HUCKLEBERRY

We are honoured to present Brian Friel’s play Lovers (Winners and Losers) as part of our celebration of fifty years of the Lyric Theatre on Ridgeway Street.

In 1968 the French director Jean Vilar, creator of the Avignon Festival, asked “Why is it always the women who resurrect the theatre in England?” He was referring to the dynamic Joan Littlewood, whose Theatre Workshop challenged notions of what theatre was and who it was for in post-war Britain. Her sense of a popular theatre for all chimed with Vilar’s own achievements in France. But it could have also referred to the equally dynamic and resourceful Mary O’Malley, who travelled up from Cork and transformed the cultural map of Belfast during the post-war years with the creation of her Lyric Players in 1951, and the bricks and mortar of an actual playhouse in 1968.

Theatre is the most ephemeral of all the arts. But actually all art lives in the moment and then the memory. Of course you can go look at a Picasso or a Monet in a gallery or a book, and watch a film in the cinema, but at some stage you have to leave that gallery or close that book and exit that cinema and then it’s what is left in your memory that is most important. Theatre by its very nature is only completed by the audience and actors coming together and only then can the alchemy of a play come alive. Mary O’Malley, and all who worked with her and came after her, created a space by the banks of the Lagan where we could experience this alchemy. The fact that the theatre was rebuilt in May 2011 into this beautiful venue with its stunning views is even more reason to celebrate the exuberant communal spirit of the Lyric.

Theatre matters in Belfast, in the North; in our artistic imagination and lives.

Brian Friel proved himself over and over as one of the great truth-seeking alchemists of theatre. He experimented with what was achievable on stage in form and content, shadows and substance. In Philadelphia, Here I Come he split a young man into two and called both selves Gar, Public and Private. He allowed the shadow of death cross over the sisters of Dancing at Lughnasa and brought the play to an end with a fitting celebration of pastoral life so that the memory of it would not be crudely depressing but tinted with the slight blur of nostalgia. In Translations he allowed two languages to exist in perfect comprehension to the audience while driving home the barbarity of conformity as a tool of war and subjugation. All these innovations and experiments with form are present in his early work such as Lovers (Winners and Losers) Even the title is a play on our assumptions. Can a young dead couple really be winners? Can an older middle aged couple that stayed together really be losers? That is for the audience to decide. The play is dedicated to the hugely influential and brilliant Anglo-Irish director Tyrone Guthrie, who took the young Friel under his wing and showed him the unique possibilities that the magic of theatre could offer.

In 1968 the baby boomers had come of age and revolution was in the air. Brian Friel had written this play (July ‘67), Mary O’Malley opened this theatre (October 68) and Van Morrison released Astral Weeks (November ‘68). Many more things happened in 1968, but for these three there is much for which to be grateful. We hope you enjoy this production and please do leave feedback on this or any aspect of the theatre. If you have memories to share please do get in touch with us memories@Lyrictheatre.co.uk

Jimmy Fay Executive Producer Lyric Theatre

DIRECTOR’S NOTE

I was thrilled and more than a little daunted when the Lyric invited me to direct Brian Friel’s LoversWinners and Losers

Winners is one of the few Irish plays that I remember being dramatised in my youth. The sole authentic Northern articulation of Love and Frustration, unconnected to ‘the troubles’ - I remember vividly the inspired teachers of my Theatre Studies class adapting Winners as a duologue, set on the Black Mountain in West Belfast.

On reflection, that is the true power of Friel’s play - it speaks beyond Ballymore, beyond Ballybeg, beyond Ireland. I feel that I am in the delicious flux of beginning to grasp Friel’s thoughts and though I am ‘no scholar’, I feel the pulsating anger in these ‘love’ plays - and I believe that you will too, because I don’t feel that we have moved too far beyond the toxic binding ties he articulates so beautifully - so heartbreakingly. The stranglehold of organised religion, the small-town insularity, and troubling family relations all still resonate. And beyond all of that a feeling of despair - the Beckettian gaze into the void through second-hand binoculars - the inability of human beings at all stages of their lives to find a way to say, and be, all that they feel in their hearts.

Mags’ line about her parent’s words ‘they seared my soul forever’ speaks to us all - who we were, who we are, who we don’t want to become, how we might do better next time. In my opinion Friel’s work is full of heart and insight and has as much to say to us - 50 years on, as it ever did.

Emma Jordan Director