An Outsider’s Eye: The Art of Designing for Theatre

Part memoir, part theatre history, in this illustrated essay Joe Vaněk invites us to an inside-view on the design process. Choosing key performances of European plays (Brecht, Ibsen) adapted by Irish writers, Vaněk takes us through the thought processes and work practices that bring a play from page to stage, with descriptions and photographs to illustrate his design choices and thinking. Additionally, he offers us insights into working with Irish playwrights who examine Ireland’s relationship to Europe, for example in his designs for Frank McGuinness’s Innocence: The life of Caravaggio, and the work of Brian Friel and Hugo Hamilton. Vaněk traces his own influences, from the theatre work of the Czech designer Josef Svoboda to painters, architecture, and landscape. His reflections reveal the complexity of the role of the designer and the intricate workings of theatre practice Keywords: Theatre design, costume design, Irish playwrights, Brian Friel, Frank McGuinness, Hugo Hamilton, Gate Theatre

Brian Friel in Spain: An Off-Centre Love Story

Spanish theatres are not prolific in the staging of Irish playwrights. However, the Northern Irish writer Brian Friel (1929-2015) has been a curious exception, his plays having been performed in different cities in Spain since William Layton produced Amantes: vencedores y vencidos (Lovers: Winners and Losers) in 1972. The origin of Friel’s popularity in this country may be attributed to what many theatre directors and audiences considered to be a parallel political situation between post-colonial Ireland and the historical peripheral communities with a language other than Spanish: Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia; the fact is that the number of Catalan directors who have staged works by Friel exceeds that of any other territory in Spain. However, despite the political identification that can be behind the success of a play like Translations (1980), the staging of others with a subtler political overtone, such as Lovers (1967), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Molly Sweeney (1994), Faith Healer (1979) and Afterplay (2001), should prompt us to find the reason for this imbalance of representation elsewhere. By analysing the production of the plays, both through the study of their programmes and interviews with their protagonists, and by scrutinising their reception, I have attempted to discern some common factors to account for the selection of Friel’s dramatic texts.

‘A disoriented vision of … fact’: Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.

Brian Friel on the french stage: from Laurent Terzieff to women directors of Dancing at Lughnasa

The success of Brian Friel's drama on stage in the English-speaking world is beyond dispute. Many plays of his plays have also been widely translated leading to numerous productions worldwide. My concern in this article is with French-language productions. The focus in this article will be, first, on the association between Brian Friel and the late great French actor and director Laurent Terzieff, who introduced French theatre professionals and audiences to Friel; and secondly on Dancing at Lughnasa, the play that has been most often performed on French stages, with specific reference to productions twenty years apart by two women directors, Irina Brook (1999) and Gaëlle Bourgeois (2019).

The Split Identity in Brain Friel’s Play PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME! )

Colonized people suffer due to cultural struggle and identity loss. Brian Friel (1929–2015) dealt with the consequences of British colonisation of Ireland. This paper explores the fragmented identity in Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!. It depicts the contradicting feelings of a young man who decides to leave his country. Still, he is unable to overcome his emotional loyalty to his past. Friel divides the protagonist into two characters played by two actors on the stage. The memories in the play form an integral part of identity being live images that satisfy inner needs. The characters’ inner conflicts and personal dilemma reflect general social problems.