Summer, mid-1970s
Ballybeg Hall, the home of District Judge O’Donnell, a large and decaying house overlooking the village of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland
A small room – the study – occupies upstage right. One step up into it from the lawn. A huge marble fireplace; in front of the fireplace is a chaise-longue. In this study: a small table, an early Victorian writing desk and sufficient furnishings to indicate when the Hall flourished and to suggest its present decline.
Most of the action takes place outside the south side of the house. Most recently it was a lawn that has not been cared for in years. Before that it was a grass tennis court and before that a croquet lawn – but no trace of these activities remain. Outside: A gazebo made of wood, with a pagoda roof and badly weather-beaten. A rusty iron seat inside. A broken sundial mounted on a stone plinth.
CASIMIR: When I think of Ballybeg Hall it’s always like this: the sun is shining; the doors and windows are open; the place filled with music.
CASIMIR: Father would have been so pleased by that funeral today – no, not pleased – gratified. The packed chapel; the music; that young curate’s fine, generous panegyric and he didn’t know father at all, Judith says. Then down through the village street – his village, his Ballybeg – that’s how he thought of it, you know, and in a sense it was his village. Did you know that it used to be called O’Donnellstown? Yes, years and years ago…. Every shop shut and every blind drawn; and men kneeling on their caps as the hearse passed.
EAMON: Ballybeg Hall – From Supreme Court to Sausage Factory; four generations of a great Irish Catholic legal dynasty; the gripping saga of a family that lived its life in total isolation in a gaunt Georgian house on top a hill above the remote Donegal village of Ballybeg.
EAMON: What you’re saying is that after Claire’s wedding – if you can wait that length – you’re going to turn the key in the door and abandon Ballybeg Hall?… You know what will happen, don’t you? The moment you’ve left the thugs from the village will move in and loot and ravage the place within a couple of hours.
TOM: What was your father’s attitude?
ALICE: To Eamon?
TOM: To the civil rights campaign.
ALICE: He opposed it. No, that’s not accurate. He was indifferent: that was across the Border – away in the North.
TOM: Only twenty miles away
ALICE: Politics never interested him. Politics are vulgar.
TOM: And Judith? What was her attitude? Was she engaged?
TOM: She took part in the Battle of the Bogside.
ALICE: Very smart. Did you get it in Derry?
EAMON: Nora cleared off with a British soldier stationed in Derry
EAMON: Remember dancing to that in the Corinthian in Derry?
CASIMIR: Shhhh. Yes, Mrs Moore? Sorry, sorry? Yes-yes-yes – of course – thank you – thank you. (He hangs up.) Something wrong with the lines. Can’t even get the Letterkenny exchange.
ALICE: All set, then. Where’ll we go? Glencolmcille!
JUDITH: Willie has a mobile home just outside Bundoran.
31 August 1976
Throughout the summer there were faint signals of a very long, very slow-moving, very verbose play; a family saga of three generations; articulate people wondering about themselves and ferreting into concepts of Irishness. Religion, politics, money, position, marriages, revolts, affairs, love, loyalty, disaffection.
1 September 1976
The play that is visiting me brings with it each time an odour of musk – incipient decay, an era wilted, people confused and nervous.
EXTRACT: The ground rose rapidly in a tangle of shrubs and wild rhododendron and decaying trees, through which the avenue crawled up to the Foundry House at the top of the hill…
But here in Foundry House, a modesty, a shyness, a vague deference to something long ago did not allow his eyes to even roam from the work he was engaged in. Yet he was conscious of certain aspects of the room; the ceiling was high, perhaps as high as the roof of his own house, the fireplace was of black marble, the door handle was of cut glass, and the door itself did not close properly…
Then his father appeared. First a stick, then a hand, and arm, the curve of his stomach, then the beard, yellow and untidy, then the whole man. Since his return to the gate lodge, Joe had not thought of Mr. Bernard beyond the fact that he was there. In his mind there was a twenty-year old image that had never been adjusted, a picture so familiar to him that he had long ceased to look at it.
Notebook and page of drafts of the play by Friel
The Judas Hole
Ah, Europe!
The Quality
A Party In Vienna
Next Summer In Hamburg
Gentry
Gentle Birth & Breeding
50 Years Of Europe
A Cycle Of Cathay
The Party In Vienna
Aristocrats
15 December 1976
A persistent sense that the play is about three ageing sisters.
17 December 1976
But the one constant is Judith who is holding on to late young-womanhood, who has brothers and sisters, and who misses/has nursed an old father. THE JUDAS HOLE?
2 June 1977
What makes Chekhov accessible to so many different people for 180 years is his suggestion of sadness, of familiar melancholy, despite his false/cunning designation ‘Comedies’.
19 May 1978
The play completed and christened ARISTOCRATS
To Katharine (Houghton) Hepburn
✭ Aristocrats by Brian Friel, Book Jacket, courtesy of The Gallery Press
✭ Postcards of Donegal, Courtesy of Donegal County Museum
✭ Poster and images of Performance and programme, with kind permission An Grianán Theatre, Letterkenny, County Donegal.
✭ Aristocrats (1979) by Brian Friel, in Brian Friel Collected Plays 2 (County Meath: Gallery Books) 2016
✭ Brian Friel, Extracts from a Sporadic Diary (1976-78): Aristocrats, in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999. London: Faber& Faber, 1999, pp.63-69
✭ Brian Friel, (1961) ‘Foundry House’ in Selected Stories: Brian Friel (1979) Dublin: Gallery Press
✭ Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
National Library of Ireland Collection List No. 73 BRIAN FRIEL PAPERS, MS 37,081/3
An Action of the County Donegal Heritage Plan
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