Finborough Theatre

THE FIRST LONDON REVIVAL FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS OF BRIAN FRIEL’S MODERN CLASSIC, INSPIRED BY THE EVENTS OF “BLOODY SUNDAY”

**** Four Stars Time Out
**** Four Stars The Guardian

“I am standing on the walls overlooking Guildhall Square in Derry where only a short time ago a civil rights meeting, estimated at about three thousand strong, was broken up by a large contingent of police and troops… Unconfirmed reports are coming in that a group of about fifty armed gunmen have taken possession of the Guildhall here below me and have barricaded themselves in.”

Derry, Ulster, 1970. The Civil Rights movement is at a pinnacle. As the unauthorised march from the Bogside explodes into violence, three unarmed marchers fleeing the tanks and tear gas find themselves in the mayor’s parlour in the Guildhall. Lily, a cleaning lady and mother to eleven children, thinks it’s all a hoot. Skinner wants to wreck the place. Michael takes the time to contemplate. As the police and army exaggerate their ‘occupation’ into a full-scale armed invasion, they pay with their lives for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Written as a direct response to the events of Bloody Sunday, the play documents the final hours of Lily, Skinner and Michael - and the subsequent inquest into their deaths. With a bitter attack on the establishment, and with Friel’s unique mordant humour, The Freedom of the City conjures an imaginary moment in which three innocent civilians find themselves the victims of a shameless killing and a horrifically unjust legal system.

Originally presented in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre and in London at the Royal Court, Brian Friel’s modern classic now receives its first professional London production for over thirty years at the multi-award-winning Finborough Theatre, well known for its production of Irish plays by such writers as Frank McGuinness, Tom Murphy and Jim Nolan.

Multi-award-winning playwright Brian Friel is one of Ireland’s greatest living playwrights. His other plays include Philadelphia Here I Come!, Dancing at Lughnasa, The Home Place, Translations, Aristocrats and The Faith Healer.

Exciting young director Vicky Jones makes her Finborough Theatre debut. Her previous credits include Zoo (Arcola), A Bedroom (Lyric Hammersmith Studio) and The Blind Bird (Gate Theatre). She has worked as an Assistant Director at the Royal Court, the Soho Theatre, the Gate Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, West End and Off-Broadway.

The Press on The Freedom of the City
This production shows why the Finborough deservedly won the inaugural Empty Space/Dan Crawford Pub Theatre Award. It is 30 years since Brian Friel's play - inspired directly by the events of Bloody Sunday, when British troops shot dead 14 people in Derry - was last seen in London; it is a reminder that while verbatim theatre fully deserves its place in British theatre, fictions conjured from real-life events have just as much power to act on hearts and minds.

In Friel's scenario, two men and a woman caught up in a civil rights protest in Derry take refuge in the mayor's parlour in the Guildhall. Unfortunately for them, the Guildhall is a symbol of British colonial power in Ireland and, while they spend the time discussing the personal and the political, helping themselves to the mayor's sherry, the British army is preparing to shoot them dead.

As with a lot of Friel's plays, there is something schematic here in the way he sets out his stall: there is the romantic balladeer singing of fallen heroes; the sociologist giving a lecture about the culture of poverty; the biased judge; the self-serving priest. Yet even though it was written before Friel was at the height of his dramatic powers, The Freedom of the City still gets you by the scruff of the neck and gives you a jolly good shake. It is because the characterisations of the three protagonists are so wonderfully detailed, and because he uses devices such as Greek tragedy and dramatic irony to such devastating effect.

Vicky Jones's steely production is a little cramped, but Claire Cogan, Richard Flood and Nick Lee - as the trio who discover to their cost that when there is a price to be paid, it is always the poor who are overcharged - are spot-on.
Lyn Gardner, The Guardian **** Four Stars

The winners of the inaugural Dan Crawford Pub Theatre award astutely end the London theatre year by drawing together two of its significant threads. In 2005 the capital has already seen three important productions of plays by Brian Friel and two runs of Richard Norton- Taylor's latest verbatim tribunal drama Bloody Sunday. Now here is the first revival in 30-odd years of Friel's drama inspired by the gruesome events in Derry in 1972.

Friel shifts the action by a couple of years, reduces the number of victims to three, and (in what is almost an act of charity, in the historical circumstances) invents a tenuous reason for their being shot dead by the British Army: that, having taken refuge from rubber bullets and CS gas, the three found themselves in the city's Guildhall and were mistaken for terrorists occupying the symbolic citadel of Protestant ascendancy.

The evident depth to which Friel was stricken by the events of Bloody Sunday is reflected in his efforts to find a way to treat the material dramatically. His usual naturalistic portrayal of the trio in the parlour sits at the centre of a most un- Friel-like agitprop collage: testimony to a Widgery- style whitewashing inquiry, sociological lectures about the culture of poverty as experienced by the city's Catholic population and the consciousness-raising effect of civil rights movements such as Derry saw in the late 1960s, pulpit speeches from priests and even political ballads. These last, in portraying the victims as brave republican "volunteers", collude with the official British line.

The director Vicky Jones treads skilfully through this labyrinth. Claire Cogan shines as a no-nonsense mother of 11 and Nick Lee as a civil rights activist. Richard Flood is less at ease as a ducker-and-diver who enjoys the mischief of the situation. And life imitates art: the real Guildhall has seen the premieres of a number of plays by Friel, and most recently has hosted the second judicial inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday.
Ian Shuttleworth, Financial Times