelain figure of haunting beauty who carried in each gesture, each inflection, the conviction that this was someone who had lived, briefly, in hell and was now returned to give an account of it.
I have two particular memories of Brian's presence in the earlier days of Field Day. (Field Day is undergoing a remarkable Second Coming under the direction of Seamus Deane and Stephen Rea but I'm talking about the days when Brian and I were both members of the board.) One memory is of his role in keeping things together, which says something about his strength of purpose. The other has to do with support for me, personally. To frame all this, I need to say something about what I think of the theatrical achievement of that earlier Field Day.
When I was asked to join the board I was already part of the Field Day discussions because of my closeness to those involved. I was particularly drawn into discussions between Brian and Stephen Rea about the kind of theatre that Field Day aspired to and the way in which such theatre could cast a light upon contemporary politics in Ireland, north and south.
LOOKING back on it now I feel that Field Day may have had more effect outside Ireland than within it. Its productions drew heavily upon people from London theatre and by bringing the plays to London after the Irish tours a certain axis was created which helped to break down some of the lingering misconceptions about Irish theatre in Britain which had blocked the transfer of Irish productions in the past. I think Field Day achieved a great deal in creating that interaction between Irish and British theatre which is now so commonplace. Through the London exposure, too, came the enormous interest in Field Day which developed in other European countries, particularly in France and Germany.
Within Ireland itself Field Day attracted hostility which took several forms, the most persistent being that it was somehow seen as a cultural wing of the IRA. From within the confines of Field Day itself such claims appeared risible. The members of the board represented a wide range of political opinion, the only constant being a fierce belief in the engagement of the imagination with issues which were politically and historically important. Indeed, one of the reasons why I eventually resigned from the board was because I wanted to push Field Day towards more overt political gestures. I realised that this could not happen because Field Day had no single ideology; it consisted of disparate, even conflicting, elements and its true energy was one of process, not movement towards fixed goals.
Brian played an enormous role in holding these different elements together. I think that without him the centre might not have held. It was helpful that in the same period he was working out in his own plays his own complicated relationship to Irish culture and nationalism. Because he remained a troubled querist in his Field Day plays, he was able to entertain many different strains of opinion around him, steering them and driving them to their boundaries. He was, in a sense that went beyond the management of meetings (itself a kind of heroic achievement), the chairman of the whole enterprise.
My own debt to him in Field Day is more private and has to do with the failure on stage of my second play for the company, The Ma- dame MacAdam Travelling Theatre. There are different ways in which you cope with failure in the theatre, principally by coming to an acceptance of why the thing hasn't worked and then trying to learn from that. But in this particular case I had the benefit of an extraordinary letter from Brian which rapidly provided me with a perspective on a situation which would otherwise have remained vulnerably personal and defensive.
The letter proceeds from an absolutely accurate reading of the event itself and the faults in the play which the production couldn't paper over. But the important part of the letter, of importance to every writer who has ever tried to write, is how failure can be transcended by slow, careful recomposition of the self, the regrouping of "those uncertain certainties and wobbly convictions", as he put it, until the core is reforged once more and one can go on again. It was, of course, exactly the kind of support I needed at the time and it came out of that theatrical wisdom that I've been talking about.
In an interview with John Lahr in the October 1991 issue of Vogue, Brian described the origin of Dancing at Lughnasa, in which I played a small role but in which I also learned yet more lessons from him about theatre.
He and I had been walking across the footbridge from some production at the National Theatre in London with our wives behind us. It was Thatcher's London. As we came down to the Embankment and passed by the Arches the homeless were settling down for the night and Irish accents came out of the darkness. He turned and said to me that he had had two aunts who ended up like that. Between there and Joe Allen's restaurant he told me the story of himself as a young man setting off for London to search for the two aunts who had left Donegal years before. What he found was destitution. I made the obvious, if cold, remark that he would simply have to write a play about them. He did, but it was a very different play to the one that I expected.
What I couldn't get out of my head was that moment in some hostel or home for the destitute when he stood before the surviving aunt and heard the details of their suffering. I had expected this incident to be a central event in the finished play when, in fact, it occupies a few, potent sentences. It was a lesson in how reality has to be moved about until it offers the one perspective which allows the imagination to transform it into something else.
The other lesson was how such sentences of recall could bring stage action to a halt in order to allow death to cross the stage. It is an extraordinary moment in the play in that when the action is renewed, the brimming vitality which we have enjoyed up to then, now becomes unbearably poignant because the future has cast its dark shadow across it. Nothing in our conversation that night on the London street had prepared me for such vitality in the completed play and I marvelled, not for the first time, at the man's sense of teeming life, a force which drives all the plays, this time rising out of and above a most painful loss.
This article was written for the special edition of the Irish University Review devoted to Brian Friel's career, which will be launched in The Abbey Theatre by Seamus Deane on Friday May 14th. The Friel festival, continuing until August, includes new productions, readings and other events. Give Me Your Answer Do! Is currently at The Lyric Theatre, Belfast. The Abbey Theatre's production of The Freedom of the City opens on April 28th, and the Gate Theatre's production of Aristocrats opens on May 4th. For information and booking, tel: 01 677 1717.