Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews, Four Courts Press, 216 pp, €26.95, ISBN: 978-1801511407
The decade after the death of an acclaimed dramatist generally sees a rise or fall in their fortunes, and the deciding of a reputation. Brian Friel would seem to be an exception to this rule. He died in 2015, not quite ten years ago, and in that time his progress would appear to have continued unabated. There are still regular productions of his plays in both the Irish and English national theatres. As Kelly Matthews puts it, ‘Friel’s plays still resonate. Translations played to sold-out crowds at the National Theatre, London, in 2018 and 2019 […]. In a cross-border collaboration between the Abbey and the Lyric, Translations played in Belfast and Dublin in the spring and summer of 2022.’ As I write, Dancing at Lughnasa is coming to the end of a lengthy and successful run at Dublin’s Gate Theatre; and a very welcome revival by Andrew Flynn of Molly Sweeney is about to open at this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival.
Of the twenty-four original plays Friel produced (there were many versions, principally of Turgenev and Chekhov), five are regularly revived: Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Aristocrats, Faith Healer, Translations, Molly Sweeney and Dancing at Lughnasa. This compares favourably with the plays written by the classic postwar American playwrights, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. But it is strange that there have not been more critical studies of the plays of Brian Friel; they are both immediately arresting and full of subtleties and complexities. There were a number of studies just prior to 2015: by Richard Rankin Russell, Christopher Murray and myself and Scott Boltwood on 2018. But to the best of my knowledge Kelly Matthews’s Brian Friel: Beginnings is the among the first in the six years since.
Many of these recent studies have been stimulated by the archive. In the case of this volume, the author says that it ‘began with the discovery of seventy-five previously uncatalogued letters from Brian Friel to his radio producer Ronald Mason in the BBC Written Archives Centre, […] and it continued with the excavation of an additional seventy-five letters [that magic number again!] from Friel to his editor Roger Angell, dispersed across a dozen different folders in the New Yorker archives at the New York Public Library.’ The Angell archive was supplemented by an interview and exchanges with the man himself, as she was welcomed by Angell and his wife Peggy Moorman ‘into their [New York] apartment on an autumn afternoon in 2018 to reminisce about Roger’s friendship with Brian’. Ronald Mason died, aged seventy, in January 1997 from emphysema. Matthews draws on the BBC Northern Ireland Archive and on an interview that Richard Pine conducted with Mason for his 1990 study of the playwright, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama. The professional and personal relationships with Mason and Angell are the spines around which the book is constructed.
The author describes her book as a literary biography. But the only truly biographical chapter is the first one, a brilliant account of his first few decades. After that, the focus is on the writing (and rewriting) and the back and forth between Friel and his two literary mentors. The book is a reminder that a biography of Brian Friel is badly needed, but also of the difficulties facing any biographer, of breaking through the protective layers in which Friel increasingly encased himself. Matthews makes a strong contrast between the early and the late Friel. ‘The young Brian Friel […] is different from the reclusive, tight-lipped, even stubborn writer the world would come to know […]. He is funny, self-deprecating, open to endless revisions, eager to please, hungry for honest criticism and encouragement.’
Brian Friel seems almost destined to become a teacher. His father, Patrick (Paddy) Friel, was the headmaster of a three-room school near Omagh which young master Friel attended until he was ten. Then they all moved to Derry and the father became headmaster of St Columba’s Long Tower. Brian and his two sisters all became teachers. Interestingly enough, he taught maths rather than English or languages. Derry during the war years was crammed with American soldiers: ‘the troops […] reached 40,000, a number equal to the city’s entire pre-war population’. Matthews sees Friel’s lifelong interest in America beginning here and, an accomplished mimic, he could soon ‘do’ an American accent. On December 28th, 1954 Friel married Anne Morrison. She was an accomplished woman, with a BSc, having graduated in a class with very few women and (a wonderful detail, this) found herself on the cover of the Evening Herald the day she graduated, ‘smiling in cap and gown’. As Matthews puts it: ‘With her sharp mind and “sharp Waterside tongue” (as Brian once joked) Anne became Brian’s first reader, his confidante’. The biographical focus recedes after Chapter One, mainly restricted to a dutiful notice of when the five children (four girls and a boy) arrived. In 1960, Brian Friel made the momentous decision to give up the day job as a teacher and devote himself entirely to writing. Most of his friends and colleagues were horrified, thinking it would spell financial disaster for a young man with a growing family. The exceptions were Ronald Mason and Roger Angell, both of whom welcomed the move. They felt that Brian would never achieve his full potential as a writer unless he devoted himself to it full time.
Brian Friel may have ended his long life and astonishing career as ‘the Irish Chekhov’ (The New York Times) and ‘the father of modern Irish drama’ (The Guardian). But the birth of the great Irish playwright was by no means straightforward. Many people think that 1964’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! was his first stage play, but in fact it was his fourth. Friel was thirty-six when it appeared and before then there were ten trying years in the various media of the stage, radio plays and the short story where his progress was by no means clear and rejection was frequent. For his very first entry in the drama sweepstakes, a radio play sent to BBC Northern Ireland, this is what he got in return: ‘[An] amateurish playlet, which wanders off the point and is badly characterised. Quite useless.’ But Brian was not easily put off. Fired by writerly ambition and a determination to succeed, he submitted some more. The person who wrote that dismissive appraisal had left the BBC and been replaced as drama producer by Ronald Mason, a fellow Northerner, albeit from the other persuasion, and with an identical voice to the stentorian tones of classmate Ian Paisley. Mason and his immediate supervisor agreed that the ‘dialogue is really very good and he characterises well’. But this positive response to the quality of Brian’s writing did not guarantee acceptance. There would be many revisions and sometimes outright rejection along the way.
Brian Friel began his career as a writer of short stories. His first was a two-pager in The Bell in 1952; but it was the last issue of the magazine and brought in a pittance as a fee. His good fortune came with The New Yorker, when his US agent submitted a short story entitled ‘The Skelper’ to the magazine. Roger Angell had just taken over as literary editor and was immediately impressed by Friel’s ability. But not for the last time the ending of the story proved problematic: ‘Our real reservation on the story is that the ending seems a little too simple and perhaps even too noble to ring true.’ The editorial changes Angell suggested were all accepted by Friel, as they would be in the future. Where the stories themselves were praised for the accuracy and precision of the dialogue, the endings often opted for broad statements and were lacking in dialogue to carry the meaning. In this case, Angell added a line of dialogue to the ending, which was accepted and retained. He also thought American readers should be told what a skelper is (the answer was a poacher) and what the fine for poaching would be. The story was accepted for publication in The New Yorker and in July of 1958 he received a ‘generous cheque’. The amounts are meaningless, given how much currency values have shifted over the decades, but Brian estimated that the amount was enough to keep himself and his growing family for two months. But he was by no means guaranteed a constant run of acceptances. After ‘The Skelper’, he submitted four stories in a row. They were all rejected. One of the problems was that The New Yorker was a friendly house for other Irish writers, including Mary Lavin, Benedict Kiely and Sean O’Faolain. But the star Irish performer was Frank O’Connor and, while the editors accepted that Friel had a distinctive style, they also found that his stories came uncomfortably close to O’Connor’s, almost all of them focused nostalgically on childhood. The acceptances were frequent enough however, for The New Yorker to offer Friel a $100 annual retainer for a ‘first refusal’ clause on all of his stories.
Friel was also showing an itch to develop as a playwright. He rather gauchely declared to Mason that ‘I have no experience of radio drama. […] I am a complete amateur at plays.’ In another letter, he declared that he knew nothing about writing plays and would be grateful if Mason would supply the titles of some how-to books. Helpfully, they are all listed here. As Matthews points out, these are all about stage rather than radio plays, and show that, while Brian was grappling with the art of drama itself, Mason was already encouraging him to expand his horizons.
The third key mentor figure in Friel’s life, after Mason and Angell, now enters the scene. Sir Tyrone Guthrie, or ‘Tony’ as he was known to everyone, was born in Tunbridge Wells in Kent. But he had a Scottish father and an Irish mother and increasingly came to regard himself as Irish. His involvement with Friel only served to heighten that identification. Guthrie was one of the most acclaimed, successful and artistically adventurous theatre directors of his generation and after a career in England and Canada he was now in his sixties bit still full of vim. Between theatrical assignments he would head to his mother’s family home in Annnaghmakerrig in Co Monaghan, along a border which he steadfastly refused to recognise. It was to Annaghmakerrig that Brian Friel was summoned in the early 1960s to meet with the great man. According to Friel, Guthrie ‘charmed my heart away immediately we met’ and there is not a negative word about him anywhere in the archive. Guthrie had been following the young Northerner’s progress closely and with great interest. He first of all wrote to Friel about one of The New Yorker stories set in the North of Ireland. (Curiously, all of Friel’s stories were set in the Six Counties whereas the plays mostly took place in Donegal, perhaps because the stories were directly autobiographical and most of the plays weren’t and required greater distance.) Then he attended a performance of Friel’s second stage play, The Enemy Within, about St Columba, at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Ronald Mason, down from Belfast to view it, spotted the six and a half foot military bearing of Tyrone Guthrie across a crowded foyer and made his way over to him. They enthused about Friel’s dramatic talent and Guthrie said the purpose of a national theatre was to stage such plays. At the time, late 1962 and early 1963, Guthrie was engaged in his most far-reaching and ambitious project to date, essentially founding, helping to design and inaugurating productions to be staged at the new Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, well away from Broadway and its vicissitudes. Friel accepted Guthrie’s invitation to attend as an ‘observer’ at the rehearsals of the two plays Guthrie was to direct for the opening of his theatre (Hamlet and Chekhov’s Three Sisters). This was to provide Friel with the education in theatre he felt he badly needed. He began writing his breakthrough play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, while in Minneapolis. The play was in many respects like other Irish plays of the time, its subject a young man on his last night with family and friends before emigrating to the US on the following day. What breaks it wide open and frees it from the constraints of realism is the brilliant theatrical device of the double Gar (wherever he got it from). Friel and his play required not one but two actors to play the central role of twenty-five-year-old Gar O’Donnell; the public man seen by everybody and the private man seen only by Gar himself (and the audience). Despite the hopes that Guthrie would direct the play, and despite the gestures he himself made in that direction, he was never to direct Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Reasons were forthcoming: his commitments in Minneapolis, his being out of touch with the younger actors on the Irish scene. But the real reason may have been his failure or refusal to buy into the play’s double act, cited by Matthews: ‘Now for it. […] I can’t decide whether the dodge of having two actors to play Private and Public, Ego and Alter Ego, is justified. I guess it ought to be tried.’ With a damaging reservation like that, Guthrie was clearly not the person to direct Philadelphia.
Friel was instead pointed towards Hilton Edwards at Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Though English-born, Edwards had been resident in Ireland for over three decades where, in tandem with his partner, actor-designer Micheál Mac Liammóir, he had directed plays at the Gate. No one in Ireland had as sophisticated knowledge of the theatre as Edwards. He was particularly brilliant with the lighting, which he always designed himself. Such skill would prove particularly valuable when it came to presenting Gar’s alter-ego. The technical demands of Philadelphia, Here I Come! were way beyond what the Abbey could manage in 1964, three years before their long-awaited new theatre opened. He sent the play to the Gate and it was readily accepted; it would be staged at the larger Gaiety Theatre in 1964’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Hilton Edwards was to direct the next three plays by Brian Friel, The Loves of Cass McGuire, Lovers and Crystal and Fox. The plays continued the hit-and-miss pattern of Friel’s short stories: the first and third were both massive flops; Lovers was the greatest success in the history of the Gate Theatre (up to that point). Edwards also directed Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Lovers on the Broadway stage, again to great success.
The move of Philadelphia from Dublin to Broadway was by no means a sure or an assured thing, as Kelly Matthews’s detailed final chapter makes clear. This is where Oscar Lewenstein enters the picture. Self-described as ‘a Russian Jew born in England’, Lewenstein in the main supported socialist theatre. But he was drawn to Philadelphia, Here I Come! and the subject of Gar’s ambivalence about leaving Ireland. He felt, however, that the play would not draw an English audience; few Irish plays did. Instead, when he saw the play on stage in Dublin, in a crowded theatre, he felt its most promising foreign audience would be an American one. Which is where David Merrick enters the picture. Living up to his nickname ‘The Abominable Showman’, Merrick was short on courtesy and long on bombast. But you needed a tough hide to survive the Broadway bear pit, and Merrick’s track record was undeniable: ‘Between 1954 and 1965, he presented 37 Broadway shows, of which almost all made a profit and eleven became smash hits.’ Lewenstein restaged the play in Dublin in 1965 so that certain Americans could see it; and Audrey Wood was brought in at Guthrie’s suggestion to mediate with Merrick. Roger Angell was bowled over that Brian had managed to secure the services of both Wood and Merrick. None of the ‘hot’ American directors would touch the play so director Edwards and most of the Irish cast were brought back in. When Merrick noticed that a young American actor playing one of the ‘lads’ had a very uncertain Irish accent, he contacted Eamon Morrissey in Dublin and brought him over to New York to fill the role. The play opened, drawing mainly positive notices and ever growing audiences.
Kelly Matthews ends her book on this upbeat note. Her ‘Epilogue’ glances briefly at the dire fate which befell The Loves of Cass McGuire the following year but doesn’t even go near the whole Faith Healer Broadway failure and subsequent recuperation in Dublin by Joe Dowling at the Abbey fifteen years later. Brian Friel: Beginnings mainly sets out to show that Brian Friel as a playwright did not spring full-blown from the head of Zeus. In that it succeeds admirably.
1/10/2024
Anthony Roche is Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. His publications on Brian Friel include The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (2006) and Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics (2011). He recently contributed the entry on Brian Friel to The Dictionary of Irish Biography.
