Living Quarters
The Tobacco Factory, Bristol
4/5

ANY informed poll rating major modern playwrights would assuredly place Brian Friel very near the top.

All the more surprising then that currently his work is so infrequently staged. All the more praise then to Andrew Hilton’s Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory company for breaking the ice.

First performed at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1979, Living Quarters is less well known than what are now recognised as modern classics by Friel such as Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa. It’s one of his earlier treatments of the complexity of Irish society, history, politics and above all identity.

Like Anton Chekhov, with whom Friel is often compared, this is a domestic piece, with layered reverberations. Described by the playwright as “after Hippolytus” the play, like Euripides’s Greek tragedy, deals with betrayal and subsequent disaster.

But there the similarities largely end. While it’s true that the Greek play presents a world ruled by the iron control of the gods over man, here it is irrevocable human decisions that shape lives.

The Butler family have returned to the scene of familial disaster, where Commandant Frank Butler has returned a hero after five months service with the Irish army peacekeepers in the Middle East with the UN. While away, his new young wife has had a brief affair with his estranged son.

The structural tensions in the play arise from the action being relived through the memories of the family, memories rigidly controlled by Sir, “the ultimate arbiter,” who’s a kind of theatre director-cum-absolute headmaster, who insists they must keep to the “ledger” or script.

A uniformly strong cast are controlled by Christopher Bianchi’s benevolently menacing Sir, whose short absence allows the Butler family to relive moments of freedom from history through shared childhood memories.

Yet “out of some deep psychic necessity” they need regularly to rehearse the events of the fateful day in their minds, each questioning what they said or didn’t say and what they did or didn’t do that could have altered the final tragedy.

Director Andrew Hilton, completely at ease in the intimate, in-the-round space of his home venue, never falters in holding our attention in this portrayal of a claustrophobically close family cruelly forced to forego the comforting selectivity of personal memory and accept reality.

It is to be hoped that he will continue to explore more work by Ireland’s greatest living dramatist.

Runs until October 3, box office: tobaccofactorytheatres.com