Andrew Hilton directs Brian Friel’s Living Quarters once again, having last done so for Show of Strength over twenty years ago. In those intervening years it has been largely neglected, so is Hilton right to champion it? This thoroughly engaging co-production from Tobacco Factory Theatres and Shakespeare at The Tobacco Factory shows that his faith in Living Quarters is not misplaced. Subtitled ‘After Hippolytus’, we know from the start that there will be echoes of Euripides’ tale of the doomed love of a stepmother for her stepson. But this is also the story of a middle-aged soldier besotted with his new young wife and who finds that he is ill-equipped to deal with the realities of domestic life, so there is more than a touch of Othello, too. The soldier is Commandant Frank Butler, a hitherto unexceptional officer who has shown great courage carrying out a UN peace-keeping mission. He has returned to his family in Ballybeg – Friel’s familiar fictional little town – to be honoured as a local hero. He has three daughters and a son from an earlier marriage which ended when his wife died from a long and painful illness. He has been away soldiering for five months, and on his return he discovers that his new bride has had a brief affair with Ben, his wayward son. This revelation comes at the moment of his greatest personal triumph, and it destroys him.

So far, so familiar, but Friel does not tell this tale in a conventional linear fashion. The first character we meet is ‘Sir’, who we quickly gather is an omniscient figure conjured up collectively by the Butler family and whose task it is to make them re-enact the events that led up to the tragedy. He embodies their ‘deep psychic necessity’ to relive and re-examine their past. We are in the present, and the family has gathered to ‘reconvene and recollect’. The action switches back and forth in time as members of the family plead with Sir to allow them to modify the part they played, but he demands that they adhere strictly to the events as they actually occurred. It is all set down in his big black ledger. The past is as unalterable as Fate itself.

Though Frank’s children have many happy memories of earlier years, they each have their own painful truths to confront: ‘There were shadows – we’ve got to acknowledge them’. Helen Kelly is particularly affecting as the sister who cannot forgive her dead mother for wrecking her relationship with a young soldier, Frank’s batman. In a powerful monologue Ben (Craig Fuller) recalls his paradoxically ecstatic reaction to his mother’s death, which was then followed by ‘a greater grief’. Simon Armstrong gives a touching performance as Frank Butler, a man who is only too aware that there’s no fool like an old fool, but who cannot help himself. It is clear that he was merely dutiful to his first wife, but he has truly fallen in love with the lovely young Anna (Rose O’Loughlin). There is a childlike helplessness in his adoration of her; he regains his dignity only when it is too late.

This is a serious play, but all is not angst-ridden darkness. Christopher Bianchi endows Sir with a cheerful, no-nonsense briskness that contrasts strikingly with the anguish being enacted before him. Sir’s direction of this ‘play within a play’ does not always go to plan, and there are moments of pure comedy when characters fail to make their entrances or exits at the appropriate time.

Living Quarters may not be one of Friel’s greatest plays; it lacks the originality and sustained power of Dancing At Lughnasa or Translations. Nevertheless it has much to offer, and it is hard to imagine it being performed better. This is an excellent production of a play that speaks of some universal truths about the choices we make in our lives. It is also a play rooted in Ireland – a country that, more than most, seems unable to escape from the clutches of its own past. Highly recommended.   ★★★★☆    Mike Whitton      23/09/15