Brian Friel

Faith Healer (Finbar Lynch as Frank)

I first encountered Brian Friel's plays at University in the 80s.  A friend was in a student production of Translations.  It was not only the first Friel play I had seen, it was also the first post-colonial play.  I was studying history, and had an awareness of the context from with the ongoing Troubles sprang - but this was the first time I had seen theatre engage so powerfully and immediately with that complex shared past, leading its audience to re-assess the present.  At the centre of the play is the question of language, and Friel's theatrical device of delivering the whole text in English (the language of the audience) even when the characters are understood to be speaking Irish, was a glorious revelation.  Here was theatricality and comedy uniting stage and auditorium in an understanding of misunderstanding.  It was, I suppose, my Road to Damascus moment.  I have been travelling that rocky road ever since.

A few years later, I was in Dublin, doing a short period of study at Trinity, and was able to engage much more fully with Friel's work, coming to an understanding of his huge significance, not only as a dramatist, but as a cultural activist.  I read all his plays voraciously, and was lucky enough to see superb productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come (directed by Joe Dowling) and Faith Healer.  The latter would be one of the first plays Border Crossings ever presented, when in 1995-6, Richard Cave's production toured a series of overseas venues, acquiring new resonance and meaning as it responded to widely differing contexts.  The thought of it performing in Cairo seems extraordinary now, but Michael Keneally's review bears witness that, twenty years ago, it really did happen.

But for me, the most important influence of Brian Friel was in the form of the company he created with Stephen Rea, supported by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin - Field Day.  Inaugurated with Translations in 1980, Field Day was the first contemporary Irish company to operate through the entire island of Ireland: a statement made all the more powerful by the fact that its base, and first performances, were in Derry / Londonderry - a city which at that time was a by-word for The Troubles.  The programming saw the gradual emergence of a clear vision for cultural regeneration.  Productions of Chekov and Molière translated into an Irish idiom, new Irish-English versions of the Greek classics by Heaney and Paulin, new Irish plays and (perhaps most tellingly of all) Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena - all pointed up the centrality of language to meaningful political change.  The company went on to publish a series of pamphlets, starting with Paulin's A New Look at the Language Question, and a Dictionary of Irish English.  The entire project sought to regenerate the post-colonial space through the claiming of literary stature for Irish English, establishing a richer and more resonant language through the public practice of drama, enabling the possibility of new ideas and new expression within the emerging polity.  The heir of Synge and the ally of Fugard, Soyinka, Virahsawmy and Dattani - Brian Friel created a theatre that was genuinely transformative.  I believe that the current Northern Irish peace process owes far more to his endeavours than is acknowledged, and that the Irish future will be forged in the cultural revolution he began.

May he rest in peace.

Seamus Heaney

It isn't often that the death of a public figure moves me as Seamus Heaney's has done.  Don Patterson said that "the death of this beloved man seems to have left a breach in the language itself"- but I think it's more than that.  Poetry, and particularly the combination of the lyric and the political that characterised Heaney, is so personal, so intimate an art that the poet's persona comes to share the internal space of the reader.  When we lose a great poet, we lose someone to whom we are intensely close.  Put simply, a friend.

I first encountered this friend as a shy boy in my early teens, in a Hereford bookshop where I took lunchtime sanctuary from the baying bullies who haunted those years of emergence.  I remember weighing up the risk of buying the "Selected Poems", which tempted me because their writer seemed to mitigate the sissy discipline to which I was so drawn with a masculine, rural rigour that my persecutors might approve.  It cost me £1.95, and has been a treasure ever since.  On Friday, when his death was announced, I took it down again from the shelf and read that first manifesto, at once daunted and intensely determined:

"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it."

Later, in my first year at Oxford, a group of us would gather in someone's room or other to read our favourite lyrics - and I arrived clutching the same book, which now seemed a passport rather than a badge of exile.  Slowly, as we talked about the poems, I began to understand the complex relationship between these texts and the momentous context exploding in Ulster - to see how the history I was studying was as much a force in the intensity of "North" as the emotional and the psychological journey of their author.  They began to shape my own artistic voice.

Then, one day, the man himself was there.  We had lots of illustrious people visiting Oxford, to the extent that we got quite blasé about it: the Literary Society had welcomed Faye Weldon, Colin Welland, Stephen Spender and (wait for it) Enoch Powell that term: Seamus Heaney was for many another name on the roll-call.  So there were probably no more than thirty of us present to listen to him read in his soft brogue those well-known lines, to give them his personal music, and to hear him talk around them and about them without ever explaining them.  He was a gentle presence, secure in his wisdom without being in any way arrogant - wry and (I thought) genuinely pleased that there were young people there who responded to what he was saying and how he was saying it - people who shared his need to speak at a level only poetry sounds.  To dig ever deeper.  Far below the surface.

His work in theatre, especially the involvement with Field Day, was further inspiration to me - this is one of a number of key companies whose way of postulating theatre in a complex contemporary space of cross-cultural tensions has influenced the Artistic Direction of Border Crossings.

In 2008, there came his substitute for autobiography - the wonderful Stepping Stones interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll.  I gave a copy to my great friend Jay Griffiths, and it became as special a book to her as it was to me.  "Nurturing the flame" she said - Heaney writes so well about the calling of the artist, the intense need to find articulacy, the conviction that language must be brought back from the brink and re-forged as the weapon of compassion.  In her own recent book Kith, Jay calls this calling "the daemon" - and so it is.  The inner impulse that pulls the book from the shelf into the boy's hand, the muscularity that digs with the squat pen, the gentle rage of prophecy.

New Year Blog

Happy New Year everybody! I'm typing this on my new iMac - which will hopefully contribute to the development of Border Crossings over 2010 and beyond.

2009 has been an amazing year for the company - by far our busiest to date, and one which has clarified and defined our aims and identity for the future. For a start, there's a completely redesigned website, courtesy of Sam Hope-Evans at Phuture Design, with social networking and all that jazz! Now the iMac's in action, we should be able to get much more exciting content onto the web, with more videos to whet the appetite for performances, screenings, publications, workshops and talks.

The fact that I can list all of these things as Border Crossings activities is largely due to the Origins Festival of First Nations, which was the biggest single event in an amazing year. Just to present so much work in those two weeks was incredible - but what was even more exciting was the way in which the programme managed to lay down a coherent vision in terms of political, spiritual, artistic, social and environmental thought. All of which has shown its importance more and more as the year has gone on, with the Copenhagen summit rounding it off convincingly. If a gathering of world leaders, with the express purpose of slowing climate change, can be so dominated by petty economic self-interest as to fail to produce anything of any value whatsoever, then boy are we in trouble. We have got to start listening to ways of living on this planet which present alternatives to the power of the market - and First Nations offer them. So there will be more Origins Festivals: and in March I am off to New Zealand to start working on the next one.

On top of that, much of the year has been spent working on the development of Re-Orientations, the third part of the Trilogy, which we'll be presenting next autumn. I can truly say that February and August of 2009 were two of the most extraordinary, creative and open times I can ever remember - and I think the play, which we showed as work-in-progress in early September, more than proves the point. There's still a lot to do before we can perform them, but the foundations have been soundly laid. So look out in the autumn in Soho and Shanghai!

Outside of the company, it's also been a rich year culturally. In my freelance work, I've particularly enjoyed directing my first Brecht, The Good Soul of Szechuan, for Rose Bruford College, and beginning to write MA materials for the same academy - a job I'll be continuing in January. At the theatre, the highlights for me were Complicite's beautiful production with Japanese performers, Shun-kin at the Barbican; the Toneelgroep Amsterdam's six-hour epic Roman Tragedies at the same, ever-fertile address; and the National's staging of Wole Soyinka's classic Death and the King's Horseman - amazing just to see the play at last, and especially so well done.

In film, the London Film Festival was a highlight again, with Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah the star event. Obviously a film for a future Origins - unless it's had a huge general release first, which is far from impossible, given the awards it's harvesting! I've also read some great books - all of which inform my work, and the choice of which is of course informed by the work. So, in the early part of the year, I read Xinran's China Witness while in China - making its insights into the lives of older Chinese feel all the more immediate and all the more poignant. This also helped me think more deeply about the theme of Elders in the Origins Festival: the way in which First Nations value their older people so much more than we do in Western societies - and the social meaning of that value. So it was also very warming to spend a series of summer afternoons in the garden reading Seamus Heaney's book of interviews with Dennis O'Driscoll: Stepping Stones. Here is the quiet wisdom of one of our own Elders.

I've also spent quite a bit of time with David Mitchell, whose novels combine plot-lines and locations in ways which I find very helpful in thinking about our own devised work. I thought Ghostwritten, his first novel, of some years ago, was even better than Cloud Atlas: and experienced quite a shock while reading Black Swan Green, which at times felt uncomfortably like my own autobiography!

Have a great year, everyone....