At age 79, Brian Friel still is dramatizing Irish history, still pondering the antagonistic interdependency with the English, still writing darn good plays about the gulf between cold political absolutes and hot, human muddles.
Friel’s fascinating latest work, “The Home Place,” isn’t a soft-focus memory drama in the accessible style of “Dancing at Lughnasa,” his most famous work. But this fine latest play is a strangely wise, melancholic and compassionate drama that’s directly concerned with the so-called Anglo-Irish in the 1920s, but also brings to mind post-colonial literature, modern battles over immigration and even the contemporary Middle East.
“The Home Place” is a play about two great and contradictory biological impulses — the desire to invade and the desire to protect your home.
And it’s a play that understands that one man’s egregious, occupying force is another man’s rightful settler with claims on a new homeland. More interesting yet, Friel knows that religious hatred or nationalistic fervor rarely prevents human intimacy from flourishing around its edges. Occupiers fall in love with the occupied. Decent people oppress. Freedom fighters aren’t always pure. Most people just try to get by without getting shot.
Friel gets at all this stuff by showing us one Christopher Gore (Simon Jones), an unmarried father and Anglo-Protestant who has lived his life in an ancestral big house in County Donegal, trying to be a kinder, gentler landlord to the impoverished Catholic peasants who surround him. He can’t make that work, of course, as is all too clear when one of his English cousins shows up, an obnoxious anthropologist who views the Irish as little more than savages. Gore eventually kicks his relative out, but it leaves his home and family in a muddle akin to the one famously described by E.M. Forster in “A Passage to India.”
After all, you can’t entirely kick out a part of yourself.
And there is a young woman in the middle of all this — a practical Irish girl who has grown fond of the Gores, both father and his son. Margaret O’Donnell (played by the superb Sarah Agnew) has landed somewhere between their protective surrogate mother and a potential lover for either (or both) of the men who adore her Irish self. So she’s in a tricky spot too.
Joe Dowling and the Guthrie Theater — a longtime sympathetic American home for Friel’s work — landed the U.S. premiere after negotiations with the Roundabout Theatre for a Broadway production apparently fell through. It is a traditional piece of direction that builds as slowly as the play, a pace typified by an act curtain that rises and falls in almost funeral fashion. Frank Hallinan Flood’s remarkable set literally blooms with realism — an entire forest seems to grow on the stage, replete with invasive sycamores from across the Irish Sea.
But you come to see that Dowling and his cast are intensely in sync with the rhythms of the play. In particular, Jones offers a very moving portrait of a reluctant occupier, ripped apart by partial affinity yet abiding difference.
By the end of the play, Agnew’s Irish character is in exactly the same bind. Whatever she chooses to do with or without either of the Gores, she’ll always be caught in the middle of something, somewhere. She can’t ever really belong.
Such are the human costs of our species’ great love of intrusion and our crippling fear of the other.
“The Home Place” plays through Nov. 25 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Call 612-225-6000.
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cjones5@tribune.com
