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Home arrow Sections arrow Entertainment arrow Polished, detailed and moving account of Friel’s best-known work.
Polished, detailed and moving account of Friel’s best-known work. E-mail
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Wednesday, 25 July 2007
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Polished, detailed and moving account of Friel’s best-known work.
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More people speak Polish than Irish as their primary language in today’s modern Ireland. Now it is only an earlier generation that remember when Irish emigration exceeded the birth rate and the hundred years during which the Irish population sank from four to two million and the young person’s dream was of the USA as ‘God’s Own Country’. Stirring these memories is the purpose of Galway Youth Theatre’s crisp production of Brien Friel’s ‘Philadelphia Here I Come’.

Set in a remote village in Donegal, Friel’s 40-year-old Irish classic portrays a victim of a stultified post-Emergency Ireland, whose only refuge is exile. Friel voices the émigré’s plea for ‘impermanence, anonymity - that’s what I’m looking for; a vast restless place that doesn’t give a damn about the past…to hell with Ballybeg!’ Gar O’Donnell, the young man at the centre of the play, is fleeing a country that, to him, appears backward, inhibited by oppressive religious ideology and inhabited by repressive relationships. Ireland is the ‘land of the curlew and the snipe’ and the USA driven by ‘abhorrent lust’, but for Gar, the daunting, immoral possibilities of a foreign Philadelphia are more attractive than the uncertainties of a struggling Ireland.

Philadelphia Here I Come also explores the dynamics within a small community: one where the characters, and particularly the father, S.B.O’Donnell, are emotionally unavailable to Gar. This, and the memories of other failed relationships are at the heart of GYT’s interpretation. It is the frustration associated with the inability to express feelings adequately, the tragic consequences and the attendant poignancy that is so carefully and skilfully drawn out by Director Andrew Flynn and his team.

To underline the petrified emotions of his central character, Friel uses a dramatic device ahead of its time: he has two actors play Gar simultaneously. Cathal Finnerty is Gar Public and, unseen by other characters on the stage, Séan Ó Meallaigh is his alter ego: the bitter but more expressively more honest Gar Private. It is Gar Private who makes the often harsh comments on Ireland’s stultifying and oppressive society of the 1950s.

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