All Brian Friel’s plays are set in and around Ballybeg, a fictional village in Co. Donegal. All human life is there. In The Home Place, currently in the West End, he looks at the Protestant Anglo-Irish in the “big house”, the landlords who ran the district. But in his 1978 play Aristocrats, the gentry are Catholic, it’s the present day, they’ve fallen on hard times and the big house is barely still standing.
Friel is often compared to Chekhov. This piece has hints of the Russian master’s plays Three Sisters, in its family structure, and The Cherry Orchard, as the house is lost to them. Also like Chekhov, he never overwrites. Drama, for him, isn’t about big actions or heroes: it’s about ordinary events in the lives of ordinary people. The point is that ordinary events are still full of importance in ordinary lives.
Tom Cairns’ production could never be accused of betraying Friel’s low-key writing by ratcheting matters up a bit. Indeed, for the first half or so of the play, that’s the problem. Things are taken at an unforced pace – entirely faithful to the writing, but they could do with a bit of a directorial gee-up. By the time things start happening to any serious degree, there’s a danger that we may already have lost interest.
Gina (Our Friends In The North) McKee as eldest sister Judith
is excellently pent-up: tied to the house and her invalid father, but not
resenting it.
Well, maybe just a little, secretly. Dervla Kirwan, no longer
quite the young flower of TV’s Goodnight Sweetheart, almost equals
McKee as Alice, an alcoholic in an uncertain marriage with Peter McDonald’s
Eamon. The venerable T.P. McKenna has a cameo.
The finest performance is from Andrew Scott as Casimir, the cracked brother, honest and true of heart but never quite facing the world squarely on. It’s a keenly judged production (and beautifully designed, also by Cairns), but to stick with it through the long, slow start requires more commitment and trust than many may feel ready to give. Maybe wait till autumn, when the NT tours Friel’s masterpiece Translations.
Written for Teletext.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
Return to index of reviews for the year 2005