Review

Fintan O'Toole reviews The Home Place at the Gate Theatre, in Dublin.

Throughout a career that spans almost half a century now, Brian Friel's plays have been concerned with two distinct but intertwined groups of people. In the words of Christopher Gore, the central character of The Home Place, his most accomplished new play since Dancing At Lughnasa 15 years ago, they are "those who believe themselves the possessors and those who believe they're dispossessed".

The categories mirror, of course, the conflict between Gael and Planter that has underpinned so much of his work. Even though it is set in 1878, what makes The Home Place such a contemporary play is the way, after the peace process, its focus is on the world shared by the possessors and the dispossessed. For all its poignant melancholy, this makes it also a moving work of reconciliation.

One of the pleasures of new work by an old master is the sense of retrospection. Friel's writing has always been deeply embedded in theatre history, and there are obvious echoes here of plays as diverse as The Cherry Orchard and Waiting for Godot.

But The Home Place is embedded, too, in Friel's own history. It revisits both Aristocrats and Translations, and brings their disparate worlds together. The setting is virtually the same as that of Aristocrats: a Big House room opening out onto a lawn lit by the sunshine of late August. There is the same atmosphere of a family's vigorous past slipping away into inevitable decline. David Gore (Hugh O'Conor), the son and heir of the landlord Christopher, is a sketchier version of Casimir in Aristocrats.

But The Home Place glances back at Translations, too. That play's arrival in Friel's mythical Ballybeg of the English map-makers has its parallels here in the arrival from England of Christopher's bumptious cousin Richard, who wants to take physical measurements of the locals as part of his obsession with the racist pseudo-science of "anthropometrics".

The same desire to codify and classify is met with the same threats of violence. Hugh O'Donnell, the grandiloquent, alcoholic teacher in Translations, is resurrected as Clement O'Donnell, whose daughter Margaret has become the housekeeper at the Big House, loved and desired by both Christopher and David.

What makes The Home Place far, far more than a mere reprise of earlier work, though, is that it knits these two stories into one. Planter and Gael are seen to share a predicament. The central characters, Christopher and Margaret, are both, albeit in different ways, people in no-man's land, neither one thing nor the other. Christopher, part of Donegal but still regarding Kent as the home place of the title, comes to realise that he is "an exile from both that memory and this fact now".

Margaret, too, is cut off from both her own family background and from the Big House world she lives in but can never really inhabit. The great achievement of the play is to give this haunted, hovering existence a vivid, compelling life.

The sheer mastery of the writing is evident in Friel's ability to suggest that we both are and are not in 1878. There are, admittedly, occasional false notes in Friel's attempts to establish a historical context. (William Wilde, who is referred to in the present tense by Richard, was two years dead in 1878, and it seems unlikely that his son Oscar, then a mere student, would be referred to as "that execrable aesthete creature".)

But these are far less important than the subtle triggering of later resonances. The brilliant scene in which Richard carries out his measurements on a group of locals has chilling echoes of the Nazis. Richard's desire to crack the physical code that will give him access to the secrets of the personality reminds us of contemporary genetics. Thus, history is telescoped, and the action acquires immediacy.

Director Adrian Noble handles this multi-layered text with a skill that is often breathtaking. He shows, above all, a wonderful confidence in Friel's writing. While a more nervous director might have slowed down the first act to untangle the sometimes knotty relationships between the characters, Noble trusts Friel's story to clarify itself, and sweeps the action along at a mesmerising pace. He can do this because he, in turn, can trust a superb cast, in which Nick Dunning, Pat Kinevane and Barry McGovern are especially strong, not to sacrifice telling detail to speed of motion.

At its centre is Tom Courtenay's utterly captivating portrayal of Christopher. Painfully self-conscious and blindly self-indulgent, Christopher could be a caricature of the benevolent but ineffectual landlord. But Courtenay gives him the immense dignity of a man who sees his own weakness more acutely than anyone else ever can.

He also makes Friel's language more his own than any actor since the late Donal McCann, speaking the longer speeches as if they were verse and yet with a completely convincing realism. His interactions with Derbhle Crotty's Margaret, who is at her most deeply expressive when she is saying nothing, is a balletic counterpoint of language and silence. Like the harmony between Friel and Noble, their interplay embodies an Anglo-Irish understanding that tragically eludes their characters.

The Home Place runs until March 26th