A question of identity

A new production of Friel's 'The Home Place' focuses on the notion of 'home', and the debate in the North about who are the possessors and who the dispossessed, writes Jane Coyle

HOME. IT’S WHERE the heart is. Or is it? This deceptively simple yet extraordinarily complex question forms the core of Brian Friel’s The Home Place, which has a new co-production by Belfast’s Lyric Theatre and An Grianán Theatre in Letterkenny.

Its director is Mick Gordon, who hails from Co Down, but who has established himself as one of the brightest stars in the London theatre firmament. Given the warm mutual respect he and Friel share, it is not surprising that he would wish to honour him with a production on home turf in this, the writer’s 80th birthday year.

Gordon, who directed a highly praised Dancing at Lughnasa for the Lyric in 2007, says he has much to thank Friel for, not least “for providing me with the access point to consider my own sense of ‘home’.

“It does seem odd,” he reflects, “that this is a significant milestone in the life of the country’s greatest writer and yet being done back home.”

A hallmark of Gordon’s work is his focus on re-evaluation and reassessment. In a recent radio interview, he admitted to having been somewhat underwhelmed by Adrian Noble’s premiere of The Home Place for the Gate Theatre in 2005 and felt that the play had not received the production it deserved.

“I was just trying to stir up a bit of argy bargy,” he says, grinning impishly. “My main concern with the production was that it needed to be conceived for a big space. This is a play of huge scope, set at a time when the Planter ascendancy had lost its powerful grip on the country.

“It’s an epic play, centring on a family drama, but whose theme is ‘home’ and the possession of home, a very big and searching subject. It’s a great contemporary story of Irish and Northern Irish history and that’s why we were keen to design a production on a large scale, appropriate to the spaces where it will be performed. The tour ends on a rather smaller stage in Omagh, but we’re squeezing it in there because that’s Friel’s own home place.”

An excellent cast includes five of the North’s finest actors, appearing together for the first time – Ian McElhinney, clearly relishing his recent successful return to the stage; double Olivier Award winner Conleth Hill; Stuart Graham, recently nominated for his screen performance in Steve McQueen’s Hunger; Lalor Roddy, once described in this newspaper as the finest actor of his generation; and Miche Doherty, now based in Dublin.

To a man and woman, the ensemble are bringing to their individual interpretations their own sense of the notion of “home” –­ as Gordon says, “not just bricks and mortar, field and coast, town and country, but what it is that connects you to this intuitive, sophisticated, primaeval thing”.

The cast and director have become absorbed and engaged in an ongoing debate, generated in the rehearsal room and continuing afterwards, in which their own personal experiences and philosophies play a vital part.

McElhinney and Graham grew up during different eras in the Protestant tradition of the North and declare themselves caught up in the dichotomy of the play’s central idea, beautifully summed up by Christopher Gore, the play’s lead character, as “the doomed nexus of those who believe they are the possessors and those who believe they are dispossessed”.

The Home Place is set during the unrest of 1878, when the spectre of the land war was looming, causing fear, anxiety and uncertainty among the Anglo-Irish gentry. But what gives it real bite is the fact that debate has resurfaced in the North about who are the possessors and who the new dispossessed.

Mick Gordon agrees that the crucial word in Gore’s phrase is “believe”. “Perception is all important and here the locals have a very real feeling of being dispossessed,” he says. “The story is set at a specific point on the cusp of huge historical change. There is a sense of the inevitable descending, as in so many of Friel’s plays. He is, of course, an historian and knows very well that history moves in cycles – as in Gaza, Israel, Africa and here on our own doorstep.”

In contrast with the 1878 “possessors”, wealthy Protestant landlords like Gore, who, while being embedded in Donegal, feels his own home place to be the family estate in Kent, unfolding events suggest that it is sections of the Protestant community in the North, which now feel dispossessed, marginalised and abandoned.

“You missed out one important word,” says Graham. “Betrayed. Northern Protestants feel dispossessed of many of the keystones of their lives and of the place they call home. Working class Protestants are among the few people in the United Kingdom who actually describe themselves as ‘British’. The very term ‘loyalists’ denotes their loyalty to the British Crown, which they feel has betrayed them. This was their life. They have paid their dues in blood and sweat and now have to reinvent themselves.”

MCELHINNEY, WHO PLAYS Gore, comes from an earlier generation of Northern Protestants. His father was a Church of Ireland canon from Donegal, while his mother’s people were from Leitrim and Fermanagh. He numbers the BBC and Churchill among the cultural references of his childhood and expresses trenchant views about the complex tangle of nuances relating to the place he calls home.

“What interests me particularly about this play – and maybe there’s a bit of a personal thesis here – is the notion of what constitutes ‘Irishness’,” he says. “One of the problems that comes up time and time again seems to be this notion of being ‘pure’ Irish. If you are Protestant, born in the Northern part of the island and deeply into the Protestant tradition, that somehow does not make you a legitimate Irish person.

“Yet there is a huge British influence in parts of the South. There are certainly many British plays which go down far better with Dublin audiences than they would in Belfast.

“Being Protestant and living in the North for the last 40 years, there is an extent to which people are trying to tell you that this can’t be your home.

“My reaction is – how dare they? This is my home. I lived and worked away from here for some time, but it was always good to come home – even when it was shit!” he chuckles.

Friel’s sympathies are placed firmly on the side of Gore, an essentially decent man, whose background and birthright could make him a figure to be despised and derided. Likewise, he creates a likeable soul in Gore’s son David, who yearns in vain to be regarded as one of the locals.

“Christopher Gore is a great character, portrayed with wisdom and understanding”, says McElhinney. “We can learn much about generosity of spirit through Friel’s treatment of this man.”

Like several of the characters in The Home Place, the two actors describe themselves as “mongrels” and acknowledge the twin dilemmas of Margaret, the attractive housekeeper at the “Big House”, and David, its heir, who have opted to step outside their own worlds and, as a result, find themselves rootless and homeless, in danger of belonging nowhere.

“We are at a crossroads in history,” says Graham. “When I came into this business 25 years ago, having been a pupil at Bangor Grammar School, I seriously wondered if there was a place for me in theatre in Ireland.

“Like Ian, there would have been a huge British influence at home and although we went on holiday to Kerry every year, we thought of the Republic of Ireland as a different country. The same applies to school. I learned far more about the Presbyterian United Irish movement from being in Northern Star than I ever did in my history lessons. Yet the last two plays I did at Bangor Grammar were by Synge and O’Casey.

“I think it’s divisive and pointless these days to be talking about people in terms of ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. We need to address what it means to be born and bred in the North of Ireland and go out and explore that.

“The human experience makes us the same, yet different. We should be mining and owning our traditions and sharing them in a mature, confident way. Having said that, it’s incumbent on people on the other side to be prepared to let us in.

“In the play, Friel introduces all these characters and shows that ultimately what it comes down to is who you are as an individual, not what tribe you belong to.”

“What Friel does so elegantly and eloquently is to show the issues rather than explain them,” agrees Gordon. “In the way that he used dance in Dancing at Lughnasa, it is music which here communicates a sense of belonging and home. When Margaret tries to turn her back on the music of her childhood, she cannot resist the siren call and submits to it.

“He creates the scene of a plenteous tea party, into which three desperate, poverty-stricken representatives of the local community arrive. He does not level political arguments at the audience. He does not need to – the images are there and they can reach their own conclusions.

“We’re very excited to be doing The Home Place and the bottom line is that we are doing it because we think it’s a brilliant play. Full stop.”

The Home Place, by Brian Friel, opens tonight at An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny, until Sat, then tours to Belfast Grand Opera House (Feb 10-21), Galway Town Hall (Feb 25-28), Cork Opera House (Mar 3 and 4), Market Place, Armagh (Mar 6 and 7), and Strule Centre, Omagh (Mar 11-14)