Review

PETER CRAWLEYreviews Brian Friel's Afterplayand The Yalta Gameat the Gate Theatre

Where does Brian Friel belong? So generous has the writer been with his work, and so widespread is its provenance, that few theatres can lay an exclusive claim to him. Friel, the writer whose plays put Ballybeg on the map and whose adaptations saw him spend a considerable amount of time in turn-of-the-century Russia, understands that home and kinship are never straightforward.

Such is the attraction of someone who can tease out universal concerns with surprising approaches: everyone wants to possess him, but Friel is a writer in association with the world.

The plays that comprise the Gate’s current short festival of his work certainly share an economy – with just three performers, ‘Faith Healer’ makes most demand on the dressing room – but also pursue neat commonalities of themes, where the reality blurs into rich imaginings.

‘The Yalta Game’, adapted from Chekhov’s short story ‘Lady With Lapdog’, actually makes a sport of this. Risteárd Cooper’s serial philanderer Gurov, whom we first meet stirred by strains of a military march, but who takes a more indirect approach to his own conquests, playfully ascribes scandalous imaginary lives to the leisure-addled holiday-makers in Yalta. Their pliability is something Patrick Mason’s witty production signals with empty chairs and fetchingly considered mime: as an initially prim Anna, played to perfection by Rebecca O’Mara, commands her invisible dog to stay, they construct the world around them and both she and her audience are seduced by the dazzle of fiction.

Few actors could so skilfully handle this gentle drift from comic diversion to the exquisite agony of doomed romance, but Cooper and O’Mara are in full possession of every physical gag, every tender ache, and the production distils the hidden complexity of the play’s idea: reality distends, with no particular solace, into make-believe.

It is the other way around in ‘Afterplay’. Here, two characters have strayed from the imagination of Chekhov and found each other in the cold reality of an actual world.

Sonya, the stoic sufferer of Uncle Vanya, struggles to retain her family’s estate and her lover’s affections while an understated Frances Barber portrays her as a creature of heart-breaking delusions. Andrey, the catastrophic brother of ‘Three Sisters’, is similarly protected from harsh truths in Niall Buggy’s engaging portrait of a befuddled fabulist.

Director Garry Hynes indulges few fantasies – along a path of untruths, concealments and revisions that inform us of their families’ sad respective fortunes, the audience recognises each white lie, every chicane – but she gently outlines the necessity of delusion.

Beside ‘Faith Healer’, both short plays pursue familiar themes with a characteristic blend of levity and gravity, although neither piece emerges as more significant than a leaf from the sketchbook of a master. They depict a world of brittle comforts and unbearable fears and our richest means of escaping them.

Performed in repertory with Faith Healer until Sep 19