Living Quarters Review

It's always going to be interesting when the early work of an established dramatist is revived - or, in the case of 'Living Quarters' - given a belated U. K. premiere. As if, encountering an overlooked painting in a retrospective exhibition, both later themes and early influences stand out more clearly and boldly.

With Friel, we are unsurprisingly back in Ballybeg, his (necessarily) loosely imagined Donegal township and surroundings; this time not in the company of his teenaged 'Winners' or the surveying soldiery of 'Translations', but with three sisters, their hearts set not on Moscow (although Dublin is mentioned), but apparently intent on the welcome of their father, lauded with hyperboles as a result of courage under fire.

The forces surrounding Commandant Frank Butler (Ron Donnachie) at home are considerable, while Stuart McGugan ('Sir') provides a firm hand in propelling events to their conclusion. Although the influences on 'Living Quarters' are paraded as clearly as the Irish tricolours decorating the staircase of Michael Taylor's inventive set, Friel brings his considerable powers to bear on a meditation on our ability (or inability) to re-tell our own story, elide over what's not comfortable and somehow patch over the gaps in between. Bit like doing history, really...

Friel's sensitivity to the past as a perpetually unrecovered (and unrecoverable) country has made him one of the most performed and admired of Ireland's current playwrights, speaking, it would seem, both for and about a country in constant change which cannot completely escape a past it fears to fully confront. The similar difficulties of other communities make Friel both an eminently exportable commodity and spokesperson of the perpetually regretful.

Regret washes around Commandant Butler's quarters as whiskey in the bottom of the glass of his friend Father Tom Carty (Gary Lilburn). Whether we are watching the Commandant's young second wife Anna (Katie McGuiness) squirm in guilt over her brief affair with his son, Ben (Ifan Meredith), his daughter Helen (Irene Allan) bemoan her parent's opposition to her doomed marriage, or Ben himself try despairingly to heal the breach between himself and his father, regrets, stated or otherwise, strain and stain the hero's welcome.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the two characters least directly involved in the events that unfold have the most resentments about their parts in it. Yet even in their selfishness, they remain the two characters truest to themselves

'Living Quarters' isn't so much 'vintage' Brian Friel as a fascinating examination of themes which have occupied dramatists from the days of Epidauros to the emergence of Twin Peaks and will always continue to do so.

Bill Dunlop, October 2007

Published on EdinburghGuide.com 2007