The couples in Irish Repertory Theatre’s new production Two By Friel—or the actors playing them, more accurately—appear in such close proximity to the audience that you may be tempted, if you’re seated in the first few rows, to lean into the stage and whisper: “It won’t last.”
It won’t be spoiling anything, surely, to reveal that the pair of short plays now being presented on the IRT’s studio stage both deal with the ephemerality of love, at least in the ecstatic form it tends to assume while still blooming. And since the playwright is Brian Friel, this subject is explored with all the lyrical vigor, wit and melancholy it deserves, and an eye on the messy stuff that links these couples to larger communities and to their species, from social mores and obligations to mortality itself.
Director Conor Bagley has chosen two plays representing different phases of Friel’s career: 1966’s Lovers: Winners (produced the following year as half of a two-part play, with “Losers”) and 2001’s The Yalta Game. Both deal with budding romances, albeit under very different circumstances. In Winners, we meet Joe and Mag, 17-year-olds—respectively played by Phil Gillen and Aoife Kelly, each adorable—who meet on a glorious day to study for their final exams and consider their future as married parents to the child Mag is carrying. We quickly glean that Joe is more interested in the former pursuit, Mag in the latter.
Yalta Game, staged after an intermission, follows a middle-aged Russian man on holiday as he encounters and courts a beautiful young woman, distinguishing his jaded detachment from her relative naiveté but showing us how he, too, is eventually moved and haunted. Dmitry Dmitrich Gurov is played by Aidan Redmond, Anna Sergeyevna by Jenny Leona; both also appear in Winners, as the Man and Woman who sit upstage to the young couple’s left and right, reading from a story—or news account—in which Joe and Mag are key figures.
Contrasts between innocence and experience exist between the plays and within each one, and are highlighted, under Bagley’s careful and affectionate direction, by the lovely performances here, by turns playful and poignant. Gillen and Kelly arrive flush with youthful exuberance, and mischief, scattering about the small, virtually bare stage, its raised level used by set designer Daniel Prosky to represent a hill overlooking the town of Ballymore.
Mag’s condition weighs on them both, though, and throws into sharp relief the differences between them as Joe’s fundamental earnestness, and his frustration with Mag’s superficial flightiness, come into conflict. There’s a growing sense that their tender years, and the difficult and different circumstances they’ve endured separately, have fueled their mutual devotion as much as anything else; and the ominous sobriety with which the Man and Woman reveal details of their family lives—to say nothing of a key event that lies just ahead—is not encouraging.
Yalta Game offers less foreboding; its lovers are both married, respectably, with no financial concerns or threats of social alienation hanging over their heads, at least initially. Their mischief is initiated by Dmitry, who gets his kicks surveying a summer resort crowd and dreaming up naughty scenarios. Redmond is stirring an imaginary beverage—whereas the Winners kids wield books and lunch provisions, there are no props here, save for a table and chairs—when Leona saunters in, with an invisible dog.
Anna’s reticence quickly dissolves, but her bliss is accompanied by intense guilt; the latter is not an issue for Dmitry—or so we would gather from the elaborate observations and confessions he delivers directly to the audience. Anna also addresses us, revealing great tenderness and her own sharp wit, both ably served by Leona, but the play is principally Dmitry’s journey, and Redmond cannily leaves the impression of a man awoken but perhaps not entirely transformed, or reformed.
Bagley ties the two works together in the end with a dramatic flourish that’s affecting but hardly necessary, sending us back into our own lives with a renewed sense of appreciation, and perhaps caution as well.
Two by Friel opened November 12, 2018, at the Irish Repertory Theatre and runs through December 23. Tickets and information: irishrep.org
