When playwright Brian Friel expressed his interest in visiting Edinburgh to see the restaging of three of his plays by Dublin's Gate Theatre, he asked the theatre's artistic director Michael Colgan a question. "Michael, do you think I should go?" the 80-year-old inquired. "I might die."
Colgan's response was abrupt. "I hope so," he replied. "We need the publicity."
While such gallows humour could have been lifted from a myriad of works from Ireland's fertile playwriting heritage, it also goes some way to explain the position of Brian Friel in the broader scheme of things.
Friel, after all, currently stands as the living elder statesman of Irish drama, with a welter of plays still in the repertoire dating back more than half a century. So much have Friel's masterpieces trickled down into the cultural mainstream that if you mention the titles of Translations or Dancing at Lughnasa to non theatre-goers, chances are they'll at least have a vague idea of both plays' importance.
Yet as iconic as his work is, Friel himself has never become an icon in the way that Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter - both his contemporaries - have done. At least, that's the way it seems in mainland Britain, where, despite major productions of his work, some of which have become rep staples, there's a sense that Friel is being patronised as a safe pair of hands, all elegiac whimsy and twinkly-eyed charm, to fit in with other museum-piece stalwarts.
In truth, Friel is a writer as mighty as Chekhov, who he has frequently drawn from in his own work. This is something recognised more in New York than London, and while America and American theatre-goers are prone to sentimental fetishisation of anything that may have even remotely crawled out from under the Blarney Stone, Friel's dramatic sensibilities seem to have more of an umbilical link with Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill than anything in residence in London's west end.
Almost a quarter of a century separates the writing of Faith Healer from The Yalta Game and Afterplay, both of which appeared in the first few years of this century. Both the more recent plays are also inspired by Chekhov, with The Yalta Game based on the Russian master's short story, The Lady with the Lapdog. Here what Colgan describes as "a holiday gigolo" falls for a young woman he had a brief dalliance with, only for her absence to tap into feelings he never thought possible.
Afterplay goes even further, imagining a meeting between Sonya from Uncle Vanya and Andrey from The Three Sisters, 25 years after the plays that thus far defined their very being. Crucially, the liaison takes place not in the country, but in the much yearned after Moscow.
It is the 1979 piece, Faith Healer, that has become one of Friel's defining statements: through three characters delivering a quartet of subtly different monologues, the lives and times of a travelling faith healer are painted in different shades and through eyes other than the maestro's own. For Colgan, despite such apparent disparity between each play, there is a thread running throughout that taps into the heart of Friel's oeuvre.
"They're all about imagination and memory," according to Colgan. "Friel is looking at what is real and what becomes contorted slightly by your recollection of something. They're about how the memory plays tricks, like in The Yalta Game, how this gigolo guy starts wondering whether the young woman he met had even been with him at all, or whether she just exists in his head."
The Yalta Game was commissioned by Colgan and The Gate alongside two one-act plays by Conor MacPherson and film-maker Neil Jordan.
"The other guys," Colgan remembers, "said that Brian's play was so good that he made mincemeat of them."
Faith Healer had caused waves in different ways.
"Each character tells the same story," Colgan points out, "but each one has a slightly different take on things that gives you new insights."
Faith Healer, too, was ahead of the game in terms of influencing a younger wave of writers from Ireland using out-front monologues to tell their story. Mark O'Rowe, Conor MacPherson and others have all used this more bardic form of expression as a crux of their own shaggy dog stories. Friel himself used similar techniques in other plays, most notably in his 1994 piece, Molly Sweeney, which Colgan is preparing to revive 15 years after its premiere at The Gate.
"Brian Friel is a pathfinder and a groundbreaker," Colgan says, waxing lyrical about a man he calls "our leader". He adds, "For people working in the theatre to have someone that great around is a blessing. There's nothing I wouldn't do for Brian Friel, but I don't think these plays are anything like as well-known as they should be. That's why we're doing them, to celebrate their greatness."
The Gate Friel season isn't, it should be pointed out, an after-the-fact acknowledgement of greatness that usually comes around, if not after a writer's death, then at least once they're well past their peak. Friel, it seems, is always hard at work. On what, exactly, Colgan doesn't know.
"He wouldn't tell you that," says Colgan. "If Brian's in Dublin he'll drop in and talk to you for 45 minutes, then on his way out, he'll say, By the way, I've left an envelope at the front desk. Just say nothing if you don't like it.' "And in that envelope it's often happened to be a play that will end up being done all over the world.
"Or he'll pop in for a cigar after he's been at the Abbey to drop something off that turned out to be Dancing At Lughnasa. But I'm in the privileged position to be able to ring him up and maybe suggest something to him, and sometimes he'll reject it, but that's how something like his version of Hedda Gabbler came about."
Despite such discretion, which runs alongside an integrity that prefers to concentrate on theatre and theatre alone, Friel is far from a solitary writer.
"He's a man of the theatre," says Colgan. "He'll come to rehearsals, and he's very involved in casting. He trusts me, but there are no surprises waiting for him. This is his life's blood. He likes the gossip and the chat. He even reads plays for me, and his love of words comes out in his reports, which read like something from the best critic ever, and his faxes and letters read so beautifully that they remind you of why you shouldn't write. It's that moment of preparation that Brian loves."
At the time of writing, incidentally, Friel is most very definitely due to visit Edinburgh to see The Gate's revivals. More importantly, this embodiment of 20th and 21st-century dramatic writing is still hard at work, and very much not dead. "The master," as Colgan dryly points out, "is going to be there."
Faith Healer, August 15-18, 7.30pm; August 16, 2pm; September 4-5, 7.30pm. The Yalta Game, August 29-30, September 1, 9pm; September 4, 5pm; September 5, 2pm. Afterplay, August 31, 9pm; September 1, 6pm; September 3, 7.30pm; September 4, 2pm; September 5, 5pm. All at King's Theatre, Edinburgh. www.eif.co.uk
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