The Irish Rep, now in its 25th season and thriving

Irish Repertory Theatre marks a quarter of a century

“Just last year we also reached the point where the victims’ families can take legal action, 40 years later. The play just feels to me as alive today, for many reasons. A lot of what Friel is trying to say in the play is about poor people, about the culture of poverty that goes on for generations and what it does to you.

“You can see parallels between what they were protesting and what the Occupy Wall Street protestors did. There are lines in the play that are relevant today.”

The objective of the Civil Rights movement was economic change, but after Bloody Sunday and the mass shootings that occurred that day, that objective was subsumed by the larger civil conflict that erupted. “They handed the IRA a recruiting tool,” says O'Reilly. “It changed Northern Ireland.”

Friel was out marching on Bloody Sunday and saw first hand the events of that day, but the play he wrote wasn't so much about the massacre as the notorious Widgery report that whitewashed it. That was the biggest tragedy of the whole thing in some ways, O'Reilly feels.

“The fact that they could so calculatedly let that day lie, to almost sponsor what those soldiers had done...”

It's not O'Reilly's first attempt to revive the play, but it's the first he could get Friel to agree to. “Sometime back in the nineties I asked Friel if I could do the play and he said no. He didn't want it done.

“At that time they were moving toward the peace process and he said it was a work that he wrote in anger, and that anything that would tip the balance of the peace negotiations, even something as small as putting on a play in New York, he'd just rather not do it.”

The original U.S. production of Freedom of the City opened in Chicago in 1974 to rave reviews. Against Friel's will the play was then brought to Broadway, where it died a quick death. Clive Barnes, The New York Times esteemed theater critic (and a Londoner by birth) called the play “luridly fictionalized,” “far-fetched” and that it was “impossible” to believe the British Army could behave in such a fashion.

That review prompted the legendary civil rights attorney Paul O'Dwyer, then the president of the New York City Council, to write to the Times to charge the critic with “defending the empire rather than reviewing the play.”

So it's timely for the Rep to allow us an opportunity to reassess the play now, in the hindsight of the war that erupted and the peace that finally followed it. It's to be hoped that The New York Times can find a theater critic with a grasp of recent Irish history, too.

On October 10, the Rep continues its new season with another major new production, the New York premiere of  A Celebration of Harold Pinter, starring floppy haired Julian Sands (The Killing Fields, A Room with a View, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) in his New York stage debut, directed by Academy Award nominee John Malkovich.

Pinter, a British playwright, had a long and formative relationship with Ireland, having traveled the length of the country as a fledgling actor paying his dues years before he became the most celebrated British playwright of the 20 century. The show is Sands' personal reflection on working with the Nobel laureate who passed away in 2008.

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Nster.com