Philadelphia, Here I Come!

The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, Ends April 10 7.30pm 32.50-55 01-6771717

Few plays have made the journey from radical to canonical as quickly as Brian Friel’s exquisite drama of withheld affections and impending exile. First staged in 1964 at the Gaiety and set in “the present”, the intervening years have made it something of a period drama, steeped in the emotional suppression of 1960s Ireland from which the only escape routes are emigration or the imagination. Gareth O’Donnell (Ciaran O’Brien) chooses both, packing his case for the US, while unpacking his inner thoughts via Gar Private (Tom Vaughan Lawlor), his unseen alter ego.

Noel Pearson’s reverential new production, directed by Dominic Dromgoole, occupies a similar position to the central character: keen to move forward while forever looking back. Our familiarity with Friel’s more daring innovation may have robbed some of its startle, but the play remains an absorbing and affecting performance piece. Lawlor is expectedly dazzling – physically dextrous and emotionally supple – without eclipsing the other characters, realised delicately and sparingly by Barry McGovern, Brid Brennan, Enda Oates and Marion O’Dwyer.

Gar is forever suspended between his memories and hopes, and this production shows us a young man fizzing with the desire to leave, while poignantly realising that he’s going nowhere.

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