There is a place-in-time in which playwrights seem to feel naturally at home, where conflict gathers on certain key subjects - age, sex, isolation and redundancy, writes Kevin Myers.
Audiences feel comfortable here also. We are literate in this epochal landscape, and familiar with its furniture, so its laureates - Chekov, Ibsen, Friel - can effortlessly lead us through it, pointing out secrets that we had not previously seen, but under their guidance, now become so very obvious.
Moreover, we possess an ironic knowledge of the greater outcome, beyond the frame of the theatre and the minds of the characters: for ahead lies tragedy. We know this. Chekhov in particular evokes deep emotions because of the utterly unsuspected, decades-long catastrophe which awaits his landscapes and all its inhabitants. In a lesser sense, the same is true for all those stories of the Big House in Ireland. Not merely is it doomed, but so too are most of the larger communities which historically seemed to be victorious - and then in victory found only economic failure, despair and emigration, yet again.
Who does not wander over the landscape of our past, feeling the texture of our history and the tragedies with which it is studded, and not wonder, If only. . ? Many people now regret the failure of the inhabitants of the Big House to become culturally integrated in Irish life, and though entertaining this notion might be, it is nonetheless vain fantasy. Gentry by nature is aloof in any society: where its position had been secured by theft, as it was in Ireland, its distance is compounded by its own insecurity, by the loopholes and fire-steps inside the front door, and by a querulously ruthless magistracy.
Brian Friel is back on that familiar territory in The Home Place at the Gate - and moreover, back to a form some might have thought had left him. Not so. This is a quite magical play, adorned with quite stunning performances that have an extraordinary uniformity of quality. With great delicacy and sometimes overwhelming passion, Tom Courtenay plays Christopher Gore, an agonised Englishman whom family vicissitudes have caused to inherit an estate in Donegal. He is a kindly man, and though he has lived most of his life in Ireland, his heart still lies in his home place in Kent, with - in comparison with Donegal - its almost tropically exotic fields of wheat and hops.
He is visited by his eugenist cousin, Richard Gore, played with an almost eerie arrogance by Nick Dunning. One could almost be tempted to say his insensitivity towards the mere natives as he measures their skulls for racial characteristics is a caricature. But when you consider the astounding condescension that unconsciously infuses what are intended to be sympathetic short stories from Somerville and Ross, his visible disdain for the local schoolmaster, played with a supplicant, drunken dignity by Barry McGovern, becomes entirely believable.
We are early on introduced to the twin themes of dispossession and temporality by Richard Gore's offstage visit to the ruins of a Cistercian monastery. Of course, he doesn't understand that the great edifices of empire, in Ireland and India alike, would one day resemble the crumbling remains of Ninevah and Tyre or the Donegal branch of Cîteaux.
But in his bones, cousin Christopher knows of the fragility of the Anglo-Irish world, a belief confirmed by the earlier murder of a local landlord, Lord Lifford. He is sure that there is a list of targets, and that he is on it; and indeed the list existed, but in the might of history rather than in the minds of men. Ninety per cent of the gentry of the time were within scarcely more than a generation doomed to departure, mostly by the ferry, though some few by the assassin and the incendiarist.
The creature of violence is represented here by Adam Fergus, an actor of such sinister physicality that he could clear a street with a frown, and if he appeared at your front door at night, you'd probably exit via the chimney, pulling up the fireplace after you.
He is the very opposite of Christopher's son David, beautifully played by Hugh O'Conor. He yearns to be able to identify with the plain people of Ireland, and even imagines he can be immersed invisibly among them, but such a union is not possible: the distances and the differences are too great.
Moreover, he is both too naïve and immature to live in the complex world of the real and impoverished Ireland that begins at the gates of the family estate - which makes the secret relationship that he enjoys with his father's young housekeeper, Margaret O'Donnell, all the more unlikely.
As played by Derbhle Crotty, she is a woman of great substance, and it is hard to believe she could fall for a youth as callow and unformed as David. But then neither life nor love run along predictable lines, and we all have seen the improbable bewitched, wooed and won by the impossible.
Poor Brian Friel doesn't attend opening nights, but sits in his Donegal home chewing chairs and tugging out those few remaining tufts from his already well-plucked mane. Be easy, Brian: you have, yet again, written another wonderful play, rich in wisdom, and peopled with distinctive, entirely believable characters. It manages to be both very funny yet utterly tragic, and the language is infused with a haunting, melancholic beauty. The applause at the end, rolling on like an alpine avalanche, confirmed this truth: The Home Place is a jewel.