Brian Friel - Tribute The Arts Show

I was born in Omagh in County Tyrone in 1929.

I'm married. I have five children. I live in the country.

I smoke too much. I fish a bit. I read a lot. I worry a lot.

I get involved in sporadic causes

and invariably regret the involvement.

And I hope that, between now and my death,

I will have acquired a religion or a philosophy, or sense of life,

that will make the end less frightening

than it appears to me at this moment.

When I was a boy, we always spent a portion of our summer holidays

in my mother's old home

near the village of Glenties, in County Donegal.

I have memories of those holidays that are as pellucid, as intense,

as if they happened last week.

I remember in detail the shape of cups hanging in the scullery,

the pattern of flags on the kitchen floor,

every knot of wood on the wooden stairway,

every door handle, every smell,

the shape and texture of every tree around the place.

This is Glenties, County Donegal,

Brian Friel's spiritual home.

It inspired his fictional Ballybeg,

the location for many of his plays,

including Philadelphia, Here I Come,

Translations and Dancing At Lughnasa.

This place is now as rooted in global theatrical history

as Chekhov's provincial Russia

or Tennessee Williams's southern states of America.

Tonight, we remember this extraordinary writer

and most private of men,

who chose Ballybeg as his final resting place.

But from Glenties to the Guildhall,

where Irish theatre history was made in September 1980.

Field Day Theatre Company

was co-founded by Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea.

Their first production was the now classic Friel play,

Translations, starring Stephen Rea and a young Liam Neeson.

It has been said that it was not so much a premiere

as the initiation of a movement.

Can you remember the first time you met Brian?

Yes. It was at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

We were doing Freedom Of The City,

Brian's play,

that was provoked by the events of Bloody Sunday

and Albert Finney directed it

and Brian came over for rehearsals.

And that's when I first met him.

And we hit it off, you know?

He was very brotherly, paternal, whatever.

There was an obvious connection.

And, seven years later,

you co-found Field Day Theatre Company.

Where did the idea come from?

It was very simple - someone in the Arts Council,

Imelda Foley from Derry,

told me there was some money knocking about

and would I like to use it?

And so you asked him to write a play which then became Translations?

Yeah. I think he was working on it.

I think he said, "I'm working on a play about the place names."

But he very quickly just said OK.

-And that's all it took, really.

-And was it a one-off?

Did you ever imagine that it would become a theatre company,

there would be a board,

there would be all that stuff that goes with?

No - all of that happened incrementally.

Just... It didn't happen...

There was no agenda, there was no plan, it was just...

We did a play and then we thought, "Well, we'll do another play."

Did your friendship then, with Brian,

was it really forged during those Field Day years?

Yes. It's what Seamus Deane called "amicitia", you know?

It was friendship within a project.

But there was something about that connection with you and Brian

that seemed to transcend the project base.

I think it was the...

..the sense of how important it was to be doing what we were doing

and the sense of responsibility and...the sheer pleasure, as well.

He was a dear, dear friend

and...had more influence on me than anyone else and...

He had an immense kindness, an immense generosity.

I have attempted to hold together

a harassed and a confused people

by trying to keep them in touch with the life they knew

before they were overrun.

Did he shape you as an actor?

Do you think that the actor you are now is because of him?

All good writing shapes you as an actor.

Great writing, God knows... Yeah.

I've been lucky to be connected with some writers.

Brian had a huge influence on me, not just...

As a writer, of course, and as a man, but...

His whole philosophy, his whole perception,

was a constant learning experience for me.

When Field Day was formed,

and I sat at a table

with Heaney and Seamus Deane

and Brian and Tom Paulin and Tom Kilroy,

I just sat there and drank it in, you know?

Because the level that they were at was so...astounding, you know?

At the time of Brian's death,

you called him "a shy man and a showman".

Why do you think he pulled back from the media so much?

I don't know, because he was willing enough at a certain point,

and he was very chippy and bright and cheeky.

But in himself, he was a very shy man.

That's why all the plays, the great instruments of theatre...

He doesn't get so hung up on something

that it's not going to work.

He makes sure that the play works, you know?

It's a rare talent, you know, because all the plays work.

How will you remember him?

I remember him always being...irreverent.

He'd always do this gesture of cheek and defiance, which was kind of...

You know?

Kind of, having a go at people.

In my view, he was a majestic figure.

The work is devoted to an understanding

of our particular...sensibilities

and...the tragic distance that there has been between people.

He was great. He was not impressed by anything.

-He was fearless.

-I think he was fearless, yeah.

And...

You know? He was theatre. He was theatre.

The playwright is never fully his own man.

The playwright requires interpreters.

Without actors, and without a performance,

his manuscript is a lifeless literary exercise,

a kite without wind,

a boat waiting for a tide.

And the day he completes his script,

he has won a battle and takes on a war.

While Field Day's impact was arguably global,

its base was here in Derry,

and its administration team was local -

something that was important to Friel.

Colette Nelis ran the office day-to-day,

where I first got to know her when I worked for Field Day

as a student volunteer.

My job basically was, kind of,

all the administration that was involved in the background,

you know - things like organising the accommodation

for the actors in the production. Basically...

going out to the venues,

and if there was no box office, setting a box office up.

That was the thrill of Field Day, and working with Brian.

He would have been very involved in everything that was going on.

Everything was done locally - the Guildhall staff,

everything was sourced...

Everything was sourced here and there was a policy

when it came to, kind of, paying bills and things like that,

the small, independent person was paid first.

There was a real honesty and commitment of the man.

You must have also had to field people, you know,

wanting to have conversations with Brian.

Brian was very protective of his privacy,

but I think that was born of either misrepresentation

or just a bad experience with the press.

So I think he felt the safest way was to stay clear.

Colette, it's lovely to be sitting here

in the Guildhall with you again.

Everything happened here.

This was so central to Field Day

and the memories of Brian and Stephen sitting in

on all of the productions.

Does she know Latin? Is she certain of the words?

Very little, very, very little.

I think, in act one, we have got the three words

and I think, in this case, you're really inventing it as bog Latin.

'They are incredible memories and also I remember'

the kindness of Brian Friel to me, as well, as a young person.

Yes, but that was the mark of who Brian was.

He was very caring of the individual.

I often felt that I wasn't a person

that did the administration at Field Day,

I was THE person and, to me, that was very different.

He cared about the individual.

I think of the famous parties of Field Day

in the Guildhall at opening nights.

The City Council very much decided who was invited

and I was placed at the door and I had to kind of turn people away.

Brian was in there, but noticed I wasn't and came out and said,

"That's not what my staff are here for. Colette, come inside."

Come in and enjoy the party.

Come in and enjoy the party, you know, and that is Brian Friel.

To me, he was a gentleman in every sense of that word.

The pain or the pleasure the writer experiences

depends on his attitude to his director and to his actors.

Actors are a very special people.

All the things that most people dislike in them, I find fascinating.

But I have yet to meet the director or actor who wouldn't casually

paraphrase lines of dialogue or indeed transpose whole scenes,

hence the war or at least the twitching truce.

Friel was renowned as a tough taskmaster.

He didn't like directors changing any dialogue

and likened his works to an orchestral score, saying,

"Would a conductor change the music of a composer?"

But directors loved working with him and he chose them carefully,

including Joe Dowling, Patrick Mason and Mick Gordon.

Actor-director Adrian Dunbar was another.

How hands-on was he? Would he come into rehearsals and sit in on them?

I directed Philadelphia, Here I Come! up in Derry

and I was lucky I was directing it in Derry because it meant

that Brian was able to come and be very hands-on with us

and actually come and see a little bit of rehearsals

and make sure we were on the right road, which was great

because it's fabulous, the relationship between the writer

and the actor, of course, and he was very encouraging towards

the actors, which really helped me, of course, as a director.

He was very thorough and very rigorous

and didn't stand any frivolity.

He was a very thorough person.

I'd have to go up to Greencastle and give him reports.

This is the schoolteacher in him, you had to give him a report?

Yes, I had to report to him

and he very quickly would see through

if you really hadn't got a pile done and would express that,

telling you that you're really no further on and...

You didn't want any of those conversations, did you?

No, no, it was a couple of times I went up

and I really hadn't got far enough down the line

and I used to try and dress it up as positively as I could,

but Brian of course was able to see through all that

and you had to be on top of your game to work with him

and of course, like all great people, all the standards

rose around him when you started to engage with him and his work.

Appearances can be deceptive, Matthew, can't they?

I mean, you look at DCI Gates - a very admirable individual,

a devoted family man, officer of the year.

You admire him, don't you, Matthew?

'We know you as an actor probably more so than a director,

'but you never acted in any of Friel's plays.'

No, I didn't. I never got... Well, I did get the chance.

I remember Stephen Rea calling me one time

when I was doing a lot of TV in the UK and, to a certain extent,

that's the reason why I went back to working on Brian's plays

because I realised that there was a huge part

of my own creative journey that I was missing.

And of course I regretted it some years later

'so when I got the chance to re-engage with Brian's work,

'it was like someone giving me a gift that I could come back to.'

But I can still go and do Brian's plays. I still think I will.

That's the wonderful thing about being an actor - you can still

engage with Chekhov and you can still engage with Ibsen and Turgenev

and all these people and you'll still be able to engage with Brian.

Do you think he was a genius?

Yeah, yes, I do, of course I think he was a genius.

You can't write that many plays, do that many translations,

have so much success in what must be

one of the most difficult art forms to achieve success in.

Way before everybody else understood what a genius Brian Friel was,

the actors already knew because they were speaking his words,

they were inhabiting his characters.

They could see the depth and the scope of what he was doing,

I think, and they were responding to it in a very immediate way.

So, yeah, the game is always upped when a genius is around.

He just lifts all our consciousness, if you like.

So, yes, Brian's a genius and now that he's left us, of course,

we recognise even more what a genius he was.

It was here at the Abbey Theatre in 1962

that Brian Friel's first stage play, The Enemy Within, was premiered.

Other premieres would follow, including The Freedom Of The City,

Aristocrats and, most famously, Dancing At Lughnasa.

Playwright Tom Kilroy, a fellow Field Day board member,

was a lifelong friend of Friel's,

spending family holidays together and sharing works in progress.

Tom, when did you first meet Brian?

We met in 1969 in Mary Lavin's house in County Meath.

It was one of those dinner parties

that Mary gave to bring writers together.

So that was my first contact with him

and that was the night I heard that voice for the first time,

you know, that wonderful storytelling voice.

Then, over the decades, the relationship developed.

It took many shapes.

We were in and out of one another's homes

and there were all those letters, phone calls.

He was full of gossip and mischief

and all of those qualities which made him endearing.

Like Mr Beckett, he was a master of the postcard

and he sent these postcards with hilarious one-liners on them.

They came through the letterbox like a blast of laughter.

You also shared works in progress.

You sent him drafts of your plays and he sent his to you.

Yeah, I saw early drafts of Faith Healer

and I saw early drafts of Translations

and I remember getting Translations in an early draft,

reading it and thinking, "My God, that's an extraordinary scene

"between that young couple, but it'll never work on stage."

So I remember writing to him, saying, "This can't work,"

and he said, "Dear boy, believe me, this WILL work!"

So he was of course right.

He had a light-hearted approach to the making of art

and he had very little time for pretension,

for any kind of phoniness in attitudes

and he cut through that with great clarity and I think,

for that reason, he was a very easy man

to communicate with about his own work.

You say that you got an early draft of Translations

-and that was the beginning of Field Day Theatre Company.

-Yes.

And he then invited you to sit on the board of Field Day.

Yes, I was very moved by the situation in the North,

you know, the deep suffering of all kinds of people

and how could this be alleviated, how could you contribute something.

Maybe through theatre or through art, which would make hope possible.

And I was fascinated by that

and I jumped at the chance of going on the board and, of course,

Field Day brought its productions to London

and what happened there was that it created

a relationship between the two islands in theatre

which hadn't been there before and that was a huge achievement.

It was a kind of cultural contribution to the process

that eventually led to the Anglo-Irish peace process,

and I believe it was that important.

What will you miss about him?

I miss the phone calls.

For a man who lived in this remote corner of the North of Ireland,

he had an extraordinary knowledge of what was going on in theatre

elsewhere, the capitals,

so we had these regular phone calls

and they were usually sparked by something that had happened

in theatre somewhere the night before.

He was a good friend.

He was a great friend.

This is the National Library of Ireland in Dublin

where 160 boxes of the Brian Friel papers are stored.

There are draft manuscripts, contracts and notebooks

and hundreds and hundreds of personal letters and postcards

spanning over 55 years.

Friel famously withdrew from the media in the early 1980s,

but he continued to communicate by letters,

like these, with correspondents as diverse

as Billy Connolly and Katharine Hepburn.

One man who got to know Friel in both a personal

and professional capacity

was Downpatrick photographer Bobbie Hanvey.

With unique access to this most private of men,

the result is a stunning archive of revealing portraits.

I think that was his favourite one,

the one where he's looking at the camera.

The lighting on all that day was just amazing,

and it sort of lit him up like 3D, nearly.

He liked that photo. That photo has been used all over the world.

It's very rugged-looking as well.

He looks like he's carved out of the rock.

Brian was like the rocks.

He had this craggy face.

He had big ears, he had a nose,

and he'd all the lines on his face, but it all moulded together

and made him very memorable.

He had the greatest face that I have ever photographed.

You photographed him doing the most ordinary of things as well -

mowing the grass, walking the dog,

even Brian Friel the beekeeper.

When I took him that close-up

in the beekeeper's outfit with the black veil over his face,

I told him, "You look like a bride."

In this white gear, he took some laugh at that.

I was funny with him and we weren't serious with each other.

I knew nothing about his plays and he knew nothing about photography

and I respected him for the way he wrote these plays

and how popular they were all over the world.

He liked me because I took fairly good photographs of him.

I took him on another day with a branch,

a big old branch of a tree that had been broken down at the waterside.

It was about 12 foot high and he just stood with the branch

straight up in the air, holding the branch,

and I took him sideways, profile,

and this woman from Hungary,

she was some big university professor or something,

she wrote to me and she says,

"That's the greatest photograph I've ever seen of Brian Friel.

"You've captured his soul."

I says to Brian, "That was the worst photograph I ever took of you,"

and he roared laughing.

You had a great letter-writing relationship as well.

I used to write to him in the winter time

and I'd say, "Brian, can I come up in May and see you?"

He says, "Pencil it in."

That's the way he liked it.

It's just... He was so good.

I says, "You'll be getting as good as Samantha Fox at this posing."

What was the first picture you ever took of him?

At the anchor.

That was the first ones.

And what were the last?

The last ones were in the red pullover with Billy, his dog.

For me, looking at those photographs, it's the intimacy that you get

with them, whether he's walking the dog

or he's in his beekeeper's outfit.

It's the private man that you got.

He was private, all right, and I was privileged.

-You must miss him a lot.

-I do, I do miss him.

There's an old saying - if a friend dies,

they take part of you with them,

and I found that when Brian died.

I haven't been feeling right since.

What will your lasting memory of Brian Friel be?

He just was like the fellow next door when you went up to meet him.

There was no airs or graces. No nothing.

He just loved smoking his big Havana cigar.

I miss him.

Over the past ten years,

I wrote to Brian Friel asking for an interview I never got.

He always politely declined, a stance I grew to admire.

He wasn't seduced by the bright lights,

so it seems fitting then that the bright lights of Broadway,

where he had his first big hit, Philadelphia, Here I Come,

were dimmed briefly in his honour earlier this month.

Brian Friel was a true man of theatre.

He was the business.

His legacy in terms of Field Day is very seldom does a writer

influence a whole theatre movement,

and all of his concerns are taken up the way they were by Field Day.

The work is really put at the service of an enlightenment

of a traumatic situation that we were living through.

I don't care if the English critics acknowledge it or not.

He was a majestic figure.

I just think we have to rethink,

redraw our whole map of not just Irish theatre

but certainly European theatre.

You can find people doing his work all over the place.

Rather like Beckett, he's very accessible,

especially to those people who are dealing with the post-colonial mind-set,

which he wonderfully danced us through.

Took us, led us out of the parish and into the wide world.

I think it's going to be a long time before we realise

the extent of his contribution to the culture,

and when we do start to realise,

we'll see what a towering figure he actually is.

The great thing about him was that he had such vitality,

such a sense of life,

that it's very difficult to think that he is gone.

I mean, he is present in conversations all the time,

so that he is still with us.

Human being.

One of the most intelligent people that I have ever met

that didn't show it.

When I think of Brian, I think of him in the office

with the cigar in hand and the mischief in the eyes.

To me, he was a gentleman in every sense of that word.

A lovely human being.

When you ask me, have I anything to declare,

and I say, only this and this,

I assume that you will look beyond the innocent outspread hands.