Picture a classroom in Cork. Thirty teenage boys, a television on a trolley, and a VHS tape of a play from 1964 that gets played so many times the tracking lines become part of the text.
The trolley. Every Irish school had the same trolley.
Daniel went to Presentation Brothers College, Pres in Cork, and one of the great gifts the school bestowed on him was Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come. The educational method was watching a VHS of a performance far more times than anyone wanted to, until something about what the play meant had been absorbed by sheer repetition. He bonded with his friend Peter Clancy over the absurdity of it, and to this day the two of them send each other Facebook messages that begin with lines from the play.
That's the detail that gets me. The lines outlived the classroom.
So Daniel's asking a few things. He remembers the play's mechanism, exploring Gar through a public and a private persona, two actors playing one man. He remembers the tragic story of Irish emigration, the emotionally stilted father who can't bring himself to show emotion at his son's departure, and the one breakthrough moment involving a sturdy leather belt and some advice about where to sit on the aircraft, based on the father's understanding of aviation safety data. He watched it many hours on an old tape, alongside everyone else in that classroom. And he's often wondered what kind of critical reception the play actually enjoyed at the time.
Which is the question he wants us to take seriously today.
And then the second half of it. The Irish education system's version of teaching English, at least as he experienced it, had a strange fixation on studying specific works of literature ad nauseum, then grading you on your expositions of them in freestyle essays for the Leaving Certificate. So those who remember what they studied have a mixture of dread at the prospect of ever reading or watching the thing again, and a strange fondness that the process itself produced. He wants us to look at how this play did actually.
The reception is fascinating, and it's not the story people assume.
So where do we start?
With the play itself. Philadelphia, Here I Come premiered at the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin on the twenty-eighth of September, 1964, part of the Dublin International Theatre Festival, directed by Hilton Edwards. Published the following year.
And the setting.
Ballybeg. Friel's fictional Donegal town, the one he used across a whole run of plays. The entire action takes place over a single night, the eve of Gareth O'Donnell's departure for Philadelphia. Gar is twenty-five. He works in his widowed father's grocery and dry-goods store. He's leaving a life of routine and predictability, and the play is the last night before he goes.
And the thing everyone remembers.
Gar is played by two actors. Public Gar is the man people see and talk to. Private Gar is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id. Friel's own staging note is precise about it. Nobody except Public Gar hears Private Gar talk. But even Public Gar, although he talks to Private Gar occasionally, never sees him and never looks at him. One cannot look at one's alter ego.
It's the whole play in a sentence. And the critics understood what Friel had done. Richard Pine said contemporary Irish drama begins in 1964 with this play. Christopher Murray called Gar an Irish Hamlet for his time, a man longing for contact but driven back repeatedly on himself. Chris Morash argued the device challenged one of the central assumptions of naturalistic theatre and the whole empiricist worldview that supports it.
Which is a grand way of saying the audience can't trust what they see.
The audience sees everything. That's the point. You see the composed public face and the screaming private one at the same time, and you understand that everyone you've ever met has that second track running.
Let's get into the device properly, because it's not just a trick.
No. It's a solution to a specific dramatic problem. Friel wanted to show a man who cannot say what he feels. If you write that as straight naturalism, you get a character who sits silently for two hours, and the audience learns nothing. The split lets the audience hear the interior monologue while watching the exterior failure.
So Private Gar says the things Gar can't.
Private Gar is the id and the conscience at once. He's vicious about Gar's father, he's mocking, he's cruel, he's also the one who's honest. And Public Gar has to stand there and make small talk about the weather while his own alter ego is screaming in his ear about how much he wants his father to say something real.
The cruelty is interesting. Private Gar isn't a sympathetic inner voice.
He's not. He calls his father Screwballs. That's the nickname Private Gar uses for S.B. O'Donnell throughout. And there's a line that's the most direct statement of the play's emotional starvation. Screwballs, we've eaten together like this for the past twenty-odd years, and never once in all that time have you made as much as one unpredictable remark.
Twenty-odd years of meals.
And the tragedy is that Gar would stay. That's the thing people miss. He's not desperate to leave for the sake of America. He's leaving because nothing here will ever change. If his father said one genuine thing, one unpredictable remark, Gar would unpack.
The father is described as clench-lipped, word-shy. That's from a TIME review in 1966.
Which is exactly right. S.B. O'Donnell is a man who has feelings and no mechanism for expressing them. And the play gives him one moment, and it's the moment everybody remembers.
The kitchen scene.
Act three, scene two. Neither of them can sleep. The father and son meet in the kitchen in the middle of the night, and S.B. awkwardly advises Gar to sit at the back of the airplane, because it's safest there. That's it. That's the father's one attempt at connection. Practical advice about aviation safety.
It's devastating precisely because it's so small.
It's the only language he has. He can't say I'll miss you or I'm afraid for you or I love you. He can say sit at the back, it's safer. And Gar understands what it is, and it still isn't enough, and that's the whole tragedy.
Now, Daniel's memory of this scene has a detail worth flagging.
The belt.
He remembers the father gifting Gar a sturdy leather belt and providing the aviation advice. And the aviation advice is right. The belt is actually given by Gar's friend Ned, as a goodbye present. Two separate gifts that have merged in memory.
Which is almost too perfect for this episode. He watched the tape so many times that two goodbye scenes fused into one.
It's a demonstration of the exact phenomenon he's asking about. The memory of a studied text blurs under repetition.
And here's the thing. His reading of the scene isn't wrong even with the belt misplaced. The father's gesture is the aviation advice. The belt was never the father's. But the emotional logic Daniel remembers, the father who can only express love through practical concern, that's exactly what's on the page.
So the memory drifted but the interpretation held.
The interpretation held. That's what eighteen viewings of a VHS will do.
There's another moment in the play that does the same work as the kitchen scene, and it's the one that lands hardest.
The father's one long speech.
And he doesn't give it to Gar.
He gives it to Madge, the housekeeper. S.B. recalls walking hand-in-hand with Gar on his first day of school. It's the only time in the play he speaks at length about loving his son, and his son isn't in the room.
That's the cruelty of the construction.
And Madge's response closes the circle. She says that when S.B. was Gar's age, he was the very same. Leppin' and eejitin' about and actin' the clown. As like as two peas.
So the father was Gar once.
The father was Gar. And life stilted him, the same way it's about to stilt Gar if he stays. The play isn't about a cold man. It's about what a place does to men over twenty-odd years of eating together in silence.
Let's talk about the emigration, because that's the engine underneath all of it.
Friel set it in the present. 1964. Aer Lingus had only introduced transatlantic flights in 1958, so a young man from Donegal flying to Philadelphia was a new possibility. The play is rooted in a specific moment.
And the numbers behind that moment are stark.
The Irish-born population in Britain went from about five hundred and thirty-seven thousand in 1951 to seven hundred and eighty thousand in 1961. Emigration had been a defining feature of Irish life for a century, and it was still running hard when Friel wrote this.
So Gar isn't a symbol. He's a statistic who got a name.
And Friel was explicit that the specificity didn't limit it. He said an individual leaving behind him a whole culture is a universal theme. That's the sentence to hold onto, because it's the exact fault line the reviews split along.
So let's look at how it did.
The Dublin premiere reception was strong. Hilton Edwards, who directed it, called it intensely human, full of humour, well written and intensely normal. Desmond Rush in the Irish Independent called it far and away the finest new Irish play of this Dublin Theatre Festival and of this year.
And the commercial reaction was immediate.
The London impresario Oscar Lowenstein bought it sight unseen for the West End. The BBC bought it for radio adaptation from the script alone. That's a play that people in the trade recognized instantly.
But not universal praise.
The Times suggested it lacked the universal quality of John B. Keane's The Year of the Hiker, and said it showed the approach of the novelist rather than the dramatist. That's a real criticism. The play does have a lot of interiority and not a lot of plot.
And the Sunday Times fired back.
The best drama is always rooted in the soil from which it springs, and Philadelphia, Here I Come is all Ireland. Which is a lovely line and also a direct rebuttal of the Times' whole premise.
Then it crossed the Atlantic.
American premiere in Philadelphia on the seventeenth of January, 1966, which is a nice piece of symmetry, then New York via Boston. Produced by David Merrick, who was the biggest producer on Broadway at the time.
And the American reviews.
TIME called it honest, lyrical, unaffected and affecting. And they loved the split-Gar device, described it as a jazzy Greek chorus, a human pep pill, and a court jester.
Three things at once.
The same review has a line I want to read properly because it's the best description of the play I've found. Other people speak English; the Irish play it. Philadelphia is not scored for brass, timpani, or full dramatic orchestra, but it exquisitely renders the chamber music of existence.
That's a review that understood what it was watching.
The New Yorker was more measured. John McCarten wrote that it burns at least part of the time with an almost gemlike flame, though he thought it wasn't as well fleshed out dramatically as it might be. That's the same criticism the Times made in Dublin. The play's interiority reads as thinness to some critics.
But the run tells a different story.
By August 1966 it became the second Irish play to reach two hundred performances on Broadway. The first was Paul Vincent Carroll's Shadow and Substance, which hit two hundred and seventy-five in 1938. Philadelphia broke that record in October 1966.
So the American audience didn't find it thin.
The American audience found it. And then London, which is where it gets interesting.
The Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, September 1967.
Twentieth of September. Mostly warm. Irving Wardle in the Times called it a tender and honest play and a study in the classic Irish theme of delayed manhood. W.A. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph said the split-Gar idea was more than an ingenious stage trick.
But.
Philip Hope-Wallace in the Guardian found the device little more than a gimmick, slightly tiresome at times, and called the play pleasant though protracted. And Penelope Mortimer in the Evening Standard went further. She called it a rather woebegone offering with the air of a leprechaun who is very far from home.
A leprechaun.
That's the review. That's the register of English criticism of Irish work in that period.
And that's where the reception history stops being about theatre and starts being about something else.
It is. Because the Irish critic Mary Holland wrote about it, in Queen and Plays and Players, and she said something that cuts to the bone. She said it's impossible for an Irish viewer like myself to be objective about a play like this. I found it funny, clear eyed, compassionate and almost unbearably true to life.
Almost unbearably true to life.
But then she argues it fails by the highest Chekhovian standards to transcend local experience. Parochial none the less. And she notes that an English audience found it sentimental, overworking the commonplace Irishisms.
So the same play is unbearably true to one audience and sentimental cliché to another.
And both of them are watching the same performance. That's not a disagreement about quality. That's a disagreement about whether specificity travels.
Which is the fight Friel anticipated. An individual leaving behind a whole culture is a universal theme.
He thought the specific was the universal. The English critics thought the specific was the local. And the Irish audience sat in the middle, recognizing their own kitchen on stage and being told by a reviewer from London that it was a stage Irishman.
That maps onto Daniel's experience exactly.
It does. Because the Irish audience finds it true, and the exam system makes it compulsory, and those two things together are what produce the dread and the fondness.
So let's get into the Leaving Cert, because that's the other half of what he's asking.
The Department of Education prescribes a fixed list of texts for each year's Leaving Cert English exam. Students study one single text plus a comparative course of several texts. Philadelphia, Here I Come has appeared on those lists repeatedly. It was on the draft list for 2022 at Ordinary level. The prescribed list for 2027 was published in February 2025, and the practice continues unchanged.
And the exam itself.
Six hours of written papers. And the marking criteria award marks for purpose, cohesiveness, language and mechanics. That's the list. Creativity, analysis and critique are not on it.
Ellen McCabe made that point in the Irish Times in 2017. She wrote that the strictures of the Leaving Cert compel students to passively absorb and reproduce preprepared analyses of fictional texts. And she had a line about how literary texts are approached with the black-and-white rigidity of basic facts.
Which is the opposite of what literature is for.
There's a teacher quoted in that same piece about teaching Macbeth. I'd still be going back to the handout, because for me it's very much they have to have it, they have to learn it, and they have to be able to reproduce it.
And a student. When we do it in school, I'm just looking at the exam. So I don't really put my own opinion on it.
That's the whole system in one sentence from a teenager.
And here's the paradox that makes it worse. The chief examiner's report in 2014 found students were most successful when they avoided a formulaic approach. And the same report noted that a formulaic approach inhibited independent engagement. So the examiners know the formula is the problem, and the exam structure rewards the formula anyway.
Because a six-hour paper with thousands of scripts has to be markable.
It has to be markable, and markable means predictable, and predictable means teachable, and teachable means the handout. The whole chain is rational at every link and produces something nobody defends.
And what it produces is the thing Daniel described. Dread at the thought of ever reading the book again, and a strange fondness that the process itself created.
The fondness is real, though. That's the part I find interesting. Nobody's nostalgic for a textbook they crammed. But people are nostalgic for this play.
Because they watched it.
Because they watched it eighteen times, and the lines got into them, and now Daniel and Peter Clancy send each other Facebook messages that start with Private Gar's dialogue. The exam took the play and the repetition kept it.
There's a symmetry here that I don't think is a coincidence.
Go on.
The play is about a man with a public self and a private self. The exam asks students to produce a public self, the essay that matches the marking criteria, while the private self sits there with its real reaction. The students were performing the exact split Friel wrote.
That's the thing. They were asked to analyze a play about the gap between the performed self and the felt self, and the method of analysis required them to perform a self and suppress the felt one.
Which is why the fondness is strange. It's fondness for a play that understood what was being done to them.
And the dread is because they had to do it anyway.
Herman, I want to push on one thing. Is the Leaving Cert actually bad at this, or is it just that any mass exam has to do this?
Any mass exam has to standardize. That's true. But there's a difference between standardizing the assessment and standardizing the interpretation. You could set a question that rewards a student for a genuine reading and still mark it reliably. It's harder. It costs more. But the current structure doesn't just standardize the marking, it standardizes what the correct reading is, and then the handout becomes the text.
So the play becomes a set of prepared points.
The play becomes a set of prepared points. And then the student who actually felt something about the kitchen scene has to set that aside and write the answer about the father's emotional reticence as a theme, with three supporting quotations.
Which they're doing while writing it. It's almost too neat.
I keep coming back to the memory drift with the belt.
The belt.
Daniel remembers the father giving Gar the belt. It was Ned. And he remembers it with total confidence, because he saw it so many times.
The confidence is the interesting part. Repetition doesn't just blur a memory, it hardens it. He's more sure of the wrong detail than he'd be of a right one he'd seen once.
And the wrong detail is more emotionally coherent than the right one. A father giving his son a belt as a goodbye gift fits the story he's telling. Ned giving him a belt is just a friend being a friend.
So the memory edited the play to make it a better version of itself. Which is what memory does.
And what the exam does, in a way. It edits the text down to the version that fits the answer.
The exam edits the text down to the version that fits the answer, and the student remembers the version that fits the answer, and then twenty years later they remember a play they never quite saw.
Which brings us to the question of what the play actually did, in the end.
It did what Friel said it would. It traveled. It ran two hundred performances on Broadway and broke a record. It opened in the West End and got warm reviews and one review calling it a leprechaun. It's been on Irish exam lists for decades. It's still being taught.
The reception at the time was more contested than the fond memory suggests.
Much more. The Times called it provincial. The Guardian called the device a gimmick. Mary Holland, who loved it, still called it parochial by the highest standards. The consensus that it's a masterpiece came later, and it came mostly from the Irish side of the argument.
Which is a very Irish thing to happen to a play about Irish people being misunderstood.
Friel would probably have enjoyed that.
Let's bring in Hilbert, because I know he's got something on this one.
Hilbert: Seven times.
Seven times?
Hilbert: I was covering an English class in a secondary school in the west of Ireland. Not Cork. But similar enough. A few weeks, that's all it was. They handed me a tape and said just play it, they'll get it eventually. So I played it seven times over three weeks. By the end I could do Private Gar's lines from memory.
Did the students get it?
Hilbert: Some of them. One of them asked me why the father couldn't just say I love you. And I had to explain that the father gives him the belt, and that's the father saying it, and the boy just looked at me.
The belt.
Hilbert: That's the scene. The father can't say it, so he gives him something sturdy, and he tells him where to sit on the plane, and that's the whole man in one gesture. I remember it clearly because I had to explain it four times to four different boys who all asked the same question.
Hilbert, the belt is actually given by Ned. Gar's friend. The father's gesture is the aviation advice.
Hilbert: No, the father gives him the belt.
The belt is Ned's.
Hilbert: Well. I explained it as the father's, and the boys understood it as the father's, and it works as the father's. So I'll stand by it.
You're standing by a misreading.
Hilbert: I'm standing by what made sense in the room. The father gives him the belt, the father tells him where to sit, and the boy who asked the question stopped asking. That's what the scene is for.
I can't argue with the room.
Hilbert: I still have the tape.
The VHS.
Hilbert: Borrowed it from the school. Never brought it back. It's in a box somewhere. I haven't watched it since, but I can't bring myself to throw it out.
You have a physical object from this exact experience.
Hilbert: It's a tape of a play I watched seven times and taught badly to a room of bored teenagers because nobody trained me to teach it. They gave me a tape and a room. That's the system. You don't have to understand the play. You have to press play.
That's the whole critique, and you got there by describing your job.
Hilbert: I was a substitute. I did what I was told. The tape did the teaching. I just made sure it got to the end.
The boys who asked the question, the one who wanted to know why the father couldn't say it.
Hilbert: He got it. He got it more than the ones who were taking notes. He just wanted to know why the man couldn't say the thing. And I told him the man gives him the belt instead. Which is true, as far as the room was concerned.
Hilbert, that's the most useful thing anyone's said about this play all episode.
Hilbert: It's just what happened.
The system doesn't require understanding. It requires compliance. You press play, the students watch, the exam gets marked, and somewhere in there a boy asks a real question and gets an answer that's slightly wrong but emotionally right, and the tape goes in a box and never comes out.
That's the dread and the fondness in one object. A borrowed VHS that he can't return and can't throw away.
The play is about a man who can't say the thing and a father who can't say the thing, and the artifact of how we taught it is a tape nobody can bring themselves to deal with.
It's almost too neat.
Friel would have enjoyed that too.
Here's the thing I keep circling. The play's whole device is the gap between the public self and the private self. And the exam system took that play and asked students to produce a public self about it, while their private self sat there with its actual reaction. The dread is the private self remembering what it had to suppress. The fondness is the private self remembering that it was there at all, that something real happened in that classroom even though the system was designed to prevent it.
The fondness is the proof that the play beat the exam. Daniel and Peter Clancy sending each other Private Gar lines twenty years later is the play winning. The exam got the marks. The play got the friendship.
That's the one thing worth taking from this. The system can prescribe the text and standardize the answer and mark the essay, but it can't stop the lines from getting into people. The repetition that was supposed to drill the analysis into them drilled the play in instead.
The play was always about exactly that. The thing that survives the performance.
Hilbert, thanks for producing. We'll be back soon.
This has been My Weird Prompts. If you've got a text you studied to death and can still quote, tell us about it. Email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
See you tomorrow.
