Sunday Business Post Review Philadelphia, Here I Come!

As mentioned in my previous post three reviews of the production Philadelphia, Here I Come! have been published today. Only two can be found on line, but I shall scan the Irish Mail on Sundays review and make it available here tomorrrow. Sara Keating's positively titled "New Raw Edges to Friel's play" can be found here...

Theatre: New raw edge to Friel’s play

11 November 2007 By Sara Keating

Philadelphia Here I Come! By Brian Friel, Nationwide tour

When it was first performed in 1964, Philadelphia Here I Come! was a radical piece of theatre. Not merely did it cut to the quick of an Irish society ravaged by mass emigration, but it put the psychological conflict engendered by an environment of economic and emotional poverty on the stage in the shape of two separate characters, Private Gar and Public Gar.Each character represents the divided mind of a man on the eve of his departure from his homeland. This sort of cultural schizophrenia became the dominant theme in the work of Irish writers for the next 20 years.
Ireland has changed profoundly since then. The Gar O’Donnells of the world have returned home to work with Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Chinese. Small towns have mushroomed.Communities have individualised. The church has lost its influence over the structure of people’s lives.So what could a play like Philadelphia Here I Come! possibly mean to an audience 43 years after it was written? Second Age Theatre’s solid production of Brian Friel’s play answers this question by performing Philadelphia as a period piece. Eileen Diss provides a naturalistic re-creation of the play’s small country kitchen set. Leonore McDonagh’s brown costumes err on the side of conservative 1960s fashion, while Sinead McKenna’s ochre lighting design evokes the sepia-toned sense of photographs fading and time gone by. In light of the play’s presence on the Leaving Certificate 2008 curriculum and the company’s status with school audiences, director Alan Stanford might be accused of playing it safe. But, with the play so embedded in a particular moment in Irish history, the backward glance effect was inevitable.In fact, it is to Stanford’s credit that he manages to find a raw edge to the play, largely through his performers. Marty Rea’s Private Gar, in particular, is superb as the repressed alter ego. With his manic energy, perfect mimicry and tense rangy physicality, Rea is like a tightly-wound metal coil about to be sprung. Sean Stewart, meanwhile, plays the 25-year-old Public Gar with spot-on sulky adolescence.Between them, they find a way to ensure that the play engages on an emotional as well as an historical level. But as Gar himself knows well, history is inescapable: ‘‘The longest way round is the fastest way home.”

Rating ***

Philadelphia Here I Come! continues at the Helix Theatre, Dublin (until November 16); Everyman Palace, Cork (November 20 & 22-23) and Pavilion Theatre, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin (November 29–December 1)

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Sunday Times Reviews Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Today three more reviews have been published via the Sunday Papers; namely the Sunday Business Post, The Irish Mail on Sunday, and the Sunday Times. All 3 are uniformly positive, but it is Declan Burkes review in the Sunday Times, that strikes me as particularly pertinent. Colin Murphy of the Sunday Tribune struggled to find the contemporary relevance of the play, and here Declan Burke, highlights the relationships within the play are as resonant today as they were in 1960's Ireland.

Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Emigration is no longer the unavoidable exile for many that it was when Brian Friel's play was first produced in 1964, but a young man's inability to connect emotionally with his family is as relevant as ever. Gar Public (Sean Stewart) - goaded by his conscience, Gar Private (Marty Rea) struggles to establish meaningful relationships, especially with his father, SB O'Donnell (Walter McMonagle), on the eve of his departure to America. In a production aimed primarily at Leaving Certificate students, the director, Alan Stanford, at first emphasises the more accessible elements of the knockabout humour between Public and Private Gar. Rea and Stewart are excellent, with Rea superb at segueing from clowning to the gravitas required for the poignant finale. Aine Ni Mhuiri underplays her role as Madge, the maternal figure the motherless Gar craves, and in this relationship Gar's tragedy has its most telling contemporary resonance for young Irish Men.

Declan Burke

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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.

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Sunday Independent - Review Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Emer O'Kelly of the Sunday Independent is one of the latest reviews to be published. To date all of the reviews have been uniformly good, and there is not much quarrel over the quality of this production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! ALAN STANFORD'S latest production for Second Age is Philadelphia, Here I Come! and a solid, competent, straightforward one it is. This is in no way pejorative, since the company's work is aimed mainly at schools audiences, and for teenagers seeing their first Friel come alive on stage, this is the way to do it.
Three of the cast re-create the roles they played in Adri­an Dunbar's production for ART NI several years ago, notably Marty Rea as Gar Private.
The others are Walter McMonagle as SB O'Donnell, and Conan Sweeney as Ned, the vainglorious "lad" from the town. All three have a fine edge, and Rea comes close to being superb as he postures, scampers, and mocks his own broken heart through Gar's last night in Ballybeg before he heads for Philadelphia and the doubtful joys of being the pampered and smothered son Aunt Lizzie never had.
It's 1964, and it will be a long time before he sees any­one again, whether it be the loving housekeeper Madge, or his faithless sweetheart Kate Doogan in her fine feathers as the local doctor's wife.
One of the joys of such a straightforward production is the recognition it gives to the exquisite writing, with every character drawn in fine lines that scream the agony of emo­tional nerve-ends stripped and put on display. And of course, the nerve ends between Gar and his father are a silent scream: "It's the silence that's the enemy," as Private franti­cally tells Public, urging him to the confidence of admitting need: for love, for memory, for hope. And no matter how often you have seen the play, the memories the father and son try to evoke, each living in a separate dappled past, break your heart anew.
Sean Stewart is an extremely good Public, and Aine Ni Mhuiri a good if somewhat pianissimo Madge. The cameos are almost uniformly good also, from Dearbhla McGuinness as Kate, David Heap as her father, Enda Oates as Master Boyle, John Olohan as the Canon, and Donncha Crowley and Dan Reardon as Uncle Con Sweeney and Ben Burton. Joan Sheehy, however, seems to be aiming for suppressed refinement as Aunt Lizzie when unrestrained vulgarity should be the order of the day. Roger Thomson and Andrew Adamson complete the cast, with set design by Eileen Diss and costumes by Leonore McDonagh: both are absolutely in tune.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! is at the Helix in Dublin and tours to the Everyman in Cork and the Pavilion, Dun Laoghaire.

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Two Four Star Reviews Published Today

Both the Irish Daily Mail and Metro Ireland gave the production Philadelphia Here I Come four Star reviews today. John McKeowns verdict was that it was "Elegantly Staged and Paced, with Quality Acting" and Darragh Reddin of Metro Ireland described it as a "Blistering Production"

Click on the press cutting image to view the press cutting in full size

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Irish Times Review by Peter Crawley

Peter Crawley reviewed the Show for the Irish Times on Tuesday night and it's clear he enjoyed the show read the full review here....

Philadelphia, Here I Come! The Helix, Dublin
It would be a bold experiment, and not one that an audience might voluntarily pay to witness, to have Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come! performed without one essential character - Gar Private. This might strike you as complete folly, like staging Hamlet without the prince. Or, given that the onstage embodiment of an internal voice was such a bold experiment to begin with, a reactionary response coming several decades too late.
But, in his frenetic routine of commentaries, interjections, vibrant fantasies, comic accents and acerbic piss-takes, Gar Private is a rebel against silence. In fact, he fills that silence of his suffocating home in Ballybeg to such a degree that in Second Age's crisp, clear production of Friel's first play, it's easy to overlook the ache of silence that might split a young man in two, to feel those excruciating stretches.
Not that you would want Marty Rea, an actor of bracing versatility and striking focus, to take the night off. Dressed as neatly as a job applicant, his Gar Private is otherworldly, certainly, but no rampaging id. In fact, as Sean Stewart's Gar Public literally makes a song and dance about fleeing for America in the morning, it's his alter ego who comes across as the restraining influence. "You know what you're doing," warns Private, essentially summarising the play. "Collecting memories and images and impressions that are going to make you bloody miserable." Director Alan Stanford works this double act smoothly, although Private, who can sometimes seem to be more in charge of the play than his author, will always run off with the show. His sardonic, caustic wit - the humour of an imagination frustrated by routine - is one that may resonate with the company's intended school audiences.
There is, from the design to the performance, a great clarity in this production - even in the well-enunciated lines of Áine Ní Mhuirí's quietly tragic housekeeper Madge that might have worked better muttered - but not much that surprises. That may be the consequence of the play's strange journey from a radical to canonical work; less the fault of a faithful production than of the sanction of the syllabus.
There is no use pining for the formal shock of 1964, however, and watching the play today you see a revealing picture of Ireland then, from the penitential posture of the rosary to the empty promise of America with its air-conditioned cars and snowy Christmases.
There may be little embellishment in this production, but there is at least no barrier between us and the play. It still has the capacity to move, nowhere more so than in the quietly significant exchange between Walter McGonagle's tamped-down patriarch SB O'Donnell and John Olohan's absent Canon O'Byrne. Silence is the enemy, urges Private, and that's true enough; but Friel also knew that sometimes it can speak volumes.
Until Nov 16 at The Helix, then The Everyman Palace Nov 20-23, and the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire 29 Nov 29 - Dec 1
- Peter Crawley

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