Summer, 1878
The Lodge, Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland. The home of Christopher Gore and his son David.
Breakfast room with couch, armchairs, bookshelves, sofas, antimacassars; zinc bucket and shovel for fire; tray of tea things. The French windows open onto the lawn.
The unkempt lawn in front of The Lodge. Table with measuring instruments for human skull, steel tape, sliding rule, record card, pencil.
The action takes place in the breakfast room and in front of The Lodge. A crescent of trees encloses the entire house and lawn. The house is approached by an avenue.
Poster, Programme and Letter from Friel to Patricia McBride. Photos of the production, 2009, by Paul McGuckin and Declan Doherty
DAVID: Just that I got a sense in the village recently – you felt it at the service today, too – just that everybody seems to be a bit… I don’t know… vigilant?…on edge?
DAVID: You know what the locals call us? The Lodgers.
CHRISTOPHER: Maybe he’s in cahoots with that gang that murdered poor old Lifford. Maybe they’re plotting out there already. Maybe the whole of Ballybeg is going to rise up.
CHRISTOPHER: The planter has to be resilient, hasn’t he? No home, no country, a life of isolation and resentment. So he has to resile. Just give me a little time. And that through the next generation and the next and the next. The doomed nexus of those who believe themselves the possessors and those who believe they’re the dispossessed. Am I forgiven?
SALLY: Con Doherty from Ballybeg. Snaring rabbits maybe.
MARGARET: He knows very well that’s not permitted on these lands.
SALLY: Sir, you’re hurting me!
RICHARD: Not a bit. Well-developed chin. Black hair. Complexion clear and ruddy. And you’ll find sight and hearing extraordinarily keen. In short – typical of the Celtic breed in Donegal. (He slaps her bottom in dismissal.) Back to the paddock.
PERKINS: You will maintain your position in line until you are summoned and then you will sit in an upright position in this seat… The instruments the doctor will use are as follows. Sliding rule. This is for measuring your span or fathom. You will stand upright – thus – feet together, arms extended to full length.
Photos of the production at An Grianán Theatre, 2009
DAVID: We’ll go to Derry next Saturday to buy some fencing posts, ho-ho-ho. We’ll get the boat there that night. And on Sunday morning there will be magnificent Glasgow.
TOMMY: Tommy Boyle – from out beside Lough Anna.
CHRISTOPHER: They could have got the length of Sligo.
SALLY: Just you and that queer bucko from Dungannon.
CHRISTOPHER: That’s why he spent three summers on the Aran Islands just measuring people’s heads.
The Murder of Lord Leitrim, The Pilot Newspaper, BOSTON, SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 1878
LORD LIFFORD: Character based on the 3rd Earl of Leitrim (1806-1878), assassinated in Donegal on 2nd April 1878.
MARGARET: The memorial service for Lord Lifford.
CHRISTOPHER: Frightened – terrified, for God’s sake: which one of us is next on the list?… He was going to oversee the eviction of one of his tenants…They shot his driver and then they dragged poor old Lifford out of the car and battered in his skull with a granite rock… And he must have put up a ferocious fight because in his right hand he had a clump of his attacker’s hair.
DR RICHARD GORE: Character based on Professor A.C. Haddon (1855-1940).
CHRISTOPHER: If I understand him at all, what the anthropologist does is study a people’s distinctive characteristics and then classify those characteristics according to their race.
PERKINS: I will lead you to the yard at the rear of the house and there I will take a photograph, or image on chemical paper, of each specimen. This photograph is in lieu of payment
PERKINS: Dr Cunningham’s craniometer. This – as the name implies – for measuring the cranium, or head; specifically, cranial height and auriculo-and alveolar-radii
EXTRACT: Appendix to The Home Place: ‘Studies in Irish Craniology: The Aran Islands, County Galway’, by Professor A.C. Haddon, read to the Royal Irish Academy, 12 December 1892. “We found that the promise of a copy of their photograph was usually a sufficient reward for undergoing the trouble of being measured and photographed… Lastly, we measured the cranial height and auriculo-nasal and alveolar radii with Dr Cunningham’s modification of Busk’s Craniometer, made by Robinson, Grafton Street, Dublin.”
A craniometer is used to measure the cranial length of a man in Inishbofin in 1893
BRIAN FRIEL: I used Tom Moore’s ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ in two plays because sixty years ago my father taught that song to his school choir which I was in and we won the cup at Omagh Feis and he was inordinately proud of us – and of himself. And for months afterwards he would line us up and start us off singing that Moore song.
Then he would leave the classroom and cross the school yard and go to the far side of the country road and just stand there – listening to us singing in harmony in the distance. And although I couldn’t see him standing there, I knew that we transported him. And I imagined that that may have been my earliest intimation of the power of music to move an audience.¹
SETTING: Suddenly, in the far distance, a school choir begins singing Thomas Moore’s ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’. The music, at first scarcely audible, then slowly increasing in volume, is in opulent three-part harmony. The ethereal, sophisticated singing in this unlikely setting is wondrous.
SALLY: Your da. He has the choir out in the playground. Do you hear them?
Oft, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around me;
The smiles, the tears,
Of boyhood’s years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes that shone,
Now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain hath bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
When I remember all
The friends, so link’d together,
I’ve seen around me fall,
Like leaves in wintry weather;
I feel like one
Who treads alone
Some banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed!
Thus, in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Sad memory brings the light
Of other days around me.
✭ The Home Place, 2009 An Grianán Theatre Programme, photographs and letter from Brian Friel to Patricia McBride, Courtesy of An Grianán Theatre. Photos by Paul McGuckin and Declan Doherty
✭ The Murder of Lord Leitrim, The Pilot Newspaper, BOSTON, SATURDAY, APRIL 20, 1878. Source: Pilot, Volume 41, Number 16 — 20 April 1878 — Boston College Newspapers (bc.edu)
✭ A craniometer is used to measure the cranial length of a man in Inishbofin in 1893. Photograph: CR Browne MS 10961 in John Burns Sat Nov 19 2022 The Irish Times
✭ The Home Place, Book Jacket, courtesy of The Gallery Press
✭ The Home Place, Gate Theatre programme
✭ Postcard of Fox Hall, Courtesy of Donegal County Museum
✭ The Home Place (2005) by Brian Friel (London: Faber & Faber) 2005
✭ Appendix in The Home Place (2005) by Brian Friel (London: Faber & Faber) 2005; extract from ‘Studies in Irish Craniology: The Aran Islands, County Galway’, by Professor A.C. Haddon, read to the Royal Irish Academy, 12 December 1892, P.81-83
✭ ¹Seven Notes for a Festival Programme (1999) in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews : 1964-1999. London: Faber& Faber, 1999, p.176.
✭ Oft, in the Stilly Night from Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44782/oft-in-the-stilly-night-scotch-air
✭ Oft in the stilly night, fox trot / The County Mayo Boys: Date Created 1931-09. Irish Traditional Music Archive 277334
An Action of the County Donegal Heritage Plan
© 2024 | Donegal County Council. All rights reserved.
