Keynote event of gathering marked by lyrical homage to author, writes Rosita Bolandin Glenties
"A CATECHISM of Friel," is how Séamus Heaney last night described his tribute to his old friend Brian Friel at the keynote event of the 28th MacGill Summer School.
A Feast of Friel: the Life and Work of Brian Friel, is the subject of this year's school. Heaney's speech took the form of a word-game: perhaps the most apt tribute that one famous writer can give to another.
In the packed ballroom of the Highlands Hotel, to a rapt audience which included the playwright, Heaney gradually spelt out the letters of Brian Friel's name, giving each one a personalised meaning that reflected important elements of the playwright's life.
B, he said, was for Ballybeg, the fictional Donegal setting for many Friel plays, including Dancing at Lughnasa, and often assumed to be based on Glenties itself. "Ballybeg, the hub of his imagined world . . . a place where the soul has no hiding place." B was also for Broadway, where many of his plays had gone on to be staged. R was for the risk he took in deciding to write full-time. I for integrity, "a quality which distinguishes Brian as a person and as an artist."
A stood first for Anne, his wife of 54 years, "his first base, his second sight. His A, but equally his Z, his Zest", Heaney declared, a line which prompted a round of applause. A was also for the Abbey Theatre and the actors who were integral to the staging of his work.
N was for "a very important word in the Friel vocabulary - no! 'No' to the cult of self-promotion". This referred to the fact that Friel, a highly private man, rarely gives interviews.
F stood for family, both Friel's own, and the memorable families that populate his plays, and for Field Day Theatre Company.
R, Heaney explained, was for the reveries that Friel's work inspires in audiences: that response that allows people to explore dimensions beyond their own lives; the rhythm that induces contemplation. I for Inishowen, where Friel's home is located; as well as intimacies and irony, both recurring themes in the plays, such as Translations. E stood for exile and emigration, and also, Heaney joked playfully, for those characters in the plays, such as Gar, in Philadelphia, Here I Come!who are "acting the eejit".
Finally, L was for love, the prominent theme, and a quality central to the lives of every character Friel created.
"And L is also for letters," Heaney continued. When Death of a Naturalist, Heaney's first book was published in 1966, Friel sent him a letter of congratulation.
There were other letters too. Another arrived to his Wicklow house in 1974, with the as-yet staged script of Volunteers. In response, Heaney gathered up the poems he had been working on, his bog poems, and "spent that Saturday and Sunday typing them up. When I was finished, I thought, maybe there's enough here for a book. So I sent one copy to Brian on the Monday and the other to Faber."
The book that resulted was North.