Brian Friel: The “Irish Chekhov”
The legendary Irish playwright’s plays examine consistent struggles through vastly different forms
Lantern Theater Company’s newly filmed production of Molly Sweeney — streaming January 22 through March 7, 2021 — was written by Brian Friel, a prolific Irish playwright whose theatrical eye was consistently focused on his home country.
Friel’s plays crossed borders and eras, frequently examining what Ireland means to his characters as both a location and a source of identity. Setting his stories in the fictional town of Ballybeg, the site of more than a dozen of his plays, provided the freedom to move the location of the play at will while also allowing his explorations of home, identity, and history to spring from a common place. According to theater historian Christopher Murray, Friel’s plays “take the spiritual pulse of the Irish people and find the dramatic form that will render the condition of universal interest.”
Replace “Irish” with “Russian” and Murray’s description would ring true for another famous playwright: Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright of the late 19th century most famous for his large casts of characters struggling to work out and master their own spiritual pulses. In fact, Friel was frequently called the “Irish Chekhov.” He did not shirk the nickname — later in his career, he translated the Russian playwright’s Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya and included characters from those plays in his own Afterplay in 2002.
Friel explained his connection with 19th century Russian writers by offering that “the characters in the plays behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever, even though they know that their society is in meltdown,” and “they seem to expect their problems will disappear if they talk about them — endlessly.”
Friel’s Chekhovian leanings are most evident in his large-cast plays. Dancing at Lughnasa and Translations, perhaps his most famous plays, are each populated with a sprawling cast of characters with complicated and competing relational ties. Plays like these and the other Chekhovian work in Friel’s bibliography often involve naturalistic, even chaotic moments of overlapping conversation among a social group. In these plays, the way the many characters interact, how their conversations flow, and how they operate as a group are as important as the content of their dialogue. In these plays, individual identity is bound up in social and cultural identity, and Friel gives us a wide range of characters by which to see that identity reflected.
But while his most famous plays may be large in scale, Friel is equally adept at turning these explorations of identity and history inward in intimate, small-scale work. Molly Sweeney and its structural cousin, Faith Healer, are in many ways the opposite of those sprawling plays — each has just three characters who never interact onstage, delivering separate but intersecting speeches about the same series of events. These deep character sketches eschew dialogue for monologue, and any character interaction is filtered entirely through the point of view of the character reporting it.
In these spare, internally driven plays, the characters’ worlds are in their words. They tell us about other characters — those we meet and those we can only imagine — and offer intensely personal interpretations of events that have already occurred, leaving us to collect the three different versions and try to construct truth out of individual perspectives.
Whether his stage is populated with three monologists or a dozen characters at once, though, Friel’s work consistently returns to the task of revealing that “spiritual pulse of the Irish people” as Murray put it. In large casts or small, Friel’s indelible characters wrestle with their communities, their identities, and where — or whether — they fit together.
Go behind the scenes: Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon and the Molly Sweeney design team on design in theatrical storytelling
Molly Sweeney was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in fall 2020, with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming January 22 — March 7, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
