Philadelphia Here I Come!

It’s a real pleasure to see this play again. Such is the quality of Friel’s writing and his theatrical vision that it still resonates with a sense of freshness and immediacy as it delves deep beneath the surface of 1960s rural village life, finding both a delicious humour and a tragic irony in the longing to escape and the aching need to stay. This is a pretty straightforward interpretation, a classic production you might say – director Dominic Dromgoole doesn’t take any risks, but then he doesn’t have to, the playwright has already done it all with his potent device of splitting the main protagonist into two separate individuals, public and private, and thereby allowing the voicing of all those chaotic inner thoughts and feelings. And while the long shadow of emigration creates obvious parallels, the real impetus here is the painful lack of communication and real human contact that casts the characters adrift – the taciturn father, the sharp-tongued housekeeper, the loquacious aunt from America, and that perfect set-piece, The Boys, forever stuck in the bravado of adolescence.

I wasn’t entirely mad about the set, which although perfectly adequate, cuts the height of the Gaiety stage in two, boxing it in with a pastiche of pastel – perhaps as a suggestion of claustrophobia. But the acting is terrific, with Tom Vaughan Lawlor leading the fray as Gar Private, weaving in and out of the action with a remarkable display of mental and physical agility. Until Sat 10 April www.gaietytheatre.com