HOPE, HEART, HARDSHIP
Brian Friel’s 1979 remarkable play stands on its own, offering a kind of depressive beauty: beneath the story of one ramshackle troubled couple it is a meditation on many universal human griefs and glories, losses and absurdities. The shape is dramatically brave (it wasn’t by any means instantly applauded) because it consists of four monologues by three characters, the first and last from the eponymous hero himself. Thus, the writing being Friel-brilliant, it needs to be held up by three remarkable performances. It’s almost tightrope-walking.
And that is no bad image, because Frank Hardy, who wanders onto the bare stage beneath a tattered and much-travelled banner , offers a form of showbiz performance along the Celtic fringes of Scotland, Wales and his native Ireland as a healer. As we meet him he is murmuring a string of names “Aberader, Aberayron,. Llangranog, Llangurig,. Abergorlech, Abergynolwyn ,Aberporth…” an incantation of rootless travel which he has used to calm himself. All three of the characters at times fall into this, a kind of lonely chorus. Before him in poor village halls have come the crippled and the deaf, the maimed and the barren and the blind. His manager Teddy, he tells us, always plays “The Way You Look Tonight”, to soothe or confuse them. Sometimes, though, his healing works: autosuggestion or miracle, he does not know, but when it does work a great contentment moves through him, displacing his unease and guilt. He speaks of his mistress and companion Grace “from Scarborough” and of his parents’ deaths and his emotions, and at last retailing a “restless and ritual” wild Irish pub night when he came home to Ballybeg. And there is something that happened at remote Kinlochbervie in Sutherland.
But before the interval we see Grace, a woman in recovery from traumas which increasingly become clear. “I am getting stronger..” is her desperate refrain. Nothing about her life and losses is simple: she describes a doctor’s brisk advice to use her knowledge and sophistication – she was once a solicitor – to control her feelings. “He meant so well. It is so simple for him”. What is also clear is how much of Frank’s account has been lies, fantastic self-serving adjustments of truth; she is not even from Scarborough, but Irish like him. Why would he lie so much? We learn how hard her life has been since in the words of her estranged father the Judge, “she ran off with a mountebank”. We gather Frank is now dead and learn more of that last pub night but also of the quality she saw sometimes in Frank : something she calls “magnificence”.
At this point let me say that Justine Mitchell’s performance is extraordinary, electric, unforgettable; starting on a chair with a drink until she rises, her vast emotion filling the house, taking our breath. This is when the evening catches light, because Conlon’s opening – skilled and subtle as it was – felt distractingly like a screen performance: muttered asides for some unseen camera, oddly unprojected. That wouldn’t work if you hadn’t known the play’s text: the only flaw in Rachel O”Riordan’s production.
After the interval Nick Holder storms through the third version of their travelling lives: he is magnificent as Teddy the manager, a big cockney getting through bottle after bottle of beer, shaking his head at the stupidity and immensity of talents down the years from Olivier to Houdini, rousing laughs with his performing-dog stories and the long ago stardom of his client Miss Mulato and Her 120 Pigeons, aka Bridget O’Donnell. But he was there through the tragedy, the birth, loss and field-edge burial of her baby at Kinlochbervie. And about the ending of the pub night. As his bonhomie fades into sorrow and love and exasperation, and the last of the bottles clatter into the bin in desolation, Holder too rises to unforgettable levels. Then we are back, in the final monologue, with Frank himself, and a dying fall.
The play is remarkable, saying much about performance, charisma, self-deception and helpless anger. Its birth in the worst of Ireland’s ‘troubles’ years is always spoken of as important in Friel’s history and thought. But like Shakespeare he always throws out many different tendrils of understanding. So seeing it now, it seemed to me to speak more powerfully though of women: of the painful disaster of loving female tolerance. Justine Mitchell is remarkable, as is Nick Holder; Conlon may be so yet, growing more powerfully present as the season goes on.
One other point: the sound design by Anna Clock is also remarkable: you’re hardly aware of it but it is affecting you, every minute. As it should do.
Lyric.co.uk to 13 April
Rating 4
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