“Still Another Judith”: Protest and Performance in Brian Friel’s Film Adaptation of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

In the unpublished transcript of a 1991 interview with Mel Gussow, Brian Friel expresses relief that he has never found it financially necessary to work in film or television because “filums [sic.]…have nothing to do with the writers really.”¹ Notoriously skeptical of directors and magisterial in the production of his plays, Friel’s distaste for a medium as collaborative and commercial as film is, in one sense, unsurprising. It is doubtful that a proposal he received just a few months after this confession—to write the screenplay for an episode of George Lucas’s Young Indiana Jones Chronicles set during the 1916 Easter Rising—did much to change his mind.² However, this distaste also seems incongruous with Friel’s longstanding interest in the experimental freedom offered by theatre and radio, dating from his early radio plays, which he claims “show[ed] me I could write dialogue” and may have been instrumental in his shift from short fiction to drama.³ Aside from what the playwright describes as a “disastrous”⁴ film version of his first major play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Friel’s archive is notably devoid of works in film and television, with one exception: a 1972 film treatment of Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955).

Like many of Friel’s prejudices, his aversion to film seems to have a specific history: in this case, that of a frustratingly unsuccessful project undertaken at a crucial juncture in both his career and the Northern Irish Troubles. Solicited by Moore on behalf of producer David Harvey and would-be leading lady Katherine Hepburn, Friel began writing the screenplay just weeks before attending the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association march in Derry on January 30, 1972, now better known as Bloody Sunday, when the killing of fourteen unarmed protesters by the British military marked a major escalation in the violence of the Northern conflict. He completed the script in the months following that chaotic day, working at a fever pitch to produce a first draft by July of the same year.

Over the years in which the screenplay would languish due to lack of funding, the realities of the film industry proved ultimately too frustrating for the playwright, who would later delegate film treatments of his dramatic works to other writers, as he did with Frank McGuinness for the film of Dancing at Lughnasa. Although the screenplay was never produced, this ill-fated attempt at staging a relentlessly dour Irish novel in a medium the playwright would eventually come to abhor nevertheless reveals a surprising nexus of concerns shaping Friel’s theatrical conceptions of gender, tragedy, and politics. These concerns are made particularly visible by the mechanics of adaptation, in which changes to the source text reveal key moments of deliberation, investment, and interpretation on Friel’s part.

The unpublished work contains key dramatic elements that become central to Friel’s later plays; most notably, the representation of Irish social problems through suffering, often female characters. Reading Friel’s later drama in light of this adaptation, his most immediate response to the “[in]adequately distilled”⁵ experience of Bloody Sunday, offers historical insight into Friel’s deployment of character as both political diagnostic and theatrical device. Further, the screenplay raises key questions about how the study of modern playwrights might place cinematic works—however “minor” or commercial—in a more meaningful dialogue with what is often conceived of as a primarily theatrical oeuvre. In the work that follows, I read Friel’s adaptation of Moore’s novel primarily through his reconfiguration of the protagonist’s character, situating the changes he makes alongside both the charged politics of the 1970s and the political investments of his theatrical work.⁶

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Moore’s novel, largely inspired by James Joyce, presents a cross-gendered retelling of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, recasting Stephen Dedalus as a sodality spinster in 1950s Belfast. It was critically successful in England, Canada, and the United States, and...