Sunday Tribune Review Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Colin Murphy of the Sunday Tribune wrote a less than favourable review of the production, and of the play itself. Perhaps it is unwise of Second Age to draw attention to this review, but as we have published all other reviews, it seems only right that we publish this one too. In fact it could serve as an interesting starting point for debate. So here it is verbatim as published in the Sunday Tribune on 04/11/2007.

Philadelphia is well past its sell-by date
Colin Murphy


THE year is 1964. Gar is going to America, and using a suitcase last used by his parents on their honeymoon. He opens it to find a newspaper from their wedding day, dated 1937. "A medieval manuscript!" he exclaims.
Brian Friel's play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! , is now older than that "medieval mauscript" was to young Gar. Like that newspaper, its value is chiefly a historical one. It is badly dated and largely tedious. Nobody under, say, 35, who wasn't already inured to it from the Leaving Cert, could listen to Gar relishing his private nickname for his father, "Screwballs", and not wince.
Similarly with the constant refrain of "It is now 16 or 17 years since the Queen of France. . .". The play is mired by flashbacks and exposition; characters consistently tell us more than we need to know; everything is made tediously explicit. Two scenes in particular jar: the hoary old cliche of reading a letter aloud; and the visit of Gar's relatives from the US, who appear as little more than a cipher for the vulgarity of wealth.
The split of Gar Public from Gar Private, brashly experimental in its day, now seems like little more than a device to allow Friel spell everything out. Though Sean Stewart and Marty Rea present a finely tuned double-act, the incessant banter between Public and Private is now more reminiscent of something on the Ryan Tubridy show than of a split between ego and id.
Alan Stanford's production for Second Age, aimed at school audiences, is uninspired but faithful. He marshals his cast well around Eileen Diss's literal set. Though the company is uneven, with some responding to the dated dialogue by hamming their performances, Aine Ni Mhuiri, Enda Oates and Andrew Adamson are particularly good.
There are strengths to the play, but its chief strength for students is now its weakness as drama: its conflicts are so glaringly obvious as to come with exam questions inbuilt: public and private; children and parents; poverty and wealth, etc. Today's Ireland is a restless place that couldn't give a curse about the past; this play is so firmly rooted at one point in that past that it has become an anachronism. Discuss.