thu 28/03/2024

A Festival of Brian Friel, The Curve, Leicester | reviews, news & interviews

A Festival of Brian Friel, The Curve, Leicester

A Festival of Brian Friel, The Curve, Leicester

Iconic Translations and underrated Molly Sweeney mark range of 80-year-old playwright

Last year Brian Friel became an octogenarian. Yet the Irish playwright who has been greeted by the English like no other has so far failed to have that fact either celebrated or acknowledged with a retrospective festival by theatre’s major shakers and movers. It’s been left to The Curve in Leicester (that remarkable glass-fronted, inside-out, state-of-the art high-tech new theatre designed by Uruguyan, American-based architect Rafael Viñoly) to take the initiative.

The_Curve_Vinoly_ArchitectsBuilding on a tradition of featuring other Irish writers, its visionary and persistent artistic director Paul Kerryson (the obstacles the £63 million theatre, pictured left, had to overcome to exist at all would have defeated any lesser spirit) has now programmed a thrilling Festival of Friel. Featuring arguably Friel’s finest play, Translations (1980), it dovetails it with one of his underrated later works, Molly Sweeney (1993), overshadowed up till now because of its similarity with a monologuic style by the earlier The Faith Healer (1979). The result is a fascinating, rich fusion, a chance to re-evaluate, compare and consider Friel as he explores ideas of loss and exile in two outstanding productions as fine as anything London could hope to stage.

Friel’s place in the English psyche is a particular one. The very antithesis of Beckett with his unblinking confrontation with life and mortality, Friel by contrast renders to the English a vision of Ireland that in some strange way confirms back to them a soft, sepia, romantic view of Ireland. Yet Friel is far from being a romantic. A Northern Irish Catholic, schooled in Derry, who moved to the South more than 40 years ago, how could he be otherwise?

It’s a paradox the more intense since Friel has spent a lifetime tussling with the ambiguities and divisions of north and south, Catholic and Protestant, and what constitutes "home". In Translations, and now in Selina Cartmell’s luminous, revelatory production of Molly Sweeney, those tensions of loyalty are palpable.

Both concern themselves with the nature of identity and understanding. In Translations it is a question of words, geography, culture. In Molly Sweeney, of how our sensory perceptions create a familiar world around us. Both consider the effect upon us of "naming".

Translations is always now considered Friel’s masterpiece. And so it is; dense, lyrical, infused with Gaelic culture. Set in Friel’s fictional homeland of Ballybeg - based on his own mixed roots spanning the land between northern Derry and southern Donegal - it is 1830, and Irish history is on the brink of change. Mick Gordon’s production brilliantly underlines this pivotal moment. At the end of Act One, the lights fade, an Irish bodhran begins to thrum and the inhabitants of the Ballybeg local "hedge" school are held in darkening silhouette. Nothing is ever going to be the same again for young Manus, the speech-impeded Sarah, Jimmy Jack the tramp, Doalty, Bridget and the rest.

Colonisation was never more potently or subtly represented than in Translations. Two English army engineers, scalding in their red coats, have arrived to make a "map" of Ireland, transforming the landscape from Gaelic names into English ones. Take away a name and its acquisition through the personal history of a place and you commodify it, render it other.

Friel, who wrote Translations at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and whose own despair and anger can be felt in every fibre of the piece, interpolates a "translator" into this process between coloniser and colonised. Owen, the army translator and son of the classically spouting hedge master, Hugh, is a wholly compromised character – at once an enabler and betrayer.

Molly, the recipient of an eye operation, experiences post-operatively an overload of stimuli. So she gradually turns recluse

So, too, in Molly Sweeney a native world is traduced, betrayed, this time by good intentions. Molly Sweeney has been blind almost since birth. But she has been taught to "see" by her father. Through naming, touching and feeling, Molly is serenely at home in this imagined world. Enter an enthusiastic autodidact, Frank, soon to be her husband. And enter also, like Frank Hardy in The Faith Healer, a "fallen" character in Mr Rice, the ophthalmologist, a once high-flying eye surgeon, brought low by whiskey and the collapse of his marriage.

Molly, like Ballybeg becomes colonised, taken over. Mr Rice allows himself to believe that one more operation may help to restore Molly’s eyesight and also his own faltering career. Frank is just enthused at the thought of helping Molly.

Where Mick Gordon’s Translations production emphasises openness in The Curve’s wide studio space, Selina Cartmell’s Molly Sweeney by contrast is all enclosure, light and shade moving across its peeling wallpapered walls, even as Molly experiences her post-operative world. And Molly is undone in this new high-intensity world. In Oliver Sacks’s case study - the apparent source of inspiration for Molly Sweeney - the recipient of an eye operation experiences, post-operatively, an overload of stimuli. So Molly – another vibrantly red-coated figure – gradually turns recluse. Neither sighted nor blind, her only recourse is to withdraw into her own re-imagined world.

Without pointing the finger, Friel seems to be saying in both these two plays that adjustment to a new world order is everything. Loss is inherent in the adjustment – tragic loss. And perhaps withdrawal.

Translations_Patrick_Moy_Siobhan_McSweeney_Kyle_James_Riley_JPBoth productions shine with Friel’s lambent sense of human frailty. Mick Gordon, refusing to bow to romantic sentiment, brings a fresh, bracing air to Translations with a cast who catch the full richness of its classical references, though I’d have liked to see more confused duality from Patrick Moy’s Owen, caught between two worlds (pictured right, Moy, with Siobhan McSweeney's Bridget and Kyle James Riley's Doalty). Paul Mallon is particularly affecting as Manus, Hugh’s young, crippled son, as is Tilly Gaunt as Sarah, struggling to find her words. The scene where the young English soldier and Máire, one of the Gaelic-speaking villagers, express their love for each other in languages neither can understand remains one of the play’s high points – a still moving reminder of understanding transcending language.

As Molly Sweeney, Simone Kirby gives her a quiet, determined resolution, and Des McAleer, a terrific storyteller, a sense of broken resignation to Mr Rice. Accolades, though, abound for Tom Vaughan-Lawlor stepping in at the last moment. Script in hand for part of the time, he still manages to convey an eccentric lost in his own enthusiasm.

A wonderful double bill, well worth the hour-and-a-quarter train ride. Go not only for the excellence of the plays and their production but the theatre itself - a triumphant vision of the 21st century bursting with open-to-all vigour, light and beauty.

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