Background questions on “Philadelphia, Here I Come.

”
What nationality is the playwright?
Which country is he from?
When was the play first performed?
What is the situation of the play?
What is the setting and who are the main characters in Episode 1.
What is the initial mood of the play?
Which characters are in conflict and why?
What do we learn about the main character?

Techniques Friel uses: 2 characters to represent one person; flashback of Gar and Kate
What is the reason for two characters representing one person?
How effective is the use of the two characters?

Gar is a dreamer – he imagines how free life will be in America, how tempting and erotic.
He is unhappy at having to work for his father on his last day in Ireland.
He has fantasies about himself.
He still misses his mother and former girlfriend and feels inferior to her family.
He's bored with his father and his repetitive conversation.
He wants to shock his father.
Gar gives Master Boyle a pound and feels moved by his best wishes and advice to forget about
Ireland.
Eventually, he sings: Philadelphia, here I come.

The play was made into a movie?

Brian Friel (1929-2015) Born in Northern Ireland

His father was a schoolteacher and he became a teacher as well.

He taught maths for about 10 years in Londonderry, the second largest city in Northern Island, but
became tired of the political Unionist movement, and moved with his wife and children to Donegal,
a country area across the border in Southern Island. He wrote more than 30 plays and is considered
to be Ireland's most important modern playwright.

What moved audiences at Friel’s plays was their authenticity of atmosphere. They were
nearly all set in Ballybeg (from the Irish for “small town”, baile beag), a fictitious town in
County Donegal – at once part of the Irish Republic and also the “North”. Their rhythmic
dialogue, warmth of humour and sympathetic characters reflected the past and present
realities of Ireland without sentimentality or irony.

The son of a Catholic schoolmaster and a postmistress, Bernard Patrick Friel was born at
Killyclogher, Co Tyrone, on January 9 1929. His family moved to Londonderry in 1939
when his father was appointed teacher at the Long Tower School, where Brian was first
educated before attending St Columb’s College and St Patrick’s, Maynooth, the Catholic
seminary.
In 1963 Friel spent six months with the former Old Vic director Tyrone Guthrie at the new
Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis. When, the following year, Philadelphia, Here I Come! was
staged at the Dublin Theatre Festival by Hilton Edwards it heralded the arrival of an
important new Irish dramatist.

The play’s serio-comic portrait of a young Irishman pondering emigration to the United
States gave immediate delight because the protagonist was split into “private” and “public”
selves. This enabled two actors to form a sort of double-act, at once inside and outside the
action, and the author to deepen the characterisation.

The play transferred to Broadway in 1966, where it was nominated for a Tony Award; and,
although the same production was less successful in London, Friel’s name was made as a
playwright, not only for breaking with the homely stone cottage tradition of Irish kitchen
comedy but also for facing painful social realities like emigration and exile. It was made
into a film in 1975 – and was given a strong revival at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012,
proving that it had endured.

Friel’s third play, The Loves of Cass Maguire (1966), which was staged in New York before
Dublin, described with ironical humour the repatriation of an ageing Irish-American woman
whose family has forgotten all about her. Lovers (1967), seen at the Gate, Dublin, in 1967,
then New York and London, was a double-bill.

Friel was fascinated by the inadequacy of speech as a form of communication between

people, articulate or inarticulate, and he developed the theme convincingly in Crystal and
Fox (1968), which dealt with a travelling theatre agent. The Mundy Scheme (1969)
satirised Irish politicians and postulated the selling off of parcels of old Ireland to exiles
who might want to be buried there. After its Dublin opening the play moved to Los Angeles
and New York.

In the 1970s Friel began to come to theatrical terms with the Irish political scene. Gentle
Island (1971), ironically titled, evoked a depopulated rural Ireland riven by animosity,
resentment and intolerance. The Freedom of the City (1973), first acted at the Royal Court,
then in New York, concerned the fate of three protesters wrongfully killed in the wake of a
Civil Rights meeting; it was evidently a response to the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre,
which Friel had got caught up in himself as a demonstrator. Volunteers (1975) addressed
the violence of Ireland past and present through the device of an archaeological dig, an
activity for which a number of IRA prisoners have volunteered, putting themselves at risk
from their fellow inmates.

(Reference-https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11906444/Brian-Friel-playwright-
obituary.html)
A shy and reclusive man, Friel rarely makes public statements. A quote from his own Self
Portrait however perhaps sheds some light on the true character of modern Ireland's leading
playwright.

'I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a
lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between
now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the
end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment.'
(Reference: http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/literature/brian-friel)

Ireland had been part of the UK, but Nationalist supporters in the south of the country sought
independence. In 1922, the Britsih government passed the Anglo-Irish Act which gave Ireland the
right of Independence from the U.K. However, a small group of counties in the north-east of the
country, known as Unionists, voted to stay in the U.K. This divided Ireland into two countries and
also created a religious division between the Protestants and the Catholics, which have been divided
in Britain for hundreds of years. The fighting, known as The Troubles, between the Nationalists and
Unionists lasted between 1969 – 1998, and occurred mainly in Northern Ireland where the smaller
Catholic population felt threatened by Protestants. The fighting was not a full-scale war between
armies, but a gorilla war between small groups of supporters, and at times the British army who had
to patrol the streets of Belfast (the capital city of Northern Ireland) for years. It was particularly
violent and brutal, and a poor reflection on Irish people who were prejudiced, stubborn and intent
on revenge for personal grievances. In the end, the British government managed to get the two
groups to reach a peaceful settlement that stated the country could be united when the people in
Northern Ireland accepted the proposal. It has not happened yet.

The Titanic ship was built in Belfast in 1911 and sank on its first voyage in 1912 when it hit an
iceberg in the North Atlantic ocean. 1500 passengers of about 2,200 died in the sinking.

Ireland was a relatively poor country and many Irish people escaped unemployment, poverty and
starvation to realise the American Dream of freedom and prosperity. Many migrants were farmers
or labourers and were divided by their religions of Protestantism and Catholicism, and so did not
mix in America. But they have made quite an impact in America.

They set up their own communities and Kansas City in the state of Missouri and on the border of
the state of Kansas was built by the Irish. They are still a very nationalistic race and there have been
many notable Irish writers and singers, perhaps because of the hardship they experienced and the
fact that so many left their country to find a better life overseas.

Today about 33 million people in America call themselves Irish which is over 10% of the U.S.
Population and over 5 times the population in all of Ireland.