Brian Friel Plays 1 (2 page)

Friel’s next four plays were produced in the Abbey Theatre before beginning their runs abroad in London and New York. After that, the pattern was broken and, although the Abbey will continue to produce his plays, it no longer has an assumed right to the first production. The plays, with dates of first
performance
, were
The
Freedom
of
the
City
(1973),
Volunteers
(1975),
Living
Quarters
(1977) and
Aristocrats
(1979). In the first two of these, the political atmosphere is highly charged. The three central characters in
Freedom
are civil rights marchers trapped by the British Army in the mayor’s parlour of a city’s Guildhall. As they and others talk of their plight, it becomes clear that they will emerge only to be shot as terrorists. In
Volunteers,
the victimized group is a squad of IRA prisoners who have volunteered, against the orders of their own organization, to take temporary release from prison in order to help with an archaeological excavation. They know that, on their return to prison at the end of the dig, they will be murdered.
Living
Quarters
and
Aristocrats
are studies in the breakdown of a family and its illusory social and cultural authority in the small-town setting of Ballybeg. All of these plays have in common an interest in the disintegration of traditional authority and in the exposure of the violence upon which it had rested. Despite the bleakness of the general situation, Friel manages to make his central victims appealing even in their futility and in their frequent bouts of self-pity. He still adheres to his fascination with the human capacity for producing consoling fictions to make life more tolerable. Although he destroys these fictions he does not, with that, destroy the motives that produced them
– motives which are rooted in the human being’s wish for dignity as well as in his tendency to avoid reality.

In addition, these plays are full of what we may call displaced voices, American sociologists, English judges, and voice-overs from the past play their part in the dialogue in set speeches, tape-recordings, through loudspeakers. The discourse they
produce
is obviously bogus. Yet its official jargon represents something more and something worse than moral obtuseness. It also represents power, the one element lacking in the world of the victims where the language is so much more vivid and spontaneous. Once again, in divorcing power from eloquence, Friel is indicating a traditional feature of the Irish condition. The voice of power tells one kind of fiction – the lie. It has the purpose of preserving its own interests. The voice of
powerlessness
tells another kind of fiction – the illusion. It has the purpose of pretending that its own interests have been preserved. The contrast between the two becomes unavoidable at moments of crisis. Each of these plays presents us with such a moment, when both sets of voices are pitted against one another in a struggle which leads to a common ruin. Yet within the group of the victims there is another opposition which is perhaps more crucial and is certainly even more tense. It takes the form of a contrast too, between the fast-talking, utterly sceptical outsider and the silent, almost aphasic insider. At first, it seems to be a comic confrontation between a witty intelligence and a dumb stupidity. But it becomes tragic in the end and we are left to reflect that intelligence may be a gift, eloquence may be an attraction but that neither is necessarily a virtue and that the combination of both, in circumstances like these, may be disastrous. These outsiders are, dramatically speaking,
dominating
and memorable presences. Skinner in
The
Freedom
of
the
City,
Keeney in
Volunteers,
Ben in
Living
Quarters,
Eamon in
Aristocrats,
are all men who make talk a compensation for their dislocation from family or society. They see clearly but, on that account, can do nothing. Against them, in the same plays, are ranged, respectively, Lily, Smiler, Ben in his second role of stammering nervousness and Casimir. Surrounding them are the voices of control – fathers, judges, narrators, expert analysts.
Friel found in these plays a way to quarantine his central cast, with its tension between eloquence and silence, within a zone of official discourse with its ready-made jargon of inauthenticity. As a result, the plays are even more fiercely
spoken
plays. Language, in a variety of modes and presented in a number of recorded ways, dominates to the exclusion of almost everything else. The Babel of educated and uneducated voices, of speech flowing and speech blocked, the atmosphere of permanent crisis and of unshakable apathy, is as much a feature of Friel’s as it is of Beckett’s or of O’Casey’s plays.

Although
The
Freedom
of
the
City
and
Volunteers
were evidently related, in however oblique a manner, to the troubles in Northern Ireland, it was still surprising to see the ferocity and the blindness with which critics, especially in London and New York, reacted to them. During those years (1973–6), the IRA campaign against the British presence in the North was at its height and the propaganda war was, as a consequence,
intensified
to an almost unprecedented degree. Friel was accused by some rather hysterical English and American reviewers of defending the IRA by his attacks upon the British Army and the whole system of authority which that army was there to defend. Wisely, he ignored this hack reviewing, although it cost him dear financially, especially in New York. Instead, Friel kept his attention fixed on the evolving form of his own work and in 1979, at the Longacre Theatre in New York, with José Quintero as director and James Mason in the leading part, he presented one of his most important, if also one of his most unexpected plays –
Faith
Healer.

Faith
Healer
has no political background. It is the story of Frank Hardy, the faith healer, his wife Grace, and his manager Teddy. The play is composed of four monologues, the first and last spoken by Frank, the second and third spoken by Grace and Teddy in turn. A ramshackle caravan, patrolling the remote villages of England, Scotland and Wales, offering to the chronically ill the prospect of a miracle cure at the hands of the faith healer; within that, another story, of a drastic event, the death of Frank’s and Grace’s child, or of Frank’s mother, or of something which both of these are emblems of; and beyond that,
the final return to Donegal and Ballybeg, where Frank’s treacherous gift will finally betray him into the brutal death he has begun to long for and expect. We have here a complex metaphor of the artist who is possessed by a gift over which he has no control. A travelling showman, putting on his little theatrical production night after night, waiting for the miracle to happen, for the moment at which the audience will be cured, energized by a miracle, he is also, very clearly, the artist as playwright. However, the return to home and death out of exile, often inspected by Friel before (as in
The
Laves
of Cass
McGuire
) reinstitutes the social and political dimension which had been otherwise so subdued. Home is the place of the deformed in spirit. The violent men who kill the faith healer are intimate with him, for their savage violence and his miraculous gift are no more than obverse versions of one another. Once again, Friel is intimating to his audience that there is an inescapable link between art and politics, the Irish version of which is the closeness between eloquence and violence. The mediating agency is, as always, disappointment, but it is a disappointment all the more profound because it is haunted by the possibility of miracle and of Utopia.
Faith
Healer
is the parable which gives coherence to the preceding four plays. With them, it marks the completion of another passage in Friel’s career. It is his most triumphant rewriting of his early work and stands in a peculiarly ironic, almost parodic relationship to
Philadelphia
, of which it is both the subversion and the fulfilment.

With the new decade of the 1980s, Field Day was born. It is a theatre company, founded by Friel and Stephen Rea, the Irish actor, and it is a cultural group embracing three poets, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and the present writer as well as the broadcaster and musician, David Hammond. It was founded to put on plays outside the confines of the established theatre and, through that, to begin to effect a change in the apathetic atmosphere of the North. Although Field Day will not be an exclusively theatrical venture, that aspect of its activities is the only one pertinent here. Derry was chosen as the centre of its operations. All the plays have their world première there. The first of these was
Translations
, widely acclaimed both in Ireland
and abroad as Friel’s masterpiece. It was first produced in Derry, in the Guildhall, on 23 September 1980. Since then, it has had long runs in London and New York. However, the play is best seen in relation to the third Field Day production (the second was Friel’s translation of Chekhov’s
Three
Sisters
in 1981),
The
Communication
Cord
(produced 1982, published 1983). For this most recent play is an antidote to
Translations
, a farce which undermines the pieties sponsored by the earlier play, a defensive measure against any possible sentimentality in its predecessor.
Translations
is not, in fact, sentimental, but it treats of a theme which is powerfully emotive in the Irish context and one which has been subjected to a great deal of vulgarization and hypocrisy. That theme is the death of the Irish language. Friel locates the moment of its final decline in the Donegal of the 1830s, the years in which the British Army Engineer Corps carried out its famous ordnance survey of Ireland, mapping and renaming the whole country to accord with its recent (1800) integration into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The crisis of the language is expressed in terms of the crisis in a family. Owen, the son of a
hedge-school
master, who teaches Latin and Greek through Irish, arrives home from Dublin with the British Army corps to help them in the mapping and renaming of his native territory. He is the recognizable Frielian outsider who has the intimacy of an insider, the man who is betraying his ancestral and anachronistic community into the modern, Anglicized world. The subsequent events demonstrate once more the salience of the connection between language (its loss and its mastery) and politics (its violence and its authority). It states with unprecedented clarity and force much that had been implicit in Friel’s work since the beginning. The crisis he is concerned with is a crisis both of language and of civilization and it is experienced directly by people who are trapped within the confines of a place and an attitude of mind from which there is no escape. It is, thus, a tragic play. Military and cultural imperialism, provincial
rebellion
and cultural fantasy collide with such force that the worst aspects of each are precipitated into a permanent and deadly confrontation. It is a play about the tragedy of English
imperialism as well as of Irish nationalism. Most of all, it is a play about the final incoherence that has always characterized the relationship between the two countries, the incoherence that comes from sharing a common language which is based upon different presuppositions. The failure of language to
accommodate
experience, the failure of a name to fully indicate a place, the failure of lovers to find the opportunity to express their feeling whether in words or deed, are all products of this political confrontation. In
Translations,
Friel has found a
sequence
of events in history which are transformed by his writing into a parable of events in the present day. Paradoxically, although his theme is failure, linguistic and political, the fact that the play has been written is itself an indication of the success of the imagination in dealing with everything that seems opposed to its survival. What is most characteristically tragic about the play is the sense of exhilaration which it transmits to the audience. Language lost in this fashion is also language rediscovered in such a way that the sense of loss has been overcome. In that strange, contradictory triumph, Brian Friel has reached a culmination in his dramatic career. No Irish writer since the early days of this century has so sternly and courageously asserted the role of art in the public world without either yielding to that world’s pressures or retreating into art’s narcissistic alternatives. In the balance he has achieved between these forces he has become an exemplary figure.

SEAMUS DEANE

January
1984