THE TOWN Hall will shortly host what promises to be one of the year’s theatre highlights when Brian Friel’s most recent play The Home Place arrives in a major new production jointly presented by Belfast’s Lyric and Letterkenny’s An Grianan theatres.
The play is set in the summer of 1878, a time of unrest and the early days of the Home Rule movement. The fateful events of The Home Place occur over a single day at The Lodge in Ballybeg, the Donegal home of the Gores, a planter family.
The Gores, father and son, are both in love with Margaret, their housekeeper. All three pursue a hopeful dream of freedom from their history and heritage and the “awful burden” of the big house.
The situation quickly unravels, accelerated by Gore’s scientist cousin Richard, who unwittingly insults and inflames the local population during an already volatile time. He has arrived in Ballybeg to do a study of the natives. He believes that by measuring heads and bodies and by noting eye and hair colour, an ethnic code can be cracked resulting in much power and information.
In the words of the learned doctor “one would therefore be able to control an entire universe”. However his investigations provoke local resentment that threatens to unleash a simmering undercurrent of violence and age-old antipathies.
Friel’s brilliantly crafted drama continues the historical probing which in Translations examines the tragic effects of a military operation to map the physical contours of the Irish landscape.
In this, his latest play, a scientific exercise to determine the Irish character unleashes the tragedy, which revolves around the ideas of national identity, love, and belonging. Beautifully written, this is classic Friel.
Lyric executive director Michael Diskin - formerly of the Town Hall - speaks enthusiastically of this new staging. While the play’s premiere production at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in 2005 was well received, Diskin feels it did not establish The Home Place as a major Friel work to be ranked alongside such works as Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa.
Mr Diskin is hoping this new staging will succeed in doing that – and in this it will no doubt be considerably aided by the fact it features a strong cast of Northern Irish actors who will be intimately familiar with the play’s subtle historical resonances.
“I really feel this is a hugely important Friel piece,” Diskin asserts. “It’s significant that here we find Friel, a major writer from a Northern nationalist background - a man who was on the Bloody Sunday march in Derry in 1972, writing a play that engages with and seeks to understand the predicament and feelings of the Protestant planter class represented by the Gores.
“And being Friel, he brings a great degree of penetrating insight into that conflict between coloniser and colonised that has shaped so much of our history and is still very relevant to us today.”
Interestingly, The Home Place also marks something of a personal watershed for Mr Diskin as it signals the conclusion of his successful tenure at the Lyric. He reveals that he’s going to take a year-long sabbatical in France to pursue some personal projects. In the meantime, he has assembled an outstanding company to present Friel’s play.
The cast features some of the best known Irish actors working today. Ian McElhinney takes the lead role of Christopher Gore and double Olivier Award winner and Tony Award nominee, Conleth Hill, returns to a Lyric production after major successes on the West End and Broadway.
The cast also includes Lisa Lambe, who received an Irish Times Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role in Improbable Frequency; Stuart Graham, back on stage after his extraordinary role in the acclaimed film Hunger; Lalor Roddy, Aisling McGuckin, the Fermanagh-born actress who is a regular on the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kyle Riley, Julia Dearden, and Pepe Roche.
The director is Mick Gordon who was previously artistic director of London’s Gate Theatre. Gordon also has a sure personal grasp of Friel’s work, making him an ideal choice to helm The Home Place.
Gordon has contributed a programme note on the play which is worth quoting from as he reflects on ‘What is a Home Place?’
“For Brian Friel,” he writes, “our sense of home is what roots us, and the call of home is what haunts our memories and motivates our deep desires. He sees the idea of home in Irish history as the painful circle of the coloniser and the colonised: What he describes as ‘The doomed nexus of those who believe themselves the possessors and those who believe they’re dispossessed.’
“He sees the idea of home in our families, as the connections that will bind us despite our most ferocious protestations and challenges. And he sees the idea of home in each of us as the deep need we all share, the need to belong.
“Brian Friel is a master playwright. He is a master because of his talent and literary skill, but most of all because he divines us accurately. And The Home Place is his latest meditation on the question that has preoccupied much of his work, the question of what we strange humans need to feel at home.”
The Home Place is at the Town Hall for four nights only from Wednesday February 25 to Saturday 28. For tickets contact 091 - 569777.
