In celebration of a friend

As playwright Brian Friel turns 80, Thomas Kilroy recalls the night he first met the irreverent storyteller, and how their friendship, as well as Friel's international reputation, have grown over the past 40 years

I FIRST MET Brian shortly after 1968 in Mary Lavin's house by the Boyne in Bective, Co Meath, that lovely house "in the middle of the fields". Mary was an elemental, quick-silver hostess of many gatherings of writers in those days, older and younger, particularly in her mews house on Ladd Lane in Dublin.

I met John McGahern and Nuala O'Faolain there for the first time. But I also met Frank O'Connor and Padraic Colum, who regaled us with stories of his meetings with Joyce. For someone young and trying to write it was heady stuff.

I don't remember Brian at the mews but I remember him at Bective. For the first time that evening I heard the witty, irreverent storytelling and the marvellous mimicry of the man behind the plays. In time this led to a friendship which has meant everything to me over the decades.

When we first met he was already a leading playwright of the English-speaking theatre with the first productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Loves of Cass McGuire and Lovers. I had just had my own first production of a play The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche at the Olympia Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival. A review of it had appeared in the New York Times. Before I knew what was happening a leading New York agent called Lucy Kroll was on my doorstep waving a letter of interest from the New York producer David Merrick.

I hadn't a clue what to make of this except that beneath the excitement I had this feeling that something wasn't quite right. Because of ignorance I couldn't put my finger on it but I knew all was not as it seemed to be. "Brian Friel will give us advice", said Mary. And so he did, with many swooping asides and anecdotes about the shark-infested waters lapping around the Broadway theatres.

It turned out to be an evening of great hilarity since Mary, too, had a great capacious sense of humour before the follies of art and artists.

But I also learned a lot about the realities of commercial theatre that night. I learned that Mr Merrick's letter meant nothing at all and, sure enough, in time, the whole thing fizzled out and I was back on earth again.

I find it hard to write about this friendship for the very good reason that Brian values his privacy above everything else. As many people will attest - young writers particularly - when approached he is a man of unfailing courtesy and attention.

He is also utterly impatient with the phoney, with pretentiousness of any kind, with careerism and all the manufactured celebrity of the current scene. On the other hand, he loves the hoopla of show business, the glitz, the sweaty business of the rehearsal room and all the camaraderie for which theatre people are known.

BUT THERE IS an inner core to him which is the preserve of his taste and judgment, in other words the centre of his imagination and intelligence. This is where he resides as a private person and it is only available to the world at large through the plays where it emerges as a vision of what human life is like in all its frailty and joy, its excess and heartbreak. He guards this inner self with fierce determination.

One of the great pleasures of this friendship for me, as a writer, has been the closeness with which I've been able to experience the emergence of this extraordinary body of work. I remember following him as he developed Faith Healer from a single monologue to the eventual four parts of the finished text, one of the great theatrical texts of the second half of the 20th century. In the course of this journey he found the two haunting stories upon which the finished play revolves, the miracle-making in the old Methodist hall and the bloody miscarriage at Kinlochbervie.

The Friel stories in the plays not only have a resonance across the action, they often carry, at an undefinable level, what can only be called the need for the spiritual, the yearning for meaning beyond material reality. This is one of the reasons, I think, why he communicates with so many different audiences, in different cultures, through different languages, all around the globe. Actors in a Friel play don't just speak to the audience. They also speak for the audience. There is no closer bond in the theatre.
We have had the odd theatrical excursion and pilgrimage together over the years, including one to Stratford. Last year we finally made the one we that had talked about for some time, a visit to Chekhov's Yalta in Ukraine, with our wives Anne and Julie.

Sometimes there comes into existence a relationship between two writers which defies time, language and geographical distance. This is true of the relationship between Brian Friel and Anton Chekhov. The nexus between them is mysteriously grounded. But it has the same mastery of social detail, the same probing below the surface, the same moral precision, the same comic tolerance before the vagaries of life. They also have a similar interest in portraying the process of time upon the stage, how ageing changes the mind as well as the body, how memory at once deceives as well as consoles.

Our journey to Yalta on the Crimean coast was a journey to the new Europe emerging out of poverty and a country being pulled towards the East and to the West with every prospect of breaking in two. But it was primarily a quest for the tubercular Chekhov in the retreat that he had created for himself away from the grim climate of Moscow.

We visited the two Chekhov houses in Yalta. I think Brian was disappointed by the main house, the White Dacha, partly because only a section of it was open to the public due to ongoing repairs. In fact, the house is caught up in political conflict between Kiev and Moscow. An important Ukrainian constituency sees Chekhov as a Russian writer and certainly the burden of upkeep as a Russian responsibility.

Just this past month an appeal for funding to pay for the work was launched in London. The nearby museum, too, with its determined lady receptionists, was heavy with the weight of cultural tourism. It was hard to see the man himself.

The garden, on the other hand, was entirely Chekhovian, planted by Chekhov himself, with now mature cedars, cypresses and magnolias. He also planted a hundred roses in memory of Pushkin in that garden and it still has its roses. In a corner is Gorky's garden seat. It was clear that Chekhov himself, and the house, attracted cultural traffic.

SO, AT SOME POINT he decided he needed an even more inaccessible retreat and bought a small cottage from a local Tartar farmer in the small fishing town of Gurzuf, just up the coast. At the end of a narrow lane on the cliff a simple one-storey cottage, one room with a desk, a single bed, the cane, hat, scarf and elegant gloves. We had found Chekhov.

Although tiny, the place has an extraordinary atmosphere and a wonderful collection of photographs, posters, set designs, stage memorabilia of all kinds and, all by itself, the first handwritten page of Three Sisters.

When he died, Chekhov left this cottage to his wife, the Moscow Arts actress Olga Knipper and the main house to his sister Masha. The two women had a complicated, uneasy relationship in part due to the fact that he clearly needed both of them in his intimate life. One of the startling reminders we had in the museum in Yalta was that in the 1950s, when Brian started to write and I was a student in UCD, these two women were still alive. History dissolved in front of us. Everything was suddenly in the present tense.

Brian spent a long time standing, looking down on the little pebble beach below the cottage at Gurzuf. I imagine he saw the relationship of the couple in all its complexity and all its simplicity, Olga sunning herself before the almost motionless Black Sea and Chekhov coming down the stone steps, there, behind her, coughing discretely. I thought of the great European confluence flowing in and through Brian's work and why it is that he belongs in that company.