Joe Dowling: ‘Brian Friel’s work changed my life’

Before I met Brian Friel, his work changed my life. When, as a theatre-mad teenager, I saw the first production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Gaiety Theatre in 1964, directed by Hilton Edwards with Patrick Bedford and Donal Donnelly as Public and Private Gar, it struck me like a thunderbolt and confirmed my determination to devote my life to the theatre.

As a Dubliner, I had no experience of life in a Baile Beag, yet the emotional sterility of Gar’s home life, his longing for a new start in a better place, and his caustic observations on the pillars of Irish society – the teacher and the priest – struck deep chords in my own confused ambitions for a life very different from the one being offered to a middle-class Dublin schoolboy.

I first met Brian Friel in 1976. Tomás Mac Anna, then artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, organised the meeting. I had been establishing a career as a director, working mainly in the Peacock Theatre and the Irish Theatre Company, and I had come to his attention. His new play, Living Quarters, was to be done at the Abbey, and I was being considered as its director.

Without Mac Anna’s genial and voluble presence, that meeting could have been a complete disaster. Tongue-tied in the company of one of my heroes, shy by nature and intimidated by the prospect of seeming foolish before the great man, I had very little to add to the conversation. Friel, also, seemed diffident and noncommittal, and at the end of the meeting I was convinced that the prospect of working with him had been ruined forever. But he was sufficiently indulgent of my gaucheness to invite me to direct the play, and in subsequent years we worked together on a range of other new plays and revivals. I was proud of both the professional relationship and the friendship that endured through the years.

Perhaps the most significant of our collaborations was the 1980 Abbey production of Faith Healer. By then I was the theatre's artistic director, and during rehearsals for the first production of Aristocrats, in 1979, Friel returned from New York somewhat deflated by the failure of Faith Healer on Broadway, where it had closed after only 20 performances. In large measure its failure in New York was a result of being performed in a huge Broadway theatre rather than of any fault with José Quintero's production. I urged him to allow an Abbey production, which I would direct. His reluctance to invite further rejection of this remarkable and original work was understandable, and I let the matter go.

Masterpiece

Shortly afterwards he called to say that if I could persuade Donal McCann to play Frank Hardy he would allow the production. McCann, one of Ireland's greatest actors, was not an immediate match for the role, but Friel's instinct was absolutely correct, and McCann gave one of the most thrilling performances of his career. With John Kavanagh and Kate Flynn superb in the other roles, that production confirmed Faith Healer as Friel's masterpiece. As Anthony Roche has argued, "its impact transformed Irish theatre in a number of ways over the coming decade." Subsequent productions have erased the memory of the Broadway failure, and it is now regarded as one of the seminal plays of 20th-century Irish theatre.

Friel’s attitude to theatre directors was notoriously negative. In a note written as part of the 1999 festival to celebrate his 70th birthday, he likened us to bus conductors, “who were once deemed necessary, but are now seen as superfluous”, and declared, “After all these years I’m still not at all sure what this person contributes.” Damning stuff indeed for those of us who chose to pursue this “bogus” profession.

And yet practically everything I know about directing a play comes from my work with Brian Friel. He instinctively knew when to offer a suggestion and when to leave the actors to discover the nuances of the character for themselves. His approach to textual analysis, to what he called the “music of the text”, was always exact and thorough. Listening to the clarity he brought to every line and every character has served me in working with other writers and with classic texts.

Friel was a benign presence in the rehearsal room, always encouraging and positive in front of the actors and incisive with private notes to the director. Before he declared himself so antagonistic to the craft, he used the metaphor of director as orchestra conductor and actors as the musicians, whose duty was to “interpret the score exactly as it is written”. This insistence on textual accuracy and the avoidance of random conceptual directorial indulgence ensured that the original productions of his plays were as he wished them to be.

Empathy with actors

He had a real empathy with actors and a great respect for the contribution they made to the overall piece. Yet he could be sharp in his response to what he saw as interference with the writer’s authority. I well remember one young actor beginning a rehearsal day by confidently declaring, “Brian, this line doesn’t work.” The silence that followed was disquieting before the laser-like reply: “It’s your job to make it work.”

Friel’s disdain for directors grew on him as his career developed. His early enthusiasm for the work of Tyrone Guthrie told a different story. For three months in 1963 he attended rehearsals for the inaugural season at the Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis, as “an observer”. He watched Guthrie, at that time probably the most significant figure in world theatre, as he worked with a company of actors, including Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy and George Grizzard, on three great classic plays.

Friel’s admiration for the “giant of Monaghan” was evident during that stay in Minneapolis. He wrote, “Director and cast worked in such intimate communication, so intensely, so vibrantly, so fluidly, that the distinction between director and directed seemed to disappear . . . so that the scene suddenly matured in meaning and significance and beauty, and there was captured a realisation of something much deeper and more satisfying than the conscious mind of the author had ever known.” This is the best description I know of the alchemy that can occur when director, actor and writer are at one with the work.

Friel's time in Minneapolis gave him "a sense of liberation, a parole from inbred, claustrophobic Ireland", and he learned a great deal about the craft of theatre during that exciting inaugural season. When I became artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, in 1995, and decided to include Philadelphia, Here I Come! in my first season, he wrote to me that "the play would never have been written had I not been an apprentice there under the great Tyrone Guthrie. Indeed, it was the first thing I wrote in a state of near-giddiness when I came back to Ireland, still on a Guthrie high."

While the world will remember Brian Friel as one of the greatest playwrights of his time, those of us privileged to know him and to love him will remember his remarkable sense of humour, his trenchant observations on the theatre world, the fun to be had spending an evening with himself and Anne, the unique handwritten notes that always followed immediately after any communication, the endless capacity for gossip and chat, and, above all, the warmth and the friendship that enriched our lives.