The Observer
25.08.19 31adjuncts to a world of Wodehouse
volumes: Hera is billed as Bertie’s
Aunt Agatha. There are some good
dimpling bits of smut: Jove and
his impregnation by golden rain
gets a big wink.
The characterisation is funny
voices. Some of them are sharp and
surprising: Prince Charles turns
up as Aegeus , Michael Caine as a
bodyguard. Some are lazy: why
does (it is not only Fry who is guilty
here) a tedious pedant have a whiny
estuary – as if “Dud” in the Peter
Cook and Dudley Moore sketches
were an adjective? And why can’t a
brainbox have a Brummie accent?
Fry is very good at showing how
the myths stretch their sinews in
etymology. Less good on making
them seem vital as ideas. I had
been thinking that in the recent
upsurge of interest in the classics
it had mainly been women who
had led the way in translation,
poetry and history: Natalie
Haynes , Charlotte Higgins , Emily
Wilson, Alice Oswald ... But then I
remembered the blasting effect of
Robert Icke’s Oresteia.Stevenson
brings all her
perplexed
intensity to
the role, her
face at war
with itself
Pop
Taylor Swift’s
new album,
page 40Where some of us
see city streets,
other see invisible
barriers crumbled
Art over troubled borders
“Politics are so obtrusive here.” The
great Irish playwright Brian Friel
( 1929-2015 ) was being interviewed
in the Guildhall in Derry in 1980.
Gesturing to the Ebrington barracks
beyond the window, on the other
side of the River Foyle , he continued:
“For people like ourselves...
defi nitions of identity have to be
developed and analysed much more
frequently [than in England]. We’ve
got to keep questioning until we
fi nd... some kind of generosity that
can embrace the whole island.”
The cross-border FrielFest, now in
its fourth year, invites audiences to
participate in both the questioning
and the embrace. In doing so, it
refl ects Friel’s own strength –
making works particular to time
and place that express our universal
experiences. The quest for answers
to shifting questions is refl ected in
the peripatetic form of the festival,
with dramatic readings of Friel’s
works presented in and around
Derry and Donegal – and audiences,
on occasion, visiting multiple venues
in the course of one performance.
First produced in 1973 ,
The Freedom of the City is set in
Derry’s Guildhall, where, poignantly,
this production is staged. A few
hundred yards away, people are
gathering around a makeshift
music stage to commemorate the
50th anniversary of the Battle of
the Bogside. On the night I attend,
the audience meets outside the
Museum of Free Derry (on other
evenings, the rendez vous point is
the Ebrington barracks). We are
sung to the Guildhall by Nigerian-
born, Liverpool-based performer
and playwright Tayo Aluko, and
walk in the wake of his resonant
spirituals. Where some of us seecity streets, others see invisible
barriers crumbled (“I would never
have crossed this road when I
was young,” says one). The play is
partially based on events around
1972 ’s Bloody Sunday. Its action
unfurls in double-time. The fi ctional
experiences of three civil rights
demonstrators, who stumble into
the Guildhall, fl eeing a tear gas
onslaught, are interspersed with the
offi cial inquiry into their subsequent
deaths (shot leaving the building
by the army, which maintains they
were armed terrorists).
Friel’s evocation of ordinary
people crushed by intransigent
authority is deeply moving and
thought-provoking wherever
it is played. In this specifi c site,
directed by Jonathan Moore as
a performed reading with a cast
of 12, it’s spine-tingling. (Special
mention to the three leads: Conor
O’Kane and Stephen Bradley as
Skinner and Michael , respectively,
twentysomething and unemployed;
and, in particular, Siobhan
McSweeney ’s layered and textured
Lily, a clean er and mother of 11.)
The Good Friday agreement of
1998 offi cially ended the Troubles
but, as recent events demonstrate,
troubles continue. A special
performance by Kabosh theatre
company of Friel’s fi rst published
play , The Enemy Within , imagining
St Columba’s personal spiritual
struggles to free himself from the
demands of clan and country, is
dedicated to the memory of the
author and journalist Lyra McKee.Lughnasa FrielFest
Various venues, Derry
and DonegalIt’s performed by an all-female cast in
St Mary’s church, Creggan , the area
of Derry where McKee was shot by a
gunman from the New IRA during
riots this April. The church acoustics
work against the cast but do not
diminish the power of the script-in-
hand production, which is further
energised by Ruby Philogene ’s
haunting renditions of spirituals.
Over the border in Donegal,
each of Faith Healer ’s four acts is
performed in a separate location.
The audience is bussed between
them, starting and concluding in
Glenties, said to be the model for
Friel’s fi ctional Ballybeg , and site
of the play’s fateful culmination. At
Ed eninfagh Glen, we are addressed
by the titular “hero”, Frank (Paul
McGann) ; at Portnoo , Frank’s wife,
Grace (Amelia Bullmore) , recounts
events from a different angle; at
Ardara, Teddy (Pearce Quigley) ,
the manager who accompanies
the couple on their tours of village
halls in Scotland and Wales, gives
his version. Seeming facts shift
with each telling. The only thing
on which all agree is an intangible:
Frank is able to heal the sick – but
cannot predict when or how. With no
director and no rehearsals, reading
from scripts, each actor addresses
us with a barrier-breaking intimacy.
Voyaging between acts, this quality of
closeness carries over into the buses,
as people share their responses. We
become bound into community in
the space of the afternoon.
The following evening we’re
under canvas, looking out over
Donegal ’s Lough Swilly. In
Homer By the Sea , Greta Scacchi
reads to us of Odysseus’s faithful
dog, Arg os , stirring at the sound of
his return ing master’s long-unheard
voice. Beyond her, a group crosses
Rathmullan beach , dog loping
beside them. Words weave our
identities, shaping questions about
existence that know no boundaries
of time or space. Clare BrennanConor O’Kane
in a ‘spine-
tingling’
production of
Brian Friel’s
The Freedom
of the City at
the Guildhall
in Derry.
Photograph
by Matthew
Andrews