‘Glenties is the stage’: Brian Friel’s Donegal

In 1981 Brian Friel wrote some lines for the MacGill Summer School brochure of that year that have been proudly used since then. They are, I think, worth repeating: “A community that celebrates a local writer does two things. Rightly and with pardonable pride, it participates in the national/international acclaim. And rightly, and indeed as importantly, it celebrates itself because the writer is both fashioned by and fashions his people. Because of my own close connections with Glenties – it occupies a large portion of my affections and permanently shaped my imagination – I am delighted that this festival is taking place and I congratulate the people who dreamed it up and made it real.”

Apart from being a significant expression of support for the honouring of the writer Patrick MacGill, it was one of the rare occasions when Friel acknowledged publicly that Glenties had played a considerable part in his development.

Even though Omagh, where his father, Paddy, taught and Friel first went to school, and Derry, where his family settled, were places to which he would remain attached, it was Donegal, and Glenties in particular, that became his home place, physically and, more significantly, in his memory and imagination.

It was not surprising. His mother, Chris, was a McLoone from Glenties, the youngest of five sisters who have been immortalised in Friel's great work, Dancing at Lughnasa, and five brothers, one of whom, Barney, became a member of the Mill Hill order. Barney served as a chaplain in the second World War, for which he was honoured, went to work as a missionary in Uganda, where he contracted malaria, and, as the world now knows, came back to die with his sisters at the Laurels, their home on the outskirts of Glenties.

This small house had been the station house occupied by Friel’s grandfather, who was the stationmaster.

As is evident from his early forays into writing, and particularly in his somewhat neglected short stories, this bleak and beautiful and dramatic west Donegal landscape had cast a spell over Friel from the earliest age.

He got to know it intimately when the young family came on holiday to Glenties and to the nearby seaside resort of Narin. It was during these sojourns that he got to know his myriad of cousins and went with his father, a keen angler, to remote and almost inaccessible lakes set in lonely and desolate heather-clad hills and bogland around Glenties.

Expeditions

Friel did speak about one of these expeditions in 1972. He went on to express doubts about the memory’s capacity to record faithfully the details of past events – a theme that would become a constant in his work.

One's mind is instantly and inevitably drawn to that wonderful pathos-filled scene in Philadelphia Here I Come! when Councillor O'Donnell and his son, Gar, who is about to leave him, can't even share a moment of pleasureful nostalgia related to a fishing outing together when Gar was a child.

It would be wrong, though, to emphasise the role of time and place in Friel’s work when it is timeless and spaceless and of the mind and could have been set in any landscape. There is no doubt, however, that it was this landscape of Glenties and its hinterland that provided him with the canvas, the theatrical set he needed to cast a cold eye on the human condition in all its complexity and to breathe life into his characters.

In one of his essays, A Fine Day at Glenties, written for a tourism magazine in 1963, when the young teacher was still feeling his way, with dogged determination, to becoming a writer, he observes the activities, the habits, the attitudes, the foibles, the trickery and the self-delusion of the characters at the street fair where animals and goods were bought and sold.

He thus weaves an incredibly rich tapestry of life in this small town of one street and was obviously already sharpening his tools as a dramatist. “Glenties is the stage,” he would say, “and the fairgoers are the players.” Glenties, in fact, offered him everything he needed to create an baile beag – Ballybeg.

Although only a village in today’s parlance, it was the centre of the hand-knitting industry in west Donegal and consequently the centre of commerce of a wide and varied region. It was adjacent to mountainous and remote communities where the Irish language and traditional music, in spite of emigration and changing social and economic conditions, had so far survived.

Scattered around the countryside were places that appeared to have escaped the attention of the ordnance surveyors and were still known by their original, poetic Gaelic names. It had a hotel and plenty of hostelries, a workhouse, a police barracks and, of course, a well-defined class structure and a powerful clergy in the large parish of Iniskeel, which had produced eminent figures of the Catholic Church.

Harsh environment

Patrick MacGill had controversially painted a vivid and none-too-pleasant portrait of merchants and churchmen and socioeconomic conditions in the Glenties area several decades before. As MacGill had also shown, there was a rich tradition of storytelling here.

But there was the other side of human life here as well, and a young, sensitive writer like Friel could not ignore it. There was the harsh environment in which young men and women were growing up with few opportunities for self-development or any room for creative or emotional growth.

There were islands that looked gentle from the mainland but were becoming depopulated because of hard economic and social conditions.

Friel throughout his life loved this place, and particularly its people, but never uncritically or unconditionally. He never stopped inquiring about it and observing it, and he never stopped observing political, social and economic life in Ireland as a whole, north and south, which sometimes made him very angry and upset.

Only very recently he railed to me against the decision to allow Star Wars to invade Skellig Michael. For him it was a sacrilege and more of the "grubby hands in the till" that throughout his life he could not abide.

One extraordinary Lughnasa evening in the life of Glenties, and, I think, in Friel's life, was the opening night of the 1991 MacGill Summer School. It was the beginning of a week dedicated to Brian's work, and Dancing at Lughnasa was performed by an all-star cast drawn from the productions of the play running in London and Dublin.

It was an evening of so much expectation, so much excitement. Everyone who was in that school gymnasium realised, I think, that they were participants in a unique theatrical and cultural event.

Friel, emotional and proud, introduced the performance from the stage. Only a few hundred metres up the road was the home, deserted but still standing, of the Mundy/McLoone sisters, “the five brave Glenties women” to whom the play is dedicated.

Through the magic of Friel’s language, artistry and imagination these women were re-created before the eyes of an audience many of whom remembered them in real life. On that occasion Friel himself acknowledged his debt to Donegal, the place, he said, he was proud to call home.