Philadelphia revisited

Will Brian Friel's classic emigration play get a new twist from British director Dominic Dromgoole, who offers an 'outsider's' vision?

‘YOU ALWAYS have this impression when you share a common language that you are more at home than you are,” says British theatre director Dominic Dromgoole. “So if you have an Irish name, like I do, and a distant Irish ancestry, like I do, and you speak the same language as the people, and you have worked with Irish writers in the context that I have, then you can get comfortable, you can think you are an insider.

“But every now and then something slips and you are gently reminded that you are not.” For Dromgoole this reminder is a good thing, an important thing. It prompts a necessary self-questioning that is the key to creativity.

Having just arrived in Ireland on a brief sabbatical from his duties as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to direct a new production of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Dromgoole did not have to wait long to be reminded that, despite his intimate relationship with Irish writing over the years, he did not know Irish theatre as well as he thought.

“I assumed that I would know the talent pool better than I did,” he explains, “having produced and directed Irish plays and worked with so many writers and actors over the years. But the wealth of talent that I didn’t know was a real surprise. And then of course some of the actors who came in to audition for me were fantastically caustic and upfront about the fact that I wasn’t part of the Irish theatre establishment saying, ‘what are you doing over here with this Irish play, Englishman?’ But I like that sort of honesty; I even encourage it. It keeps me on my toes!”

Indeed, it is hard to imagine Dromgoole put out by such cheeky ribbing. He is a warm, self-possessed and confident interviewee, settling down for a drink in the hotel bar and an unguarded chat with me before he even knows my name, and on the scale of challenges he faces daily in his professional life in London – he is responsible for a 1,500-seat theatre that receives no state funding, and manages to survive almost entirely on box office – dealing with a bit of bolshiness in an audition room is a breeze; it “makes me question my assumptions about certain things again”.

So, what is a British theatre director of Dromgoole’s stature doing in Ireland for this new, landmark production of Brian Friel’s most famous play at the Gaiety theatre?

"I have been at the Globe now for four years," Dromgoole explains, "and it is an all-consuming job: just the size and scale of it. So I had been looking to take a short break – to direct something where I wasn't responsible for the theatre, the roof, the lighting, the staff, the props, as well as what happens on stage. So when Noel Pearson came and asked me would I be interested in doing Philadelphiawith him, I flew over for the day and had tea with him and Brian.

“It was a very genteel tea, but it was sort of an audition for me really, where we talked about the play and any ideas I might have had about casting. We sort of gently nosed around each other a bit, trying to ascertain what the other’s tastes are – what plays or writers we liked – and whether our tastes collided or coincided. Anyway, I must have passed because they gave me the job and we got on with it.”

Indeed, Dromgoole’s name is synonymous with Irish writing in London. Having produced unlikely revivals of Shaw and O’Casey’s lesser known plays, he also ran London’s Bush Theatre for six years, where he premiered work by Billy Roche, Conor McPherson, and Sebastian Barry during the early 1990s, work that was crucial to invigorating Irish theatre when it returned to Ireland and which is now seen as a third golden age for new Irish writing, after the fertile periods embodied by Synge and O’Casey at the early Abbey, and Friel, Kilroy and Murphy during the 1960s and 1970s.

However, as Dromgoole explains it, the Bush’s work with Irish writers was a matter of luck rather than design. “There seemed to be a prevalence at the Abbey at the time,” he says, “that there was a certain idea of what an Irish play was. It was highly etiolated, highly literary, but there were other, more robust, varied and wilder, voices and there wasn’t room for them because they weren’t part of that tradition, so there were writers who were looking to England to produce [their work]. For us, it started with Billy Roche sending in a play to the Bush. I was working there as a reader at the time and I used to be terribly lazy and read them incredibly quickly.

When you are approaching a job like that you want the plays to be bad, because then you can move on to the next one; if they are good you have to treat them with respect. But Billy had given us a really strong, atmospheric and textured piece of writing, and I gave it the most incredible report. Well, that was it. Within three months it was put on.

Then when I became a director at the Bush, we put the next two of Billy's plays on and that became The Wexford Trilogy. We had a fantastic journey with them, and they ended up at the Wexford Opera House and the Peacock too."

Dromgoole also produced Conor McPherson's first plays, including This Lime Tree Bower, and McPherson's most famous play to date, The Weir,was premiered at the theatre just after he left. There was also Sebastian Barry's "sublime" Prayers of Sherkin, Boss Grady's Boys, and White Woman Street, "one of the best things that he has ever written".

"Martin McDonagh was knocking on the door too," Dromgoole continues, "and we did what we could for him, helped set him up with an agent, but the plays weren't ready." Dromgoole fondly remembers working with Irish companies as well, in particular Rough Magic. "They brought Declan Hughes' play Digging for Fireover and it was an incredible moment for Irish theatre in England. It was the first time that every single perception about Irish writing – that it would be about the Troubles or pain or women crying and shouting – was turned on its head. It was unbelievably modern, very European, and it couldn't be read as a metaphor for the nation. It was a great moment for changing the representation of Irish culture in Britain."

There was no real sense of dissent within British theatre about the Bush’s special interest in Irish work, as Dromgoole explains. “Nobody said, ‘Oi, Englishman, why are you producing Irish plays?’ or anything like that. I mean we had a high turnover – 10 shows a year, and they were not all by Irish writers. But there is a desire for inclusivity in the culture of new writing in London, anyway.

“Theatres are always looking for new voices. They understand they can’t maintain a theatre tradition without allowing in that diversity, so the last 30 years of theatre culture has been a long history of inclusion, absorbing different voices, different cultures, different traditions, invigorating what is already there. That might sound vampiric, but it is important for allowing us to see the variety within our culture.”

Indeed, Dromgoole's "outsider" perspective in turn seems set to allow Irish audiences to see how varied Irish culture as imagined in Philadelphia, Here I Come!is; to allow Irish audiences an opportunity to re-imagine the play outside of the dominant historical perspective of most readings. In a culture where theatre has been continually interpreted through the lens of social and political history, Dromgoole's "Englishman's" vision of the play is refreshing – "it's about intensity, adolescence, that horrible self-consciousness that rages inside you," he says, "not just the 1960s and emigration. It is not a play for the intellect, but a play about passion and the heat of that is never dated.

“You know, there’s this feeling in England that there is more romance, more sensuality, more exoticism in being a little bit Scottish or Welsh or Irish,” he concludes, “and they hear my name and think ‘oh, how very Irish’. And, you know, we can trace the family history back, though there’s a line of dispute as to whether we were Dublin Protestants or Catholics who fled after the Battle of the Boyne.

"But it's only now that I'm in Dublin again, that I remember that I'm really more of an outsider than insider. Yes," he agrees, "a bit like Gar in Philadelphia, Here I Come!"

Philadelphia Here I Come!previews at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from tonight, opens Monday and runs until April 10

When Ballybeg went right to Broadway

IT IS SET in Brian Friel's fictional Ballybeg in Donegal, but when Philadelphia, Here I Come!opens at the Gaiety in Dublin it will be a homecoming of sorts. The eve-of-emigration tragicomedy premiered there in 1964 in that year's Dublin Theatre Festival.

The production launched his reputation internationally when it opened in New York two years later, the first big Irish production to go to Broadway. Noel Pearson's Broadway production of Friel's Dancing at Lughnasawon a Tony award for best play in 1992.

In 1964 Patrick Bedford played Gar Public (“the Gar that people see, talk to, talk about”), Donal Donnelly was Gar Private (“the unseen man, the man within, the conscience”), and Eamonn Kelly was his father. Mairín D O’Sullivan, Eamon Morrissey, and Emmet Bergin also featured.

The cast for this new production includes Bríd Brennan, Alan Devlin, Barry McGovern, Marion ODwyer, Tom Vaughan Lawlor and Ciaran OBrien.