An Interview with The Playwright
The following interview appeared during the 1989 revival of his play Aristocrats at Manhattan Theatre Club.

Brian Friel's Ireland: Both Private and Political
By MATT WOLF; Matt Wolf is an American theater critic and journalist based in London
Published: April 30, 1989, The New York Times

It was a rainy afternoon in New York, the day's rehearsals had ended, and the Irish dramatist Brian Friel was back in the city where he began his international career with ''Philadelphia, Here I Come!'' more than two decades ago. He was in town for the belated American premiere of his 1979 play ''Aristocrats,'' which opened Tuesday, and that meant submitting to a journalistic rite - the interview - which he is known to dislike. ''I'm never quite sure what they're for,'' he said amiably over drinks at a Chelsea restaurant, worlds away from the nature and the quiet of his Greencastle, County Donegal, home. Indeed, in 1972 he took preventive measures to forestall such occasions by interviewing himself in a BBC radio ''self-portrait'':

''What other writers influenced you most strongly? ''I've no idea. ''Which of your plays is your favorite? ''None of them. ''Would you say, Mr. Friel, that the influence of Heidegger is only beginning to be felt in the drama and that Beckett and Pinter are John the Baptists of a great new movement?

''Well, in answer to that I'd say that . . . I'd say that I'm a middle-aged man and that I tire easily and that I'd like to go out for a walk now; so please go away and leave me alone.''

Other points of information: he is 60 years old; born in Omagh, Northern Ireland, he moved to Londonderry when he was 10; in 1954 he married Anne Morrison, with whom he has five children, four daughters and a son; his introduction to the United States came in 1963 when he was invited by his friend and colleague Tyrone Guthrie to spend six months in Minneapolis during the start of the Guthrie Theater.

On this visit to New York, his discourse seemed almost puckish (''That looks like a harvest wreath; we should all do a Morris dance underneath it,'' he said with a laugh, pointing to an adornment on the restaurant wall), even as he still avoided grand pronouncements. New York theatergoers, meanwhile, have an overdue opportunity to sample the work of the writer considered the patriarch of contemporary Irish drama. Regularly produced both in England and Ireland, Mr. Friel's work last received a major New York production in 1981 with ''Translations'' at the Manhattan Theater Club. Now, the same theater is tackling his earlier ''Aristocrats,'' which will run through June 2. When the play opened last week, Frank Rich in The Times called it funny and harrowing. ''Mr. Friel makes the Irish condition synonymous with the human one,'' Mr. Rich said. (The production occupies temporary quarters at Theater Four on West 55th Street, to allow the extension of Joe Orton's ''What the Butler Saw'' at M.T.C.'s Stage I.) The cast is headed by John Pankow and Kaiulani Lee, newcomers to the playwright's work, and the Irish actor Niall Buggy, who appeared in ''Aristocrats'' last year in London. Making his New York debut, Mr. Buggy plays the childlike, Chopin-loving Casimir, the lone brother surrounded by three sisters (a fourth is heard but not seen) in a family of Irish Catholic gentry in decline and clinging to shards of faded glory while their father dies, noisily, upstairs. ''Aristocrats'' played a limited engagement last summer at northwest London's Hampstead Theater and was named the season's best play in November at the Evening Standard Drama Awards. Robin Lefevre, the London director, is repeating his assignment in New York.

Mr. Friel never saw the London production and seemed bemused to be watching it take shape in New York. ''Once you've done a play and been through rehearsals, that's it. You cherish the memories of it,'' he said. He regards the play less as a subject for current discussion than as the re-emergence of a particularly creative time in his career: that between March 1979 and September 1980 that saw the premieres of ''Faith Healer,'' ''Aristocrats'' and ''Translations,'' three plays about myth making, family and language, all topics he continues to explore.

''Faith Healer,'' seen briefly on Broadway with James Mason in 1979, tells of an itinerant healer who publicly dispenses balm even as he nurses private calamity. Its structure, four lengthy monologues performed by three actors in succession, distills the playwright's gift for narrative and provides a link back to his initial work as a short-story writer. (Mr. Friel was a contract writer for The New Yorker at age 21.) ''Translations,'' set in 1833, uses the re-naming of Gaelic places into English to chart a society caught in the same delicate balance that holds true today. In each play, Ireland is as much an imaginative as a physical terrain; all three, indeed, take place in or allude to Ballybeg, Mr. Friel's fictional County Donegal village, which the author likens to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Both are small rural communities that allow their authors to cast wide thematic nets.

In general, the playwright rejects interpretation, perhaps as a reaction against his background as the son of an academic and a onetime teacher himself; still, dramatic influences are apparent in his work. Having written ''Aristocrats'' as he was beginning a new translation of ''Three Sisters,'' he acknowledges the play's debt to Chekhov, starting with its familial makeup and its locale, which he describes as ''an old crumbling house with upper-class pretensions.'' He has long been drawn to Russian writers, and adapted Turgenev's ''Fathers and Sons'' for London's National Theater in 1987 and New Haven's Long Wharf last year. ''I was unemployed, and I wanted to keep the muscles slightly flexed,'' he explained with a twinkle, implying that perhaps the attraction was greater than that.

And yet, he treads cautiously: ''It's up to wiser people to point out the similarities. They're implicit rather than explicit.'' And he seems more interested in the phase of his life that began after ''Aristocrats'' - his co-founding in 1980, with an actor, Stephen Rea, of Field Day, a Londonderry-based theater company that had its debut production with ''Translations.'' All his plays since, except ''Fathers and Sons,'' have had their premieres with the company, and Field Day has gone on to publish poetry and pamphlets, the latter by noted academics like Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. One board member, Seamus Deane, the poet and critic, has edited a two-volume anthology of Irish writing from the year 550 to 1987, which will be published next year in both Gaelic and English.

Financed equally by the arts councils in Belfast and Dublin, Field Day tours one play annually, bringing theater to communities that would otherwise go without. The aim, Mr. Friel says, is to forge a cultural identity for Ireland free of the influence of both London and the nationalist mythologies of the Republic. ''I don't for a moment believe that people are hungry to hear the things we say; that's self-aggrandizement,'' he declared. ''One of the things that's reiterated again and again is that we represent a group of seven (on the board of directors) talking to ourselves. If we're overheard, that's great. What's constantly surprising is how many people seem alert to what we do.

''Our work is fulfilled when we take it into the national consciousness,'' continued the playwright, who achieved just that aim with his most recent Field Day play, ''Making History.'' It concerns the English-educated Gaelic chieftain Hugh O'Neill, who led a thwarted Ulster resistance against Queen Elizabeth I in the 1590's before fleeing in exile to Italy. The incident marked an end in the province to determined Irish resistance to British rule, but not before sowing the seeds of today's discontent.

Mr. Friel has written explicitly about ''the troubles'' in the plays ''Freedom of the City'' and ''Volunteers,'' but ''Making History,'' like both ''Aristocrats'' and ''Translations,'' roots politics in the personal and in a sense of history. Today, he remains vexed, he said, about what the political component of his work should be.

''I feel I don't ever want to write about politics, but sometimes it happens. It's not a deliberate policy to get involved in political drama. In fact, I'm far from sure of the wisdom or the validity of it. Politics emerges like flesh-and-bones for Octavio Paz, Chinua Achebe; it's hard to imagine African writing that isn't political. I want to be more private and I want isolation, but there's a seduction of political drama, of political art. These last 20 years have been stressful and oppressive.''

Looking ahead, Mr. Friel is hopeful about plans for a new Field Day production of ''Faith Healer,'' to star Donal McCann, who was seen on Broadway last summer in ''Juno and the Paycock.'' He is also busy advising on Field Day's latest commission, an original play about Oscar Wilde by an Oxford professor, Terry Eagleton. And he's comically perturbed about an ongoing series of radio plays of his to be heard through tomorrow on Britain's Radio 3 and 4. ''I must be dead because they're doing a retrospective of me,'' he said, eyes sparkling, no doubt recalling Hugh O'Neill's wish, in ''Making History,'' not to be embalmed in pieties. ''They tell me they only do that to playwrights who are dead.''