The present, 1964
The home of County Councillor, S.B. O’Donnell, who owns a general shop in the small village of Ballybeg in County Donegal, Ireland.
The kitchen. It is sparsely and comfortlessly furnished. There are two doors; one left which leads to the shop, and one leading to the scullery. Beside the shop door is a large deal table, now set for tea without cloth and with rough cups and saucers. Beside the scullery door is an old-fashioned dresser. On the scullery wall is a large school-type clock.
Gar’s Bedroom is furnished with a single bed, a wash-hand basin (crockery jug and bowl), a table with a record-player and records, and a small chest of drawers.
On the night before, and on the morning of Gar’s departure for Philadelphia. The two Gars, PUBLIC GAR and PRIVATE GAR, are two views of the one man.
W G O’Doherty’s grocery shop in the Ulster American Folk Park, originally stood on Bishop Street in Derry. Brian Friel’s set drawing and notes on Gar’s Bedroom set
Black and white production photographs and programme
GAR: I’m going to Philadelphia, to work in an hotel. And you know why I’m going, Screwballs, don’t you? Because I’m twenty-five, and you treat me as if I was five.
GAR: D’you know something? If I had to spend another week in Ballybeg, I’d go off my bloody head! This place would drive anybody crazy! Look around you, for God’s sake! Look at Master Boyle! Look at my father! Look at the Canon! Look at the boys! Asylum cases, the whole bloody lot of them!
GAR: I’ve stuck around this hole far too long. I’m telling you: it’s a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end! And everybody in it goes crazy sooner or later! Everybody!
GAR: There’s nothing about Ballybeg that I don’t know already. I hate this place, and every stone, and every rock, and every piece of heather around it! Hate it! Hate it! And the sooner that plane whips me away, the better I’ll like it!
GAR: All this bloody yap about father and son and all this sentimental rubbish about ‘homeland’ and ‘birthplace’ – yap! Bloody yap! Impermanence – anonymity – that’s what I’m looking for; a vast restless place that doesn’t give a damn about the past. To hell with Ballybeg, that’s what I say!
GAR: She and old Screwballs off on a side-car to Bundoran for three days.
GAR: Snuffs from the exotic East… of Donegal.
GAR: Like the time I went to Lough Derg back in ‘35.
GAR: What ever happened to that aul boat on
Lough na Cloc Cor.
GAR: I’m getting the mail van the length of Strabane.
KATE: You know Baile Beag – Small Town.
GAR: From a place called Bailtefree beyond the mountains.
GAR: Charlie was talking about going to a dance in Ardmore
Objects from The Laurels – rosary beads and souvenir plates of the Kennedys
BRIAN FRIEL: I began Philadelphia in 1962 or ’63. It was a play about an area of Irish life that I had been closely associated with in County Donegal. Our neighbours and our friends there have all been affected by emigration, but I don’t think the play specifically concerns the questions of emigration. Philadelphia was an analysis of a kind of love: the love between a father and a son and between a son and his birthplace.¹
Philadelphia, Here I Come! Drafts of the play
BRIAN FRIEL: My father and I used to go fishing on the lakes near the village… But what I want to talk about now is a particular memory of a particular day. There’s no doubt in my mind about this – it’s here now before my eyes as I speak. The boy I see is about nine years old and my father would have been in his early forties. We are walking home from a lake with our fishing rods across our shoulders. It has been raining all day long; it is now late evening; and we are soaked to the skin. But for some reason – perhaps the fishing was good – I don’t remember – my father is in great spirits and is singing a song and I am singing it with him.
And there we are, the two of us, soaking wet, splashing along a muddy road that comes in at right angles to Glenties’ main street, singing about how my boat can safely float through the teeth of wind and weather. That’s the memory. That’s what happened. A trivial episode without importance to anyone but me, just a moment of happiness caught in an album. But wait. There’s something wrong here. I’m conscious of a dissonance, an unease. What is it? Yes, I know what it is: there is no lake along that muddy road. And since there is no lake my father and I never walked back from it in the rain with our rods across our shoulders. The fact is a fiction. Have I imagined the scene then? Or is it a composite of two or three different episodes? The point is – I don’t think it matters.
GAR: D’you know what kept coming into my mind the day
S.B: Eh?
GAR: The fishing we used to do on Lough na Cloc Cor.
S.B: Oh, aye, Lough na Cloc Cor — aye—aye—
GAR: We had a throw on it every Sunday during the season.
S.B: That’s not the day nor yesterday.
GAR: There used to be a blue boat on it — d’you remember it?
S.B: Many’s the fish we took of that same lake.
GAR: D’you remember the blue boat?
S.B: A blue one, eh?
GAR: …But d’you remember one afternoon in May — we were up there — the two of us — and it must have rained because you put your jacket round my shoulders, and gave me your hat —
S.B: Aye?
GAR: — and it wasn’t that we were talking or anything — but suddenly—suddenly you sang ‘All Round My Hat I’ll Wear a Green Coloured Ribbono’—
S.B: Me?
GAR: — for no reason at all except that we — that you were happy. D’you remember? D’you remember?
BRIAN FRIEL: So I packed my bags and with my wife and two children went to Minneapolis in Minnesota where a new theatre was being created by Tyrone Guthrie, and there I lived for six months… those months in America gave me a sense of liberation – remember, this was my first parole from inbred claustrophobic Ireland – and that sense of liberation conferred on me a valuable self-confidence and a necessary perspective so that the first play I wrote immediately after I came home, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, was a lot more assured than anything else I had attempted before.3
BRIAN FRIEL: You are never going to move people intellectually in the theatre. If there is one thing I learned from Tyrone Guthrie it’s that people at the theatre are moved by their stomachs.4
Tyrone Guthrie portrait; a selection of letters from Guthrie; letter from Friel to his publisher and press cutting of Tyrone Guthrie Theatre
Philadelphia, Here I Come! Drafts of the play
✭ Black and white production photographs with the original cast − Donal Donnelly, Patrick Bedford, Alex McDonald and Éamonn Kelly (1964).
✭ Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 28 Sep 1964 Programme for the production, directed by Hilton Edwards.
✭ Colour Photographs and poster of Philadelphia, Here I Come! Barnstorm Theatre Company 2022. Photographer Dylan Vaughan.
✭ Postcards of Donegal, Courtesy of Donegal County Museum
✭ Images of objects from The Laurels – rosary beads and plates, Donegal County Council Heritage Office.
✭ Announcement in The Derry Journal, Friday 21 July 1950, with thanks to Kate Drewitt.
✭ Tyrone Guthrie, Office of Information Photograph, 1950 in Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Programme, Photograph by H. Purkis, with thanks to Dr Charlotte Purkis.
✭ W G O’Doherty’s grocery shop in the Ulster American Folk Park, originally stood on Bishop Street in Derry. Photograph by Harriet Purkis
✭ Video Drama Cast, Courtesy of An Grianán Theatre and Workhouse Theatre Co
✭ Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) by Brian Friel (London: Faber & Faber) 1965, reprinted 1983
✭ Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) In Brian Friel: Plays One (London: Faber & Faber) 1996
✭ Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
✭ National Library of Ireland Collection List No. 73 BRIAN FRIEL PAPERS, MS 37,047 /1 Envelope labelled as follows by Friel: “First notes on ‘Philadelphia’
✭ National Library of Ireland Collection List No. 73 BRIAN FRIEL PAPERS, MS 37,048 /1 – 2 Letters to Friel from Tyrone Guthrie (2 Jan 1963 − 16 Oct 1964)
✭ National Library of Ireland Collection List No. 73 BRIAN FRIEL PAPERS, MS 37,047 /2 Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Holograph drafts of the play by Friel in hardback copybooks
✭ ¹In Interview with Des Hickey and Gus Smith (1972) in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews:1964-1999 London: Faber& Faber, 1999 p.47.
✭ ²&3Self-Portrait (1972) in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews :1964-1999 London: Faber& Faber, 1999 p.38 and p.42
✭ 4In Interview with Peter Lennon (1964) in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews:1964-1999 London : Faber& Faber, 1999 p.2.
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