Philadelphia Here I Come

Synopsis

Tomorrow morning, Gar O'Donnell is leaving Ballybeg and the Ireland of his childhood. Leaving his father and the lads. Leaving Kate. There's a dream across the ocean, of Cadillacs, Coke floats and girls: a dream of America. On his last night in town a series of visitations, real and imagined, force Gar to confront the choices he's made and the promise of the future.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 1 August 2012

Brian Friel’s first big success, his evocative dream of leaving his native fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal, was the prototype of the mid-century memory play, and it remains, like Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, the early play with shadows and premonitions of the rest.

Not seen in London for 20 years, Lyndsey Turner’s pitch-perfect peach of a revival restores the poetic vibrancy of a play in which Friel’s Gar O’Donnell, on the night before he leaves for a job in a hotel in Philadelphia, revisits his own past in a divided identity.

Gar in Public is an accommodating, easy-going Paul Reid, easily led, shy of his own girlfriend, Kate Doogan (Laura Donnelly), and frozen in inexpressible love/hate for his non-communicative father, the crabby old store-keeper Screwballs (James Hayes).

Gar in Private, played with great v...

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Latest User Review

Henry Bealby - 10 August 2012:

While I found much to enjoy the use of the alter ego was as much a distraction as it was a revelation. Too often it was used as a form of slapstic humour, or else to tell us what we could have been shown by the acting alone....

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