The first week of the Dublin Theatre Festival of 1964 was largely a bleak affair. Reviews in the English papers were mostly negative, and Irish theatre faced “a scramble to survive”, warned the playwright Eugene McCabe.

McCabe’s play, King of the Castle, was the hit of the festival, but he despaired of the Irish theatre, dominated by plays that were “quickly acceptable, easy to write and easily forgotten”, he said. The London Telegraph warned that there were fears that the festival was “slowly killing the whole tradition of Irish theatre”.

And then, at the start of the festival’s second week, a new play by a short-story writer from Derry opened at the Gaiety. When it was over, the author came out for the then customary “curtain speech”, a tradition that typically lent itself to effusive oratory.

This author, though, was different. He appeared on the stage, briefly looked out at the audience, said “I want to thank everyone very much,” and vanished again. (So Fergus Linehan wrote at the time.)

If that was Brian Friel’s first brush with celebrity, it set the tone for a career during which he has consistently greeted great acclaim with polite diffidence. Though Eugene McCabe’s play was the greater success at that festival, the strengths of Friel’s play were recognised by the legendary London critic, Harold Hobson.

It was “make it immensely desirable that the play should be seen in London,” he wrote in the Sunday Times. “The best drama is rooted in the soil from whence it sprung and this play is all Ireland.”

With Friel’s innovation in splitting the play’s hero, Gar, into his “private” and “public” selves, played by separate actors, Philadelphia was “a huge leap in Irish drama,” recalls Eamon Morrissey, who played Ned in that first production.

“It may have been set in a kitchen, but it certainly wasn’t your average Irish kitchen comedy. It was so different from an Abbey play, and yet it was a very Irish play.”

The Broadway producer David Merrick invited the production to the US but, due to the strict rules of the actors’ union, Equity, only the leads were invited to travel with it, and Morrissey stayed at home, taking a part in a revue at the Eblana theatre.

The play made its way across the States on a pre-Broadway tour, and it gradually emerged that one of the young American actors couldn’t get his accent any closer to Donegal than Arizona.

In desperation, Merrick found a way around the Equity rules, and Morrissey got a call at the Eblana. “Can you leave tomorrow?”

Morrissey joined the cast for the remainder of the tour, and they soon arrived at Broadway. After opening night, they decamped to Sardi’s restaurant on 44th Street. The first editions of the New York Times and Post arrived at 2.30am,and the party fell silent as they were read out. But not for long – they were raves.

What was that like? “There’s a terrible arrogance of youth,” says Morrissey. “You take it all in your stride.”
He would learn, later in his career, what it was like when the critics weren’t so effusive: “If the reviews are bad, people just go. Twenty minutes later, the cast are left sitting on their own.”

The cast of Philadelphia were never left on their own, and it ran on Broadway for 326 performances, following that with another, eight-month US tour.

Philadelphia may be rooted in the Donegal soil, as Hobson wrote, but Morrissey saw its success in the US as stemming from the way it captured the generation gap between Gar and his father: in an America riven by racial and cultural conflict, struggling to come to terms with great social change, this struck a chord.

And to be at the centre of this was invigorating. “To be in your mid 20s, and on Broadway… You were livin’. You were really living.

“We were sleeping a third less, and drinking a third more. I couldn’t have stayed there – if I had, I’d be dead.”
He had a curious experience one evening, riding the subway under the East River, from Brooklyn, into work. Reading a short story in the New Yorker, “the hairs began to stand up on the back of my neck.”

The story was by the Irish writer, Maeve Brennan, and was about a young girl trying to sneak into her parents’ home late at night. “It was all terribly close,” recalls Morrissey, as he recognised not just the mood of the piece, but the intimate details of the girl’s home. Maeve Brennan, it transpired, had grown up in the same house in Ranelagh as Morrissey.

He sought her out, and she brought him to the Russian tearooms. “I think she enjoyed the fact that I was enjoying New York so much.”

By the time Philadelphia’s run ended, Morrissey was ready to come home, not simply exhausted, but homesick, and filled with a new awareness of “how little I knew about Ireland, and Irish literature, and Irish theatre.”
He realised a core truth of drama: that for his art to be universal in appeal, it would have to be drawn from a rigorous, intimate understanding of his own local context.

And was that easier to do, given his success on Broadway?

“Not at all. This is Ireland we’re living in. I didn’t work for a year! I’d bump into people and they’d say, ‘Were you sick or something? Have you had TB?’”

He didn’t mind the begrudgers, though. A year later, he was back on Broadway, this time playing the lead in a new play by a playwright from Derry, called Lovers. Both Morrissey and Friel had clearly mastered the art of finding the universal in the local.

Thereafter, Morrissey established himself as one of the best-loved Irish actors of his generation, while Philadelphia, Here I Come! established itself as one of the most loved Irish plays. Rarely off the Irish stage, it returns to the Gaiety from Wednesday in a new, all-star production being directed by Dominic Dromgoole of the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and produced by Noel Pearson, presumably with at least half an eye on a return to Broadway, or the West End (tickets from 01 677 1717 or www.gaietytheatre.com).

So will Morrissey be at it?

“Ah, I probably will,” he says. “But I know it backwards. I played in it about 800 times, and when I wasn’t on stage, I could hear it backstage on the tannoy. Every syllable of it is ingrained in me.”

And he has his own work to concentrate on. In 1974, Morrissey adapted the work of another much-loved writer, Myles na Gopaleen, for a one-man show, The Brother. It has proved an enduring success, and has been revived again for a short tour, stopping at the Theatre Royal, Waterford, tonight (booking on 051 874402) and continuing to Port Laoise, Kilkenny and Ennis (see www.ten42.com for details, and YouTube for clips from it).

As Eamon surely learned in the bars and dives of Broadway, the bright lights may be all very well, but a pint of plain is your only man.

Full tour details: The Brother plays at the Theatre Royal, Waterford, tonight (booking on 051 874402), the Dunamaise Arts Centre, Port Laoise, on Wednesday and Thursday (booking on 057 866 3355), the Watergate Theatre, Kilkenny, next Friday and Saturday (booking on 056 7761674), and Glór, Ennis, on Tuesday March 16 (booking on 065 6843103).

Published in the Irish Independent Review, Saturday March 6