[Hewes admires Friel's "powers of observation that permit him to recreate characters with telling accuracy" and claims that Philadelphia, Here I Come! is "an honest piece of work" that "achieves great poignancy without pretension. "]

One reason Brian Friel's new Irish play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, is so likable may be that it so honestly assesses two unsatisfactory civilizations: inhibited and materially impoverished Ireland and its opposite, America. The playwright's view seems to be that Ireland's tragedy is the constant emigration of its best young people, and that the Irish emigrant's tragedy is that his achievement elsewhere is rootless and disconnected. For the play's entire action is its protagonist's sometimes humorous, sometimes sad, search for any reason to stay where his roots are.

To make this search more dramatic, Mr. Friel has employed the device of having one actor, Patrick Bedford, deliver young Gareth's outward behavior, and another, Donai Donnelly, portray the same character's private self. The latter argues and provokes, hopes and laments, under-lines and comments, but surprisingly enough emerges as almost more real than the actual Gareth. Under Hilton Edwards's sensitive direction these two fine young Irish actors never rest on the device and thereby avoid the danger of tedium.

While the author doesn't demonstrate a capacity for writing dialogue comparable to that of an O'Casey or a Behan ("You wait, says she, till the rosary's over and the kettle's on" is about as lyrical as he gets), his powers of observation permit him to recreate characters with telling accuracy. Most memorable of these are Mairin D. O'Sullivan's aged womanservant whose affection goes unrewarded, Eamon Kelly's hoary father almost totally imprisoned within small habits, Eamon Morrissey's laconic hangeron, and Mavis Villier's flashy Philadelphian whose loud talk only makes her hidden emptiness more apparent.

Furthermore, like The Glass Menagerie, this play expresses a tender awareness of how memory distills events, with the evening's nicest irony being that the uncommunicative father remembers his son through one past incident, while the lonely young man remembers his father through a different one. But the tragic fact is that neither can recall the other's incident.

Because it is such an honest piece of work the play ends inconclusively, and one feels that the playwright may have missed an opportunity to allow the private Gareth to stir us with a more passionate and poetic summing up. Nevertheless, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, achieves great poignancy without pretension and deserves to be widely appreciated.