Anne Friel on her late husband playwright Brian: ‘I was crazy about him. He was everything’

“I was happy. You know, you say you’re content, generally. Happy is a word we didn’t normally use. Because to be happy is something further than content. To be happy is a rarity.”

Anne Friel is remembering her birthday a couple of years after her husband, playwright Brian Friel, died on October 2nd, 2015, aged 86. Their children brought her on birthday trips, to Donegal’s Slieve League, to Lough Erne, to Dublin. “They gave me a great time. I came home on a high.” Her son David met her at the bus in Derry, brought her home to Greencastle in Donegal and settled her. Later, alone upstairs in her bedroom looking out on Lough Foyle, “I was starting to unpack. And the next minute, I looked sideways. And Brian was standing there. And I looked at him. Looking perfectly as he would. He said: ‘Welcome home.’ And he was gone. I just went back to my unpacking. That happened. I mean, it was astonishing. And it was so casual.”

The experience “left me thinking that he’s there, in that house. He’s not here.”

“Here” is her comfortable apartment in Milltown, Dublin, where we’re sitting as the June sun streams through open doors. They originally bought it as an investment in the 1980s (“I don’t think Brian ever stayed”, preferring hotels), and it’s more practical than living in Greencastle since she’s had a couple of falls. Besides, their three daughters Mary, Judy and Sally live in Dublin, while David’s in Greencastle. Their daughter Patricia (“Paddy”) died from cancer in 2012. She mentions Paddy regularly.

Anne will be 93 at the end of August but seems almost sprightly, despite using a walker. The room is full of Brian and their life together. On the wall two Basil Blackshaw paintings, of each of them. A New Yorker photograph she loves of himself; mischievous face, hand on hip. A photo she took of Mary and Paddy as children by the water in Minneapolis, where they lived when Brian was an “observer” with theatre director Tyrone Guthrie.

Today, Mary makes us tea, chats briefly and leaves, reminding her mother to mention the Brian Friel Trust (Mary’s on the board). It’s fundraising towards a Brian Friel centre in Glenties, restoring the courthouse as an interpretative centre and the Laurels, the family home of Brian’s mother, Mary McLoone, and her sisters, which is the real-life Dancing at Lughnasa house of the play’s Mundy sisters.

His widow would like to see it happen. “They’re hoping it’ll be finished next year. He’s buried in Glenties. Mary’s daughter recently got engaged, and they went up to the grave to tell Brian. It’s kind of quaint.” She is moved.

The Gate Theatre in Dublin has a new production of Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel’s exhilarating, heartbreaking memory play about the Mundy sisters in the fictional Ballybeg as recalled by their nephew Michael, in August 1936, as outside forces encroach on their world and life changes entirely.

She long considers what is her favourite play of Brian’s. “I find that very hard to answer. It’s easy to love Lughnasa, because you can just go with it.” Its Abbey Theatre premiere in 1990, directed by Patrick Mason, “was a wonderful production, stunning”. She reckons that “long before Riverdance ever happened, the wild dance they did to the wireless was really the beginnings of sending up what we used to call Irish dancing”.

She loved last year’s National Theatre production in London, singling out Ardal O’Hanlon’s performance as Fr Jack, the brother returned from the missions. “He interpreted in a different way. It put the balance on his strengths out in the leper colony and their culture, not our culture.”

Anne Friel knew some of Brian’s aunts, the McLoones, “very vaguely”.

She is still discovering new things about Lughnasa. At the National she realised the song playing very softly during the final speech was It Is Time to Say Goodnight. “A dance hall we used to go to on Friday nights when we were teenagers and growing up, that was the last song of the night.” She’s looking forward to seeing it again, but as always, “I’m so nervous that it be done properly.”

She’s connected. Friends and family call, she gets out and about. She’s just back from Belfast for a Heaney event at Queen’s. “I was there because of Marie [widow of Seamus] being a friend. It was a big, big do.” Another friend rings; they are playing bridge tonight, online. “We have an income from plays going on all over the world. I have no financial worries. I’m very, very lucky.”

Anne Friel is lively, chatty, with a bit of mischief about her. She talks about all sorts: family dynamics; Civil Rights marches in Derry and Bloody Sunday; the Field Day theatre company Friel founded with actor Stephen Rea, “such a passion”; her children and grandchildren.

She recalls the furore when an interview clip of Brian saying “I don’t have a Protestant friend in Derry,” was used several times in a mid-1960s BBC documentary, out of context (communities were separate in Derry, and he’d plenty of Protestant friends outside Derry).

Warm and funny, one could imagine her a formidable woman to cross, especially in protecting Brian’s legacy. “I was strong for supporting him. That was my motive in life. Like, I was crazy about him, absolutely. He was great fun. A great sense of humour. Brian was big into [the] Irish language, and if there’s a party anywhere, he would sing. Lovely tenor voice. He’d sing Mise Raifteirí an File as Gaeilge.”

Brian Friel was famously suspicious of directors. She giggles now at how he said they were like bus conductors (as in, once deemed necessary). She carries some of that too, saying some contemporary directors want to make their own mark, rather than following what he wrote. Brian’s veto passed to her, she says. She’s forthright about particular Friel productions, which she recalls in detail.

In one Lughnasa, the actors moving around the stage during the moving final speech were distracting, and “the whole speech was lost”; she’s glad a proposed international production didn’t happen as she feared the director would add nudity to “give it an extra dimension”. At the same time, several were “absolutely truthful to the script”.

She talks about the triumphs and disasters of his career; after a failure in New York “he was in bits. But within a year he’d written Translations. Where in under God had he that rumbling along? Whenever he came back from Minneapolis we went to west Donegal for the school holidays and he wrote Philadelphia, Here I Come! in two months. It was lift-off for his career, though it didn’t guarantee anything that followed. He was true to everything he did. I think Brian learned that whatever you’re doing, if you do it right, the audience will buy anything”.

She was glad The Loves of Cass Maguire didn’t take off in the US. “He was getting very uppity. ‘Philadelphia’ was a big success, still on Broadway. He was beginning to get more important. I could watch it. You were invited to everything. I wasn’t smug. Because I know if this works, I’m finished. He’d be gone. It’s just, everybody wants a part of you. And you respond to it. Anyway, it didn’t happen. So I was lucky.”

Born Anne Morrison, she is from Derry’s Waterside. There were many teachers in her family. Her mother was born in Glenties and her father was a draper from Sligo. The family was well off and she grew up in a house on the road to Strabane. “I could stand at my front door and look across the river [Foyle] and see Brian’s house on the other side” where he lived close to the Bogside. He played bridge with her brothers, and both families holidayed in Glenties, where she met him when she was 16. He was two years older, a student at St Patrick’s College Maynooth where he was a seminarian, so “it wasn’t possible at all. Like, he always wanted me to go out for a walk with him. There was no way I could have. In his black suit? His mother would have killed me! Anyway, I was only a youngster.”

She played piano – she still does – “and people would gather in the house. There was a sing song. That was his excuse to come over. He shouldn’t have his eye on any girl. He used to leave me notes and he put them under the cushion” she sat on.

He told her he was leaving Maynooth early, after two years and one term. He wasn’t leaving for her. “He must have fancied me but nothing was happening.” Anne Friel has always wondered, she tells me, what happened in Maynooth to determine his departure. “Normally people who are leaving – like, John Hume left because he knew he’d never be celibate – all stayed on till they got a degree.” The mystery remains. “He would never ever talk about Maynooth. In interviews later he said, that is closed.”

He did sit his finals and then trained as a teacher. He used to get a lift home to Derry from teaching. “He’d get off at my end of the bridge. I’d be coming from school. He would be waiting at the end of the bridge to walk me up the length of the gate up to the house.”

She did a degree in UCD and taught in a convent school in Derry, Thornhill. They married in 1954, and he started getting stories published.

She recalls him trying to make a living as a writer, after quitting teaching. The writer in gestation had to work at it; “it didn’t come naturally” and “he knew nothing about what was wanted”. The book Brian Friel: Beginnings by Kelly Matthews, launched this week, details these times. Anne laughs fondly about the fledgling writer. “I have so many love letters he wrote me. They’re trite. I’ve got to burn them.” Later, when he was a better writer, did the letters improve? “No, no, that all faded.”

Brian’s papers are in the National Library. But “I found four or five letters last time I was home, from Seamus Heaney to Brian and Anne. So they’re mine!”

It was a long marriage. She’s unsentimental and sanguine about the nature of changing love. “I adored him.” Did he adore you? “In the early days, I think yes. But maybe later on. In fact, I think I knew, whenever he wrote Lovers. I thought it was the saddest. Years later I realised he was telling his own story. That that crazy in-love doesn’t last.” In the 1967 two-parter Lovers: Winners and Losers, two teenage lovers die in Winners, and Losers is their story in middle-age, having lived. “And that was where he was at in his marriage. I didn’t see it at the time. But I realised it afterwards.

“It was enough for me to be in the room with him somewhere. I never had to stand beside him. I know it’s a different stage of love. I was crazy about him. He was everything. He was the best of fun.”

Dancing at Lughnasa previews at the Gate Theatre from July 12th, opens July 17th and runs until Sept 21st gatetheatre.ie

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