Stage: Your Friends And Neighbours

Actor Peter Hanly is positively inspired at the moment. And so he should be.

He’s just finished playing a leading role in one of the biggest hits of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Rough Magic’s Improbable Frequencies, and now he’s taking one of the four lead roles in the Pulitzer Prize winning play Dinner With Friends, written by Donald Margulies and currently running at Andrews Lane Theatre in Dublin. Better still, although “touch wood” he is happily involved in a relationship he did often receive the “shock of recognition” while rehearsing this ‘breezy comedy of modern manners’ which explores the ‘murky waters of forty-something marital break down’.
“In fact, all four of us actors in the rehearsal room and the stage manager and director were all saying things like, ‘this is amazingly familiar’,” claims Peter. “Or I’d be saying, ‘in my experience women can be like this’ then someone else would say, ‘and all men can be like’ such and such. But then we had to be careful not to generalise and, more so, not to judge our characters.
“Indeed, we had to try really hard not to be judgmental about the four characters in the play or the way all of them operate and the things they feel. But the play itself does that, too. It walks the line really well of showing quite extreme behaviour but not judging it so we, as actors, had to really carefully walk that line also. We had to leave it to the audience to be as judgmental as they please!”
Whether Irish audiences will be judgmental watching Dinner with Friends remains to be seen. One thing is certain, given that marital breakdown among fortysomethings is a rapidly growing phenomenon in Ireland, audiences will also be struck by a shock of recognition in terms of its theme. The play focuses on two couples, and Peter plays the part of the couple “who seem to be staying together”, though he quickly hangs a question mark over that premise. The other couple, however, are very much breaking up.
“These couples are all old friends,” he says. “And what’s great about the play is that it really scratches away at how relationships can be corroded over the years, how people change. In fact, though there are only four people involved, there also are four relationships at the centre of the play because the two guys were friends, and the two women were friends, and one couple introduced the other couple to each other - so there are all those ramifications.
“Certainly the couple who are staying together are shocked and rocked by the break up of the other couple. That’s a huge strand of the play. And let’s just say a lot is left up for grabs! But either way I do think a lot of people will relate to this play deeply.”
Now you know why Peter Hanly is so inspired by being in the Irish premiere of Dinner With Friends.
“In a way it even feels like I’m in a brand new play because although it has been on in London and off-Broadway it is basically a new play for Irish audiences,” he muses. “But its theme definitely will be familiar because the subject is so universal. But you can never tell how a play will be received. None of us could have known back when we started doing the Rough Magic play that it would turn out to be so successful.
“But its success was a real delight. Especially for the playwright, Arthur Riordan, who I heard worked on it for four if not six years. In fact an amazing amount of work went into even the writing of that musical and it showed. So, yes, moving from that to Dinner with Friends has left me on a total high!”

Dinner With Friends is currently running at Andrew’s Lane Theatre