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Two Plays After
Brian Friel

    Two Plays After is the latest in a series of productions at the Gate, including Bash and Three Plays, in which interlinked short works substitute for fully realized three or five act plays. Brian Friel’s contribution to Three Plays was an adaptation of Anton Chekov’s story "Lady with a Little Dog" entitled The Yalta Game. It was by far the best received, certainly the one which aroused the most excitement among those who saw it either at the Dublin Theatre Festival or during its subsequent run at the Gate itself. Two Plays After is the inevitable result: a double-bill presenting Friel’s adaptation of The Bear, one of Chekov’s seriocomic farces written early in his career, and then Afterplay, an original work inspired by Chekov and making use of characters and story elements from Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya.
    There are congruencies between the theatre of Friel and that of Chekov. Both are concerned with a world in which memory and reflection are in a state of conscious interplay with immediate reality, where perceptions of the world are tempered by half-realized truths and (often frustrated) visions of the ideal. Both have a mixture of humor and tragedy in which one is often a sublimated version of the other, and both present stories driven less by the urgency of narrative as by a more meditative, deconstructive engagement with the moment's realization.
    Arguably these are traits and concerns shared by many playwrights, but as Richard Pine notes in the program for Two Plays After, there is a connection between these worlds on the level of national consciousness. He says that: "Friel brings ‘Russian’ themes into close proximity with themes which have preoccupied the modern Irish stage: people who live far away from reality; hopes that are more depressing than inspiring; a lifetime’s experience of emptiness, of longing, of deferral; action (the real world) always taking place elsewhere." Though it may seem that Ireland’s greatest living playwright has divorced himself from his country with his recent preference for adaptation, he is, of course, immersed in a sensibility which informs his practice and his art and is infused in his linguistic concerns.
    The Bear is a more or less straight adaptation of the original, first staged in 1888. The story takes place in the home of an affluent Russian widow which is invaded by a boorish creditor. Sparks fly between them leading, inevitably, to farcical, satiric romance. Though easily dismissed as vacuous fluff (as if often was by Chekov himself), this is a neatly mounted story of characters trapped in a cycle of irrational self-destruction. Stephen Brennan’s blustering bully falls head over heels in love for the umpteenth time, utterly convinced that this time will be different when it is blatantly obvious that it will not, while Flora Montgomery’s widow finds herself irresistibly drawn to a man so like her husband and so destined to disappoint her equally as much that everyone apart from her can see it will only end in tears. The scenario is played for laughs however, and comes complete with a comic butler played by Éamon Morrissey.
    Afterplay is a more complex elaboration of themes seen in embryonic form in The Bear but which received fuller treatment in Chekov’s later works. It is the story of an encounter between two people in a run-down cafe in 1920s Moscow. One is a woman charged with the running of a huge country estate which has been redesignated by banks and local Government, the other is a lonely musician from a remote part of the new Soviet Union. The twist, if the term is appropriate is that she is Sonya Serebriakova (portrayed by Penelope Wilton), whose misguided but much loved uncle was the subject of Uncle Vanya and he is Andrey Prozorov (portrayed by John Hurt), the ‘effervescent’ brother of the Three Sisters whose lives Chekov documented in 1901.
    It may sound like an uncomfortably indulgent bit of theatrical self-reference, but the presentation of these characters is anything but a gimmick. Friel draws these two lonely individuals from the fringes of stories whose moments have passed into memory and gives them a moment of contact all of their own. There are clever references to Chekov’s plays and characters, yes.  Sonya dispenses advice to Andrey which might well have saved the life of his suicidal sister in that play while Andrey offers Sonya a life which might resolve her own unrequited love for her stepmother’s second husband. But the play is itself a delicately written and subtle exploration of the threads of memory, dreams, and life experiences which is both of Chekov and of Friel. It is also involving, moving, and entirely universal.
    The play is about the evolution of a relationship between two people. It depicts how their understanding of one another is affected by layers of accidental and deliberate deception, accidental sometimes insofar as they are deceiving themselves, deliberate insofar as Andrey in particular admits to constructing ‘fictions’ or ‘fables’ which aggrandize the story of his life. Both of them have emerged from the shadow of a story which is bigger than they are, and, as if aware that they have been pushed to the fringe, they have a need to create something more interesting for themselves. The irony is, of course, that in exploring one another and gradually revealing more of their inner truths to one another (in very different ways), they have contributed to a discursive narrative on the nature of human self-definition and told a story as powerful and meaningful as those they have missed out on.
    In a warm, touching, and very gentle way, Friel draws the audience into the rhythms of these people’s lives. His dialogue is rich with observation and comment on memory, family, home, loss, absence, and desperation. It is tender with these people, yet strong enough to offer them no easy answers. Instead as it begins with a suggestion of a narrative which began before the play did so it ends with the promise that the story (and these characters’ lives) will continue. The play itself becomes an incomplete reflection which still inspires thought and contemplation.
    Afterplay is brilliantly acted by Wilton and Hurt. Their subtlety in control of voice and gesture perfectly represents the complexities of the dialogue. Small movements of the hands and eyes communicate much we need to understand about these characters. Hurt’s respectful, slightly inferior manner speaks of his great inner needs in spite of his tuxedo, and Wilton’s oscillation between cheerful expressions and a taught, controlled demeanor speaks also of a deep longing for a connection which may or may not be with something we are about to see on stage. Every moment seems charged with potential meaning, and the interpretation of that meaning may depend as much on whether these stories are ‘fables’ or ‘fictions’ (the characters virtually tell us as much on several occasions) as anything suggested by the setting.

    Dublin, March 5, 2002                                                                          - Harvey O'Brien