Brian Friel’s mother Chris was a great woman for the Feis and dragged him around the North West to perform on stage in the 1930s.
She was not the only one in the family who was enthusiastic about cultural competitions. His father Paddy, a schoolmaster, won prizes for solo and choral singing and directed award-winning school choirs. And an impressive aunt, Kate MacLoone, a graduate of the Abbey School of Acting, was for a long time the only woman on the committee of the Feis Thír Chonaill. After giving up teaching in 1943, she devoted herself to producing children’s plays.
But it was Chris who was Friel’s first great supporter. He mentioned her efforts on his behalf in a jocular column he wrote for The Irish Times from 1957 to 1962: “I entered whistling competitions on Narin beach, harmonica competitions at Ardara, fiddle and singing competitions in Letterkenny, Lifford and Derry. By the time I was ten she was introducing her protégé in every cottage and hall in Donegal, Derry and Tyrone.”
This article appeared in December 1959. By then, Friel, a 30-year-old teacher who was married with two daughters, had already had two stories published in the New Yorker and two plays broadcast by the BBC. The following December, he left school to pursue a literary career. The column in the Irish Times and a “first reading agreement” with the New Yorker – $100 a year for the first viewing of new works – had made this departure possible.
It was an all-or-nothing move. And it proved astonishingly successful, first with high-profile stories in the New Yorker and a successful play, The Enemy Within, at the Abbey Theatre in 1962. And then, after Friel had “hung around” for a few months at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, his Philadelphia, Here I Come! was such a success at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964 that it was revived at the Gate the following year. In 1966, Philadelphia opened on Broadway; it ran 324 times. Friel, Variety proclaimed, had “hit the jackpot.”
It is those years when the promising amateur turned professional that are the focus of Kelly Matthews’s gripping Brian Friel: Beginnings. In particular, it skilfully reconstructs Friel’s relationships with agents and editors, producers and directors who gave him advice and opportunities. Notably, they included BBC producer Ronald Mason, Roger Angell, his editor at the New Yorker, and director Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis. Friel proves to be witty and self-deprecating, with the eagerness to improve that is the mark of a die-hard competitor.
Not everything is covered. The North West, the place that shaped Friel before it shaped him, is not brought into clear focus. We get little sense of the schoolmaster’s development in the small middle classes of a deeply disadvantaged nationalist community that suffered from Unionist discrimination and southern disinterest. His political involvement, not least in the Derry Catholic (Voter) Registration Association, is ignored. And the contribution of his wife Anne, who Matthews admits was his “first reader”, is unknown. What was her feedback on his early works?
Rediscovering Friel’s youth is a challenge. Remarkably, he never spoke about his decision to leave the seminary in Maynooth; the subject was “closed”.
There is no shortage of sources for a portrait of the playwright as a young man. Many of Friel’s memories of his first appearances on stage can be confirmed. He was a fine singer and took part in feiseanna competitions well into the 1950s: press reports mention his voice and his choice of songs. The competition on Narin beach that he recalled in 1959 was most likely an aeraíocht, an open-air festival organised by his Aunt Kate’s party, Fianna Fáil, in August 1937: eight-year-old Brian contributed to the formal music programme, as did his older sisters Mary and Nanette. And then there were the Omagh Parochial Sports organised by his father in 1938, when he won the boys’ fancy dress costume dressed as ‘Shoneen’; his sisters took a place in the girls’ egg and spoon race.
As important as acting, particularly singing, was to the Friels, writing was also important to them. In 1937, the year of the Aeraíocht, Mary won a prize for a humorous essay published in the Irish Press, describing a fight between her ‘little brother’ Brian and a local boy in Glenties when they were playing Lexicon, a fashionable word game. In 1939, Aunt Kate took Mary and Nanette to a friend’s farewell dinner at the Portnoo Hotel (which had been founded by her uncle), where they met Northern literary greats Seumas MacManus, Alice Milligan and Paddy the Cope. And in later years Mary published a short story, and Paddy Friel is said to have broadcast one on the radio.
( Anne Friel on her late husband, the playwright Brian: “I was crazy about him. He was everything”Opens in new window. )
Yet it is a challenge to rediscover Friel’s youth. As Anne Friel noted in a remarkable recent interview, he never spoke about his decision to leave the seminary in Maynooth; the subject was “closed”.
Closed to him, perhaps not to history. Does neither Maynooth nor the Diocese of Derry keep records?
A complete literary biography of Friel, beginning long before Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), his most successful play, and ending long after, could answer this question and shed light on this departure.
“Beginnings” doesn’t claim to be such a biography. But it is a well-crafted, impressive book about a young wordsmith on his way to Broadway and those who helped him along the way.
