Brian Friel plays & bees

This incredible photo of Brian Friel was taken by the photographer and broadcaster Bobbie Hanvey (aka The Ramblin' Man) and appears in the latest edition of Irish Pages. Bobbie, of whom Van Morrison once said "Look at the cameras flying out of that man!", is a force of nature. You can almost hear him behind the camera, standing in Brian Friel's back garden in 2000. I love the look on Friel's face, totally inscrutable, but you know that he has to be enjoying himself with Hanvey. 

Friel is a man of few public words these days. I've long given up trying to get him to agree to me doing a radio interview with me. He always writes back to me with a polite but firm no.

I got to know him in the late 1980's when I spent summer holidays helping Field Day Theatre Company in their Derry office. I was head of putting up posters! 

Brian would come in from time to time, for board meetings or to pick up letters. I must have said to him I was heading to London for a few days, and he paused and said would I do him a favour? "Only if I had time" he insisted "but would I go to Foyle's and look out some sheet music for him?" He wrote down the pieces of music he was looking for, all popular songs from the late 1920's and the first half of the 1930's. A big band number like "Dancing in the Dark" from 1931, or Cole Porter's "Anything Goes " from 1934. He wanted to know publisher's details. Now I realise for copyright.

It was only the next year watching "Dancing at Lughnasa" in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990 that I realised what I had been doing. He was researching songs for that play. The sisters love to dance and snatches of songs break through on the kitchen radio, the wireless with Marconi written on it. It's funny now, with the internet, that kind of research can be done with a search engine and a download. In 1989, it was me heading into Foyle's armed with the piece of paper on which he had jotted down some song titles and browsing through the alphabetised rows upon rows of music.

A few days after I came back and had sent him on the sheet music, a copy of his plays was left on my desk. Inside he had written, "To Marie-Louise who tramped the streets of London for me, Brian".