Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics

Brian Friel

Also by Anthony Roche: CONTEMPORARY IRISH DRAMA (second edition) THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO BRIAN FRIEL (editor)

Brian Friel Theatre and Politics Anthony Roche

© Anthony Roche 2011 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978–0–230–57647–6

hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roche, Anthony. Brian Friel: theatre and politics/Anthony Roche. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–57647–6 1. Friel, Brian—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Friel, Brian—Political and social views. 3. Ireland—In literature. 4. Northern Ireland—In literature. I. Title. PR6056.R5Z87 2011 822'.914—dc22 2011012450 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Katy, With love and gratitude

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Escaping Containment: The Early Plays of Brian Friel

8

2

Friel and the Director: Tyrone Guthrie and Hilton Edwards

32

3

Fantasy in Friel

58

4

Brian Friel and Contemporary British Drama: The Missing Dimension

84

The Politics of Space: Renegotiating Relationships in Friel’s Plays of the 1970s

105

Friel’s Translations: An Inquiry into the Disappearance of Lieutenant George Yolland

130

7

Memory and History

152

8

Negotiating the Present

177

5 6

Conclusion

203

Notes

208

Bibliography

226

Index

231

vii

Acknowledgements There are a lot of people to be acknowledged in the preparation of this book. I would first of all like to thank University College Dublin’s President Hugh Brady and Vice-President of Research, Des Fitzgerald, for a President’s Research Fellowship in 2006–7, which enabled me to spend the time with the Brian Friel Papers in the National Library of Ireland that laid the foundations for this study. I am grateful to the staff of the National Library who facilitated my work in the archive, in particular Tom Desmond. I also thank the Guthrie Theater Archive, Performing Arts Archive, Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Richard Pine and Frank McGuinness were as usual my invaluable sounding boards, joined by Anna McMullan who provided various occasions for me to try out the material. I am grateful to the following colleagues in the UCD School of English, Drama and Film: Luca Crispi; Gerardine Meaney; Christopher Murray; Declan Kiberd; Emilie Pine; and to colleagues in Drama Studies at UCD – Finola Cronin, Eamonn Jordan, Cathy Leeney and Ian Walsh – for their support. Special thanks to Catriona Clutterbuck, who first suggested I write a book solely about Brian Friel, to James Ryan, for the right advice on how to end it, and to Eamonn Jordan, for his careful reading of the final manuscript. I wish to thank my wonderful Third Year English students in the Brian Friel seminar I have taught over the past four years; especially Caitriona Ennis who with Katie McCann produced a memorable Dancing at Lughnasa in Dramsoc. I am also grateful to my Ph.D. student, Patrick O’Donnell, who worked on Tyrone Guthrie, and to Harry White of the School of Music. In Trinity College, Dublin, Nicholas Grene in the School of English and Melissa Sihra in Drama Studies both helped the work, as did Brian Arkins and Patrick Lonergan at NUI-Galway. The same was true of the following in Drama Studies at Queen’s University, Belfast: David Grant, Paul Murphy and Mark Phelan. Christopher Fitz-Simon, Mary Luckhurst of the University of York and Stephen Watt of Indiana University all helped me along the way. Thomas Dillon Redshaw of Irish Studies at the University of St Thomas, St Paul, and James Rogers, editor of New Hibernia Review, both facilitated my stay in the Twin Cities and visit to the Guthrie Theater. In addition to the creative individuals who put on the many Friel productions I have seen, I would particularly like to thank the following from the theatrical community, all of whom fed the work: actor/director Denis Conway and actor David Heap; directors Sean Holmes and Patrick Mason; producer Noel Pearson; Michael Colgan, director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre; Joe Dowling, director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; Fiach viii

Acknowledgements

ix

MacConghail, director of the Abbey Theatre and literary manager Aideen Howard. Joe Mulholland of the McGill Summer School in Glenties, County Donegal, Anne McGrory of the Macklin School in Culdaff in Inishowen and photographer Bobby Hanvey brought it all closer to home. I owe a great debt to Christabel Scaife, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who believed in and encouraged the book from the start and who never failed to say the right thing; and to her successor, Paula Kennedy, and assistant editor Ben Doyle, who brought it through the final stages. I am grateful to Pat Donlon, director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan, where several of these chapters were drafted, for always giving me Guthrie’s study. My greatest debts are the last named: to Brian Friel not only for the wondrous work but for his unfailing courtesy and good humour. And to my family: Merlin Roche, who was an invaluable research assistant in the early stages of the project; Louis Roche, who understood what Daddy was up to; and my wife, Katy Hayes, whose love and profound knowledge of the theatre kept her husband and the book on track until the very end. I would like to thank Brian Friel for his permission to reproduce unpublished material from the Brian Friel Papers at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin. I would also like to thank Julia Crampton and Michael Travers for permission to publish extracts from the correspondence of Tyrone Guthrie and Hilton Edwards respectively in Chapter 2. I would like to thank the following publishers for permission to quote from the plays: Faber and Faber (London); Peter Fallon of The Gallery Press (Oldcastle, Co. Meath).

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Introduction

Brian Friel is widely recognized as Ireland’s leading contemporary playwright, a reputation secured across half a century from the early 1960s onwards and an oeuvre of 24 original plays and eight translations/versions (primarily of Turgenev and Chekhov). But through the ability of plays like 1980’s Translations and 1990’s Dancing at Lughnasa to translate and find equivalents in other cultures, he has also made a major contribution to and impact on world theatre. His plays have usually had their world premieres in Ireland, at either of Dublin’s main theatres, the Gate or the Abbey. An important element in the Irish dimension is his decade-long involvement with Field Day, the theatre company he co-founded in 1980 with actor Stephen Rea. After premiering a play annually (either by Friel or other noted Irish writers) in Derry, the city where Friel grew up and worked as a teacher, the company then toured the productions extensively throughout both Northern Ireland and the Republic. Throughout his career a significant number of Friel’s plays have ‘broken out’ of Ireland and gone on to worldwide success. This is a relatively rare phenomenon for an Irish playwright and considered in relation to his Field Day involvement links Friel back to Yeats, Gregory, Synge and their founding of an Irish National Theatre over a century ago. In the 1960s, Friel’s breakthrough play Philadelphia, Here I Come! was produced on Broadway the year after its Dublin premiere, its portrayal of a young Irishman emigrating to the US striking a responsive chord in US audiences. This success was followed up two years later with another long Broadway run for Lovers (1967), his two linked one-act plays. In between, however, came The Loves of Cass McGuire, which after an extensive out-oftown tryout in the US closed its New York run after 20 performances. In the 1970s a new Friel play opened roughly every two years at the Abbey; but with the exception of 1973’s The Freedom of the City – which had a joint premiere in Dublin and at London’s Royal Court – Friel’s 1970s work did not play much outside Ireland. (The Broadway premiere of 1979’s Faith Healer was an exception, but did not succeed on this occasion.) In the 1980s Field 1

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Brian Friel

Day drew more notice to Friel in the UK. Its premiere play Translations, whose nineteenth-century plot and setting bore on Anglo-Irish relations in the present, has had many UK productions and has for some time been a set text on the A-Levels curriculum. The 1988 Field Day production of Friel’s Making History, with Stephen Rea in the lead as Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, transferred directly to London’s National Theatre; and a London production in the same year of Friel’s 1979 play, Aristocrats, at the Hampstead directed by Robin LeFèvre, won the Evening Standard Drama Award for Best Play. It was Dancing at Lughnasa, first produced at the Abbey in 1990, that brought Friel’s worldwide reputation to an all-time high, as it took first London and then New York by storm, winning an Olivier and a Tony award along the way. The plays written since then have met with mixed fortunes. 1993’s Wonderful Tennessee, unlike Lughnasa, did not last long on Broadway; whereas the Gate’s production of 2005’s The Home Place again won Friel the Evening Standard Drama Award for its London run. His work now receives productions worldwide that show how established and celebrated Friel has become; in the words of Charles Spenser in the London Telegraph, ‘at his best, there is no greater dramatist now writing in the English language’.1 Two of the most courageous decisions Friel ever made were the decision to give up teaching and the decision to dedicate himself to playwriting. Born, as he put it himself, ‘a member of the [Catholic] minority living in the North’ of Ireland,2 he moved at the age of ten from Omagh to Derry where he was to grow up and become a teacher, like his father before him. In 1960, at the age of 31, he gave up teaching to become a full-time writer, a brave decision for a married man with a growing family. The decision must have been helped by the fact that he had a contract at the time with The New Yorker for the short stories he was then writing. Later in the 1960s he gave up writing short stories to concentrate solely on drama and the theatre. This may have been encouraged by the US success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! but was still a risky move, since a successful play can often be followed by a commercial failure, as Friel was to experience more than once throughout his career. He may even have encouraged this zig-zag pattern of success and failure, since he is extremely ambivalent about success. In the next work he writes, Friel could be seen to react against what he sees as a process of simplification when one of his plays achieves huge success, its deep-felt emotion sentimentalized, its political and historic ironies flattened or removed. He quoted the late Graham Greene to the effect that ‘success is only the postponement of failure’ when accepting an Olivier award for Dancing at Lughnasa in 1991 (this comprised the entire acceptance speech). Friel went on to prove (and arguably test) this maxim with the failure of its successor, the more abstract and philosophical Wonderful Tennessee; it closed on Broadway, after nine performances, where Lughnasa had run for over a year. But fellow playwright (and fellow Field Day board member) Thomas Kilroy has suggested this process and pattern was at work in Friel’s career

Introduction

3

from the start, noting that ‘some of the American audiences that responded with such warmth to young Gar [in Philadelphia, Here I Come!] must have felt distinctly uncomfortable’ with the title character of his next play, The Loves of Cass McGuire, ‘the “returned Yank” with all her fierce, vulgar energy and her experience of the American system at its most pitiless’.3 Encouraged by the director Tyrone Guthrie, who invited him to Minneapolis for some months in 1963 to sit in on rehearsals, Friel sensed that he had it within him to become a distinctively original and groundbreaking Irish playwright. He published his second and last volume of short stories in 1966, The Gold in the Sea, having lost interest in the form and concluding that he would never produce anything beyond what Frank O’Connor had achieved. Henceforth, he would dedicate himself solely and wholeheartedly to a life in the theatre. The archive of the Brian Friel papers in the National Library of Ireland, on which this book is the first to draw, is a detailed and painstaking record of what he invested in that belief. Here is the textual evidence of the numerous versions of the plays, written and rewritten through draft after drafts across a span of months, sometimes years: incisions are made with the meticulous scalpel of his black-ink pen into what would seem perfectly fine lines of dialogue and even better suggestions are superimposed. Each play, whatever its ultimate success or failure when produced, is written with a high ambition, a self-questioning perfectionism, a ceaseless experimentation and a determination to break new ground. The numerous drafts are also accompanied by the playwright’s own extensive notes, working out the characters and themes of the chosen play. One of the key questions for a book such as this has to be: what light does the knowledge of the archive reveal about Friel’s process in writing his plays? How do the findings modify or alter the established perceptions of his work? One answer comes readily to mind: that Friel is a more radical and experimental playwright than is commonly perceived. In part, this perception of Friel’s work as theatrically conservative has taken ground because a certain number of the plays (the ‘successful’ works already mentioned) have grown familiar through being frequently produced; while certain other works (the ‘failures’) have scarcely been seen since their original productions. The playwright may be seen to collude in this since he himself does not favour productions of a number of his plays, especially from the 1960s; but my own sense is that if a particular director wishes to stage one of these neglected works, the playwright is not beyond being persuaded. An example would be two of the co-founders of the Druid Theatre in Galway, director Garry Hynes and actress Marie Mullen, who when casting around in 1975 for an Irish play centred on a woman with which to launch their company came across Friel’s The Loves of Cass McGuire. On at least one occasion since (in the 1990s), Friel relented in his disinclination to see the play restaged and granted them permission to do so. With Marie Mullen still well short of the specified age of Cass’s three score years and ten, I would hope to see them stage it again.

4

Brian Friel

But if productions across the entire range of Friel’s oeuvre would help to remind us of that continuous experimentation, so too would renewed attention to and a greater awareness of the no less radical nature of the ‘successful’ plays. When Friel’s dramaturgy has been characterized, his work has been seen as largely naturalistic in form. Christopher Murray’s view would be representative of this: for him Friel adheres to a ‘realistic form’.4 The question – and questioning – of form is at the heart of all his work on the plays: successfully resolving the question of theatrical form is always a key point in their development. The concern that animates Friel’s experimentation in this regard is succinctly rendered in a remark on the composition of Aristocrats: ‘I suppose what I’m really trying to avoid is the threadbare device of realism.’5 Some of the ways Friel does so become increasingly overt as the career progresses: the appearance on stage of walking, living, breathing, talking characters who turn out to be dead, for example. Frank Hardy and his wife Grace in Faith Healer are a notable instance of this theatrical phenomenon, but one of only many that could be cited. But that experimentation is there from the start: in Friel’s decision to have the central character Gar O’Donnell in Philadelphia represented by two different actors. All of the decisions made in relation to form in Friel’s plays are driven by theatrical aims and ends, as this study will show. The most misunderstood critically speaking has to do with the frequent use of a narrator. Far from being a holdover from and recourse to the practices of his short fiction, the complex deployment of spoken narrative in Friel is always done to advance his theatrical aims, never more so than when narrative takes over in Faith Healer. There is no simple one-way process evident in the evolution of the manuscripts – for example, from initial specificity to a greater degree of abstraction. Certain real-life prototypes for certain characters are suggested, but at no point does it become a one-on-one identification, merely a contribution to the process by which the character is developed. (A notable exception to this is the judge presiding at the Tribunal of Inquiry in 1973’s The Freedom of the City, who is clearly modelled on Lord Widgery, the man who wrote the original report into the events of Bloody Sunday when 13 Civil Rights marchers in Derry were killed by the British Army.) It would be neat if there was a progressive depoliticization, as might seem when Friel considers making a particular character in a play a member of the IRA and then does not. But various options for the characters are being considered and reconsidered all the way through drafting, and that has to seriously qualify any such judgement. Perhaps the most that can be said is that the materials, the non-political as well as the political, become less crude and more refined in the process of composition. What does recur throughout the drafts is Friel’s use of a key term, the ‘political element’. As an example, when he is developing the 1983 farce The Communication Cord, Friel notes the absence so far of the ‘political/social element’, wonders how and by what it will be supplied and locates it principally in the setting of the ‘authentic’ peasant cottage in which the present-day action unfolds.6

Introduction

5

The ‘political element’, therefore, is always present in Friel’s plays. But it is not always concentrated on the North of Ireland. One of the aims of this book is to provide a more nuanced understanding of the politics of Friel’s plays, in relation to both Northern Ireland and the Republic. The emphasis of much of the academic analysis of Friel’s plays has been on the politics of Northern Ireland, given the huge media attention it has attracted across three decades. But Friel’s plays have as much to say about the politics of the Republic of Ireland as they do about the North. One example would be the Dublin-based satire of 1969’s The Mundy Scheme. The play focuses on the Republic’s Taoiseach [prime minister] and his cabinet colleagues as they face a financial crisis: the play was premiered in Dublin in the run-up to a fraught general election. And Friel frequently targets senators from the Irish Republic, Doogan in Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Donovan in The Communication Cord, as objects of his satire. But the political focus of this book will not be a case of replacing an overemphasis on the North with an exclusive emphasis on the South. Brian Friel never writes about one jurisdiction without some oblique relation to the other. This dual focus is in part enabled by the location of many of his plays in Donegal, in his archetypal setting of Ballybeg, a direct translation of the Gaelic ‘baile beag’, little or small town. Donegal in the time of Friel’s parents’ upbringing was part of the province of Ulster and not yet sequestered from the rest of Northern Ireland. His father was from Omagh in County Tyrone, where Friel was born in 1929. His mother was a Christina MacLoone from Glenties in County Donegal, one of five sisters, a biographical fact that is drawn on in several of the works, most memorably Dancing at Lughnasa. The north-eastern part of Ireland was bound by many local affiliations of family and culture. A wedge was driven into these links by the Act of Partition in 1922, with Donegal not included in the North because of its high proportion of Catholics and its largely unproductive land. The border was drawn just to the left of Derry, a valuable port thus secured for the North. The city was known by two names, Londonderry to the Unionist community, Derry to the Nationalists. The Friel family moved to Derry in 1939, where Friel’s father had a teaching position at the Long Tower school. Brian Friel attended as a pupil at his father’s school and in his turn became a teacher in Derry in 1950, after training at St Joseph’s College there. In 1969, as the Troubles spread, Friel and his family moved just across the border to Muff in County Donegal and subsequently even further up Lough Foyle to Greencastle in County Donegal, close to being the northernmost point in the island of Ireland. From his eyrie there, he has continued to keep a close eye on developments in both Irelands. Each of Friel’s plays calibrates the degree of its involvement with both the Republic and the North, and that dual calibration will be gauged and assessed in what follows. The book’s eight chapters are to some degree chronological. Chapter 1 examines the first five plays by Brian Friel, two for the radio, three for

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Brian Friel

the theatre; all three were staged, though only one has subsequently been published. All of this dramatic activity precedes the first ‘official’ play, the breakthrough with Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964. The writing and staging of that play is examined in Chapter 2 through Friel’s engagement with two major directors, Tyrone Guthrie, who became something of a mentor, and Hilton Edwards of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, who actually directed the play. But this second chapter also breaks with chronology, moving ahead in Friel’s career to consider how both Guthrie and Edwards surface in the later work. Chapter 3 draws on the theoretical writings of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek to examine the operation of fantasy in Friel’s theatre, in particular the two 1960s plays, Philadelphia and The Loves of Cass McGuire; but it moves on to 1979 to consider the most complex fantasist in all of Friel’s work, Casimir in Aristocrats. In Chapter 4, 1968’s Crystal and Fox and 1975’s Volunteers are analysed in relation to two central works from the canon of contemporary English drama, the least acknowledged area of Friel’s creative engagement with world theatre. In Chapter 5, four plays from the 1970s are examined in terms of space, as a means of breaking down the distinction between the political and the non-political plays of that decade. 1980’s Translations, which inaugurated the Field Day project and whose influence not just in theatrical but in cultural and political terms is huge, is the sole subject of Chapter 6. The closing movement of that chapter touches on the subject of Friel as a dramatist of history, writing plays about the Irish past that engage with the present, and so leads the way into a more extensive consideration of that subject in Chapter 7. Unsurprisingly, 1988’s Making History is considered in that context, as is Dancing at Lughnasa and its representation of the Ireland of the 1930s. Faith Healer’s presence in this chapter is owing to the dual frame of analysis linking history to memory provided by Paul Ricouer’s magisterial last book. In Memory, History and Forgetting, Ricoeur defines memory as an ‘active search’ for recollection that brings the three damaged protagonists of Faith Healer into the frame.7 The final chapter looks at Friel’s three post-Lughnasa plays later in the 1990s as works that confront and negotiate with the present rather than with the past; but that context is enlarged by the addition of 1983’s Communication Cord to the picture. This prising loose of that play from its association with Translations was suggested to me by Scott Boltwood’s in his 2007 study, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, and his decision to reverse chronology by placing the later play first. Boltwood regards The Communication Cord as ‘unique’ in the Field Day plays of the 1980s in its engagement with the present.8 But by linking The Communication Cord of the early 1980s with what was to come in the following decade, I have sought to show how it shares certain features with those plays, not least in its making a jargon-spouting academic central to the action. This repositioning is also done to cut across the cordoning off of Friel’s work for Field Day as if it were somehow separate from the rest of his career. Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics seeks not only to maintain a dual

Introduction

7

trajectory, one chronological, the other thematic, it also wants to break up some of the more established categorizations of Friel criticism and look at the work anew. In The Freedom of the City, one of the three Civil Rights marchers, Lily Mathews, is given a privileged theatrical opportunity at the moment of her death to reflect on the life she has lived: I thought I glimpsed a tiny truth: that life had eluded me because never once in my forty-three years had an experience, an event, even a small unimportant happening been isolated, and assessed, and articulated.9 This is as close to the articulation of an artistic credo as Brian Friel has come in 24 original plays written across more than 40 years. In that time, Ireland has become a more self-aware place because in and through the plays of Brian Friel the experiences and events of its people have been isolated, and assessed, and articulated. These concerns have been refracted through a number of families in the marginalized small town of Ballybeg in County Donegal; but like the great plays of the Greek tragedians they tell the whole story in revelatory microcosm. And like those Greek plays they have spoken to and been received around the world. While preparing a 2010 production of Translations in Leicester at the Curve Theatre, director Mick Gordon spoke of the rehearsal process in which he and the cast of actors were involved as ‘mining the architecture’ of Friel’s masterpiece.10 The work that follows is dedicated to and driven by the mining of the multi-layered strata of Brian Friel’s rich, subtle, profound plays.

1 Escaping Containment: The Early Plays of Brian Friel

When Philadelphia, Here I Come! was premiered at the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival, it established Brian Friel’s reputation as an innovative new playwright in a remarkably short space of time. Most of the reviews were positive; but it was the word of mouth, and in particular the play’s impact on future theatre practitioners, that testified to its importance as a breakthrough in the history of the Irish theatre. Thomas Kilroy, who would make his own theatrical debut four years later, has written: ‘I remember when I first saw Philadelphia, Here I Come! what excited me most, as someone who wished to write plays, was the delicate use of the stage as a place of illusion, playacting, make-believe.’1 Although it would take another production by the Gate Theatre the following year to achieve the desired American transfer, the play ran for nine months on Broadway before going on an extensive US tour. But Philadelphia was not Brian Friel’s first play, as might have appeared and as was suggested by most of the reviews. Several of the Dublin theatre critics referred to the fact that he had published a collection of short stories, The Saucer of Larks, with London publisher Victor Gollancz in 1962. One of them was Frank O’Connor, the greatest Irish short story writer of the time; when he reviewed the play for the Sunday Independent, O’Connor took the view and lamented the fact that Friel – the writer of delicate, Chekhovian short stories – had fallen among the vulgarians of the theatre.2 Only one reviewer referred to the fact that 1962 had also seen the premiere at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre of an earlier play by Brian Friel, The Enemy Within, centring on the exile of St Columba on Iona. None of the coverage stated that prior to the appearance of Philadelphia, Here I Come! Brian Friel had written and seen produced three stage plays: The Francophile (less satisfactorily retitled This Doubtful Paradise by its nervous producers), premiered by the Ulster Group Theatre in Belfast in 1960; The Enemy Within at the Abbey in 1962; and The Blind Mice, staged in Dublin’s Eblana Theatre by Gemini Productions in 1963. In the first critical monograph on Friel, D. E. S. Maxwell’s 1972 volume in the Bucknell University Press – Irish Writers Series, the Bibliography lists the 1965 publication by Faber of Philadelphia, Here I Come! as Friel’s first play.3 8

The Early Plays

9

In 1964, Brian Friel was 35 years of age, hardly a ‘young’ writer. In the drafts for Philadelphia, he originally conceived of his young protagonist Gar O’Donnell as a 29-year-old who will not only emigrate to the US the following day but will also turn 30. In the final version, it was revised downward to 25, though in many respects Gar’s behaviour remains that of a teenager. Friel had been writing throughout the 1950s, publishing his first short story in 1951 in The Bell when he was 22. In 1959, his story ‘The Skelper’ was published in The New Yorker, the first of many to be published there. The economic advantages of New Yorker publication for a writer were considerable, as he explained in a 1965 interview: ‘I’m lucky to the extent that most of my work sells in America, which means I get paid by American standards. […] I’m under contract to them [The New Yorker]. […] What they do is they pay you a retainer if you sign the contract and then they have to see everything that you write and they pay you twice as much as they would do if you weren’t under contract. […] If it weren’t for The New Yorker, I couldn’t live. Couldn’t live at all.’4 In 1960 Friel had resigned from the teaching job in Derry he had held for ten years to pursue a full-time career as a writer. This was a courageous thing to do at a time of general economic hardship and given his personal circumstances (married, with children). It would be natural to assume that Friel would concentrate on writing short stories for the rest of what was now to be a full-time professional writing career, since the genre of the short story had brought him the greatest financial and cultural success. But in that interview Friel also judges many of the stories that went into his first collection as ‘not good at all’ and confesses that he finds it more and more difficult to write them. Where earlier he ‘could write ten stories a year without any great effort’ now the best he can manage is ‘four or five a year at the most’; all he can conclude is that ‘perhaps now I’m more critical’.5 The year following the interview (1966) was to see the publication of a second collection of short stories, The Gold in the Sea. It was also to be his last. Friel was hardly much more positive in his remarks about the first three stage plays he had written. The Enemy Within he judged to be a ‘solid’ piece of work,6 and this relative endorsement was presumably the reason that, 17 years after the play’s first production, its author relented on the question of publication and allowed an authorized edition to appear in 1979 from Peter Fallon’s The Gallery Press (though never from Faber). But about The Francophile and The Blind Mice he was adamant; they were both ‘very bad’ and he decided to withdraw them.7 Neither has been published since, either by Faber and Faber or by The Gallery Press, and after a second production of The Blind Mice at Mary O’Malley’s Lyric Theatre in Belfast in October 1964, neither has been seen since. But the original scripts of both plays (in several drafts) are now available for consultation in the Brian Friel Papers in the National Library of Ireland. The archive also contains the original scripts of two radio plays of Friel’s produced by BBC Northern Ireland in 1958: To This Hard House and A Sort of Freedom. Despite the self-criticism levelled by

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Brian Friel

Brian Friel at many of his short stories and his first three stage plays, what has become much clearer in retrospect is that when the 1965 interview was conducted his career as a playwright was on an upward trajectory while his work as a writer of short stories was virtually at an end. In 1963, the year he was writing his fourth stage play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Friel spent a crucial sojourn out of Ireland as a guest of Sir Tyrone Guthrie. At that time, the world-famous theatre director was overseeing the building of a new theatre on the banks of the Mississippi in Minneapolis. The consequences of Friel’s time there, and his profound, complicated relationship with Tyrone Guthrie, will be explored in the second chapter. What I wish to establish in the first is what the landscape of Friel’s playwriting, the territory he had marked out at the outset of his dramatic career, looked like before 1964. Most commentators, myself included, have followed Friel in the importance he has bestowed on the experience of attending rehearsals at the Guthrie – introducing him to the practice of theatre in a sustained way and at a level of sophistication he had not previously encountered. But privileging that period has the effect not only of distorting but of dismissing, indeed erasing, the plays he had already written and had produced, on radio and on stage. This is an effect to which Friel has contributed through the suppression of his early work and which he has encouraged through such remarks as the following post-Minneapolis act of revisionism: ‘I made the startling and humiliating discovery that the few plays I had written were not the masterpieces I had thought them to be, but were, in sad truth, tedious and tendentious and terribly boring.’8 These early works are not theatrical masterpieces. But neither are they the sorry pieces Friel maintains in what is clearly rhetorical and emotional over-statement. When these missing pieces of the two radio and three stage plays are restored, a valuable and necessary perspective is gained on what Friel was facing at the outset of his career as a dramatist. The most immediately striking feature that four of the five plays share is their setting. With the exception of The Enemy Within, which is necessarily located among Columba’s community of monks on the ‘island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland’,9 they are all set in Northern Ireland. The first radio play, To This Hard House (1957), ‘takes place somewhere in the North of Ireland’.10 The second, A Sort of Freedom (1958), specifies no setting in its opening stage directions or author’s remarks. But the opening line indicates that the central character’s wife is expecting to be ‘driven up to Belfast this afternoon’ to do some shopping, which places the action squarely within the North.11 The first stage play, The Francophile (1960), is more specific in its choice of locale: ‘The action takes place in Derry, a large provincial town in the North of Ireland.’12 To consolidate the cultural location of these works in the North, the two radio plays were produced and broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland with local casts while the stage play was produced in Belfast by the Ulster Group Theatre, which had foregrounded Northern

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writers like George Shiels, Joseph Tomelty and Patricia O’Connor in the then 20 years of its existence.13 1963’s The Blind Mice, though premiered in Dublin at the Eblana Theatre before its second and final production at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast the following year, ‘is set in a provincial town in the North of Ireland’.14 The settings of these four plays contrast markedly with the location of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, set as it is in ‘the small village of Ballybeg in County Donegal, Ireland’.15 In contrast with how the settings of the earlier plays are described, the absence of the term ‘provincial’ here is noteworthy, even though the play is set in a small village in the remote county of Donegal. Notable also is the manner in which an unequivocal ‘Ireland’ (rather than ‘Republic of Ireland’, which numbers Donegal as one of its 26 counties) replaces ‘the North’. A great many, and many of the most celebrated, of Friel’s post-1964 plays will be set in this same fictional Donegal locale of Ballybeg (from the Gaelic baile beag or ‘small town’), a setting typified mainly by its equal remoteness from the cities of Belfast and Dublin in the two jurisdictions. Friel’s Irishness is complicated by the fact that he is (as he has described himself) ‘a member of the [Catholic] minority living in the North’.16 Born in 1929 in Omagh, County Tyrone, in Northern Ireland, he moved at the age of ten to a city where he was to grow up and become a teacher, like his father before him. That city bears two names – Derry to the nationalists, Londonderry to the unionists – and to live there is to be acutely aware of linguistic, cultural, religious and political divisions. Summers for Friel were spent in his mother’s home county of Donegal. Donegal is adjacent to and serves as a natural hinterland to Derry. But it remains divided from the town by a border established by the Boundary Commission in the early 1920s, in the same decade as Brian Friel was born. As Richard English describes it: The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 had effectively partitioned Ireland, establishing the basis for a six-county north and a twenty-six county south, each possessing its own executive and its own bicameral parliament; and this arrangement came into effect in May 1921.17 If a ‘natural division’ were being sought as a basis for partition, the ninecounty province of Ulster may at first have suggested itself. This had always been the basis of a local allegiance and identity among its population over and above religious affiliation. As early as 1902, that local impulse had given rise to the founding of an Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast when it became clear that Yeats wanted to keep the North out of the National Theatre Society. The Belfast founders wanted to express the particular idiom and features of their region, even though they recognized that such an idealistic aim left them open to the charge of being labeled ‘provincial’.18 The legacy of partition was to divide not only Ireland but the province of Ulster. Three of its nine counties (Donegal in the north-west and the

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adjoining Cavan and Monaghan to the south) were separated by a border from the other six. The town of Derry was cut off at a single cartographic stroke from the Inishowen peninsula on the far side of Lough Foyle and from the county of Donegal as a whole. The playwright’s parents now came from separate jurisdictions. Friel’s own attitude to the border at one level is extremely straightforward: ‘The Border has never been relevant to me. It has been an irritation, but I have never intellectually or emotionally accepted it.’19 But in relation to both Friel’s politics and his emotions, the border is an extremely complex subject, as the following statement suggests: ‘I live in Derry now. I’m a nationalist too, you know. I feel very emotionally about this country. I wouldn’t attempt to rationalize about my feelings, but I get myself involved in stupid controversies about the border … I don’t know why.’20 Over the course of his lifetime Friel (and his family) have gradually moved from Derry into Donegal, progressing along Lough Foyle to near the northernmost tip of the island in Greencastle, where he inhabits the borders of the two Irelands. By 1964 and the staging of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in Dublin, Friel’s plays had removed themselves from ‘somewhere in the North of Ireland’ to ‘Ballybeg in County Donegal, Ireland’. What the early plays restore is the geopolitical context from which that removal was effected and the conditions which necessitated that relocation. The first of the radio plays, To This Hard House (1958), takes its title from Shakespeare’s King Lear and its harsh view of the daughter’s house to which the storm-beaten king is being brought for possible refuge: ‘to this hard house/More harder than the stones whereof ’tis raised.’21 These first Friel plays are most directly linked to Philadelphia, Here I Come! in that they focus on a family conflict between the generations, most centrally between a father and a son. But they differ from the relationship in that play between Gar and S. B. O’Donnell in that the dramatic emphasis and the burden of sympathy is more weighed on the side of the older generation than on the young. In To This Hard House, Daniel Stone is a 62-year-old principal of a small country school in the townland of Meenbanid. He is coming up to retirement, and his eyesight is beginning to fail. Stone lives up to his allegorical name in his stubborn reluctance to hand over the reins of leadership or to make concessions on the traditional methods he has employed in a lifetime’s teaching. Nevertheless, his fears are exacerbated by the imminent arrival of an inspector of schools and the relentless displacement of his pupils to the new houses and new school in the modern estate up the road. The father–son conflict is established in relation to 36-year-old Walter Stone, a teacher and principal like his father. When he visits home, Walter’s knowledge of the failing conditions at Meenbanid rapidly makes it clear that he is about to be appointed principal of the new school: The principalship was vacant, as you know … and well, approaches were made to me. […] Listen to me, Father; you oughtn’t to be annoyed; you

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have no reason to be, really. I applied for the job over a month ago – I did what any young man in my position would have done with a big position in the offing.22 Although Walter promises his father that he will be offered the vice-principalship or retirement on full salary, the speech in which the son admits to his sister that he doesn’t want the ‘antediluvian old pedagogue’ on his hands is removed from the final version of the text. Even with that cut, the son remains unsympathetic and seemingly oblivious to the injury being inflicted on his father’s pride. Friel was to return to this scenario in one of his most acclaimed plays, Translations (1980), where the master Hugh O’Donnell teaches pupils in the hedge school assisted by his son, Manus. As in the earlier work, father and son both go for the principalship of the new national school that is soon to open in the area. Unlike Walter Stone, Manus does the decent thing when he discovers his father has applied for the same position and defends himself against his girlfriend’s anger by exclaiming: ‘I couldn’t – I can’t go in against him.’23 This may diminish Manus in Maire’s eyes as a potential wage-earner and prospective husband, but it increases him in ours. In the end, despite promises that he claims the school’s proprietors have made him, Hugh discovers that the principalship of the national school is instead to be offered to one Mr Bartley Timlin and can only console himself by composing a satire on his rival. Friel’s increased expertise in characterization is evident in the later play’s treatment of the same situation. The values crudely set in opposition between tradition and modernity in the earlier play are fleshed out and contextualized in the later. Very little is done in To This Hard House to indicate what Daniel Stone has to offer in his pedagogy. The absence of any classroom scenes is telling, whereas in Translations we witness first hand the contrast between Manus’s more individualized approach to his students and Hugh’s traditional question-and-answer technique. There is one late scene in the schoolyard of the new school, to establish that Daniel has retired and that under Walter’s direction (according to one of the pupils) ‘we don’t have nothing to do here’ (53). The replacement of Hugh and Manus O’Donnell’s teaching in the hedge school by the new English national school system is the replacement of one culture by another, the erasure of a way of learning dedicated not only to the Irish language but to the non-utilitarian languages of Greek and Latin. Unlike Daniel Stone, however, Hugh finally bends to the new historical reality by conceding that he will teach his pupil Maire the English language he has hitherto opposed, or at least that he will provide her ‘with the available words and the available grammar’. But whether that will enable her to ‘interpret between privacies’ remains another matter.24 The parallels between To This Hard House and King Lear mean that Daniel and Lily Stone have two daughters in addition to a son. The determined act of claiming the principalship over his father while disavowing the effect

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it will have on the old man is more than enough to qualify Walter for the role of ‘bad’ offspring. The Stones’ 34-year-old daughter, Fiona, occupies the Cordelia role. Throughout the play she consistently puts a reasonable point of view about the school issue, which her father is unable to accept. In Daniel’s eyes she is also challenging his authority through her relationship with Sam Daly. Daniel’s dislike of his daughter’s suitor stretches back to when Sam was a pupil in the school and brought a charge against the principal for hitting him. Fiona cannot ally herself with Sam and remain Daniel Stone’s daughter: ‘if you continue to throw yourself at the feet of that vulgar upstart Daly […] despite my strong condemnation of him […] this house is no longer open to you’. When the patriarch decides that ‘you have left me in no doubt where your loyalties lie’ and construes her behaviour as rejection, Daniel turns to his other daughter and praises her ‘softness’, rhetorically contrasting it to Fiona’s ‘hardness’. Rita Stone is absent throughout To This Hard House, having emigrated to England years earlier to pursue a musical career and cut off all contact with her family. When her father sends her money to induce her to return home, he later discovers that she has instead used it to emigrate further to Canada. The reconciliation scene between the father and the ‘good’ daughter is a good deal more muted than that between Lear and Cordelia: Fiona only comes back to the house because she has been jilted by Sam Daly and the forgiveness she is accorded by Daniel is surly and parsimonious. The reconciled Lear–Cordelia relationship of Act 5 operates instead between husband and wife, with Lily reading Daniel the passage from Shakespeare’s play beginning: ‘We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage.’25 The King Lear parallel is an awkward one, excessively flagged through quotation and never quite fitting the dramatic context nor transforming it from its base in social realism. But it certainly signals Friel’s ambition, in particular his intention to write tragedy. To This Hard House works through a series of geographic displacements that would become a signature of Friel’s drama. The microcosmic displacement, within Northern Ireland, is from the traditional rural village of Meenbanid up the road to the symbolically named Newtownabbey, with its new housing estate and school. The displacement of the traditional community is measured by the constant erosion of Daniel Stone’s already small stock of pupils and Fiona’s lament that ‘everyone is moving to the town, it seems. There’ll soon be no one left here except ourselves: the immovable Stone family.’ The situation she verbally and exaggeratedly conjures becomes the basis for Friel’s 1971 play, The Gentle Island, whose first scene depicts the emigration of an entire community from the island of Innishkeen. This mass emigration leaves behind only one family, the Sweeneys, with a father, two sons and a daughterin-law. If the Gentle Island community are bound for labouring jobs in Scotland, the Meenbanid citizens are being lured up the road by the promise of the availability of television. But the prospect of wider displacement is also signalled in the text. There is the prospect for a Catholic family of a university

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education, available to the younger generation as it never was to their parents. Both Walter and Fiona have attended Queen’s University, Belfast; but since neither of them won the much-valued scholarships that were such a feature of post-war education in Northern Ireland, the family could only afford to educate one, and Walter as the son was naturally favoured. Fiona, therefore, returned home after only taking First Arts at Queen’s. This aborted university career, rather than Walter’s successful acquisition of a degree and eclipsing of his father, sets the pattern for later Friel plays. Gar O’Donnell has only completed one year of his Arts degree at University College Dublin (unsuccessfully) before returning to his father’s shop in Ballybeg. This earlier failed attempt at escape from Ballybeg needs to be borne in mind when evaluating the potential of Gar’s decision in the play’s present to emigrate to Philadelphia. Similarly, Fiona’s return after a year at Queen’s is replicated when she returns to the hard house of the Stones after the plan to elope with Sam does not succeed. His unreliability as a suitor is signalled by his insistence on their going away and by his promiscuity in relation to their ultimate destination: He knows what father thinks of him so he is always on to me to run off to Belfast and marry him there or go to his sister in Dublin and get married from her house or go to London with him next Monday. In the event, London is the place they finally go. They do not travel there together, as promised, but separately, and as Fiona wearily recounts upon her return: ‘He didn’t turn up. I waited three weeks but he didn’t turn up.’ Her mother’s concerned response focuses on her daughter’s sexuality and whether the couple have covered their running away by marrying. But even greater than that is Lily’s piercingly acute fear of the near-destitute and socially isolating conditions of geopolitical displacement in which her daughter may have found herself: ‘Worse, my love, I thought of you married and unhappy and living in a sordid tenement sharing a bathroom with some … some smirking family who laughed at your accent.’ While in London, Fiona has sought out her sister, only to be told by the landlady that Rita has emigrated to Canada on the money recently sent by her father. The dispersal of households, of families, will prove as common and pervasive in the drama of Brian Friel as in that of Anton Chekhov. But the representation in Friel’s plays of the desolation that attends exile from Ireland, deprived of enabling familial and cultural contexts, is never traded in for an easy nostalgia. Rather, his dramas direct a critique at the home culture for its failure to provide a sustaining environment, for creating the conditions of dissatisfaction that impel his young protagonists so readily to seek exile. Friel’s second radio play, A Sort of Freedom, was broadcast on 12 January 1958 on BBC Northern Ireland with a high-profile cast: two of Belfast’s leading stage actors, Harold Goldblatt and Doreen Hepburn, played Jack

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and Rita Frazer, the middle-aged couple at the centre of the drama. And the young Colin Blakely, who was to go on to great acclaim in London at the Royal Court Theatre in the following decade, played Bill Hamilton, the trade union secretary who threatens a strike against Jack Frazer and his haulage company. Unlike other Northern Irish plays of the period ,which engaged with work practices in the North (such as Sam Thompson’s 1960 drama, Over the Bridge), A Sort of Freedom was not set in Belfast nor in the shipyards of Harland and Wolff. The one reference to this scenario is Bill Hamilton’s threat that, if a strike is called, the ‘dockers in Belfast wouldn’t even unload your goods’.26 Otherwise, the only acknowledgement of place is Rita Frazer’s repeated request in the opening lines that her husband release his longest and most trusted employee, Joe Reddin, from his regular work to drive her ‘up to Belfast this afternoon’. But this calculation of the length of time it takes to drive to the capital city at the outset is sufficient to place the action of the play somewhere within Northern Ireland. When eventually a taxi is summoned, Rita indicates that the box being taken out to the car contains ‘a few pieces of Quimper china I’m getting mended in Belfast’, china given to them on their wedding many years earlier and obsessively attended to. The previous day, Rita has broken several of the china pieces and, in a remark that bears on the fragile state of her marriage, reflects that recently ‘I seem to be breaking everything I put my hand to’. The play makes a consistent parallel between the latest development in the private married lives of the Frazers and the public threat of a strike against Frazer and Son, Haulage Contractors. The title of the latter speaks more to a patriarchal aspiration on Jack’s part than any familial reality since, despite having been married to Rita for many years, the couple remains childless. In consequence, as the husband reveals, their lives have drifted apart and developed along separate lines: ‘the pair of us being alone here for so long … She made a sort of life of her own, and I suppose I did too, and there was never very much to keep us together, to keep us close.’ Now, however, after months of legal and emotional preparation, the Frazers have adopted a baby boy (as the only remaining way to secure a child but also to ensure that it is a son who will inherit the business). The jubilation experienced by Jack, the double possibility of a new beginning for himself and of a revitalized relationship in the marriage, is expressed in his opening lines: ‘[the baby has] brought new life into the house. It’s almost made a young fella of me again.’ One troubling impediment remains before the baby is officially theirs: the requirement to have him inoculated against T.B. Jack becomes irrationally obsessed with this legal and medical obligation and opposes it throughout the play. Friel in A Sort of Freedom vividly recalls the ubiquity of tuberculosis in Ireland in the mid-twentieth century and the steps that were taken to eradicate it. But what he is chiefly concerned with is the Irish obsession with natural purity and the quasi-eugenicist concern that illness might be passed on to a child through either side of the family.

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The inoculation is required ‘on account of Rita having … been laid up for a year with T.B. away back in 1934, that it was compulsory under these circumstances since it’s not our own baby’. Jack’s repeatedly declared reason for refusing the inoculation, which drives him at one point to persuade a drunk doctor friend of his to sign a waiver, is that he himself never got inoculated and has never suffered from T.B. The hidden inference is that, because he himself has never been subject to the condition, his son and heir will not be either. This is simultaneously to overlook the fact that the baby is adopted, not biological, and to remove Rita from the process, as someone who has suffered from T.B. The dramatic logic of the play makes one thing clear from the start: the baby is not going to survive. This private plot strand is rather too deliberately replicated in the public sphere, where Jack Frazer is threatened with a strike because his longestserving employee, Joe Reddin, refuses to join the trade union. Reddin is as stubborn and uncompromising in refusing to conform to social pressure as Jack Frazer is with regard to the infant’s inoculation. To his wife’s repeated questioning as to his reasons for holding out, Reddin makes the conscious parallel with his employer: ‘Money has nothing to do with a thing of this nature – with a principle. Jack Frazer is making a stand against what he thinks is wrong for his child just as I’m making a stand against what I think is wrong for me.’ These lines, whether consciously or no, echo those in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1926). When Johnny Boyle offers his defence of why he fought in Easter 1916: ‘A principle’s a principle,’ his mother Juno wearily replies: ‘You lost your best principle, me boy, when you lost your arm.’27 Johnny’s sister Mary speaks the same line at the beginning of the play to justify her going out on strike in support of a dismissed fellow worker; then as later, Juno replies with caustic wit: ‘Wan victim wasn’t enough. When the employers sacrifice wan victim, the Trades Unions go wan betther be sacrificin’ a hundred.’28 Friel’s play appears to follow O’Casey’s in eschewing a radical politics in favour of the assertion of the rights of the individual; or, as his notes for the play put it, both characters object ‘to the surrender of a personal liberty to what [they are] told is the common good. […] If the play has any moral purpose, it is this, that in our age, personal liberties have been forfeited to what we hope is a greater common democracy.’29 The point is argued within the play, in an exchange that gives A Sort of Freedom its title. When Jack Frazer protests in the face of the proposed strike and its boycott of his goods whether ‘you call that freedom? You call that honesty’, Bill Hamilton asserts ‘it is more important that two hundred men submit part of their individual freedom, and so acquire a greater freedom’. The issue is played out in the Reddin household between father and son: Joe maintains his traditional independence while his son Edward urges him to join the union and so call off the proposed strike. It is Jack Frazer who has to compromise on both fronts. He reluctantly accedes to the inoculation when the doctor refuses to sign the waiver and,

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despite having promised to support Joe Reddin’s stance ‘to the last ditch’, finally agrees to sack him when faced with the walkout of his 32 other employees. While Jack is in the middle of the latter decision, Rita is desperately trying to contact him with the news that the baby has died suddenly – not through having contracted tuberculosis or an unforeseen side-effect of the inoculation but through the pure arbitrariness of being accidentally smothered. But Jack insists on seeing a design in the outcome of events. The tragedy of the child’s fate more properly resides in the irony that Rita had come around to the idea of adoption and grown to care for the baby. In the play’s most memorable speech, she confesses to a change of heart: You are right about the beginning; I didn’t want to adopt the child at the outset. I didn’t want to inflict either of us on any child. Twenty years earlier it might have been different, before your soul withered in you and mine withered because yours withered. […] I agreed because a woman never gives up hope, Jack, never despairs. She concludes, however, that the child came ‘too late. […] A home is an atmosphere, a climate, something that we ourselves should have been able to generate, not something you can acquire. But in time you will be content to have the vision of what might have been and you will be safe with that. Even you can’t destroy a vision.’ It is in these lines that the play’s true politics reside, rather than in the factitious and unproductive parallel between the plight of the two male individualists. Rita’s plangent lines resonate off the later occasions in Friel’s drama when a baby that does not long survive childbirth metaphorically comes to represent failed political possibilities. One such example is the sudden death of Nelly Ruadh’s infant, shortly after its baptism, in the tragic final act of Translations. Maire Chatach, who pauses in the doorway to report that the baby ‘died in the middle of the night’, concludes as she exits: ‘It didn’t last long, did it?’30 Neither did the brief period of reconciliation between English soldiers and Irish natives figured by her own love affair with George Yolland. But Rita Frazer’s lines, though eloquent on their own terms and rife with metaphoric and political possibility, do not resonate within A Sort of Freedom. They do not do so because the world of the play is insulated from the political realities of Northern Ireland in the late 1950s. Friel clearly wishes to steer clear of the Harland and Wolff shipyards, where Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge is set. The play that might have resulted would have developed along the predictable if powerful social realist lines followed by Thompson. Instead, Friel locates his employer–employee dispute in a business (road haulage) and in a non-specific setting that effectively neutralizes any possibility of a political vision radiating out from Jack and Rita Frazer’s failed marriage. As his last radio play makes all too clear, Brian Friel had not yet found a form or a setting that would provide his plays with the freedom they needed to develop, the sort of freedom with which he is most concerned.

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The term that best conveys what is operating within the two radio plays with which Brian Friel began his dramatic career is ‘containment’. A metaphor drawn from cognitive psychology, ‘containment’ is deployed by theatre historian Bruce McConachie in his 2003 study, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, to analyse the perceptual relationship between American audiences and the US theatre between 1947 and 1962, the same historical period in which Brian Friel made his beginning as a playwright. McConachie argues that ‘spectatorial perceptions triggered by “containment” organized much of the experience of theatergoing’ in those 15 years.31 Psychological in origin, ‘containment’ is given a sociopolitical application to designate, describe and define ‘what happens when a person categorizes a perceived image as having an inside, an outside and a boundary between them’.32 My concern in this instance is more with the perceptual relationship between playwright and script than between theatrical event and audience, but the primary evidence remains the theatrical script and what it encodes; and there is an inevitable corollary in the perceptions that an audience brings to their encounter with a play. The ‘historic patterns’ that McConachie reads in American drama’s ‘embodied actions’ have primarily to do with the threat of Communism as perceived by the US in the 1950s.33 The neat division into ‘inside’ (patriotic Americans) and ‘outside’ (godless Communists) is undercut and complicated by the fact that the latter may not be Russians but Americans who have undergone ideological conversion. In the context of Friel’s drama and Northern Ireland in the 1950s, the first thing to observe is that these plays are being written a full decade before the outbreak of ‘the Troubles’ when the North clearly became a war zone. Prior to that, the conditions are more difficult to ascertain and operate primarily by what is included and what is excluded in the spatial politics of the place. To the Unionist population, Northern Ireland is ‘inside’ the UK; to the Republican population, the North is ‘inside’ the island of Ireland. This may be the case in purely ideological terms; but for many natives of the North of both persuasions a move beyond the containment of their province is undergone and experienced as a move ‘outside’. Friel’s first two radio plays are set ‘somewhere’ in Northern Ireland, the ‘inside’ within which the characters and indeed the play itself are contained. The ‘outside’, as we have seen, is London/England, where the daughters go to make ‘proper’ lives but with a real sense that they will experience cultural and political alienation there, if not outright destitution (as is the case with two of the Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa). Belfast is named repeatedly in both texts, the furthest place to aspire to within Northern Ireland, but in the larger context of the UK very much a boundary or median zone between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’. Belfast is either a place from which Friel’s characters return after going there to make lives and (frequently failed) careers but which is as likely to be an in-between place on the characters’ ultimate trajectory to England.

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This is certainly the case with the younger generation in Friel’s first stage play, The Francophile of 1960. Product of a working-class family, all have sought to better themselves, with the active encouragement of their father, Willie Logue. The play opens with the mother’s announcement that their son, Kevin, who is ‘carving out his career in Belfast’ as a young barrister, is coming home for the weekend. Maggie Logue’s speech makes clear the class differences that are operating beneath the surface of such a career option in the family. As a young woman, she went into service to a family called the Monteiths, ‘every one of them judges or barristers or lawyers’, whereas the Logues have no such tradition in their family. The mother throughout the play questions the rightness of the career decisions made by all three of her children, especially in the case of her son, but ‘nothing would please the father but a barrister’. When Kevin enters the scene, he is dishevelled and slightly drunk, giving some ground to his mother’s concerns, and soon declares that he has been suspended for six months for conduct unbecoming. The play is scant on the specifics of the behaviour that has triggered his suspension. Instead, he repeats the precise terms of the legal document conveying the decision: ‘the Bar Committee have decided that Kevin Logue of the city of Londonderry in the county of Londonderry […] be debarred from practising in a professional capacity for six months’. The Francophile is not set in some vague and unspecified part of Northern Ireland but rather in a city that mobilizes its loyalties around the very choice of name with which its inhabitants describe it. The name ‘Londonderry’, to the unionist community, recognizes the historic fact that in the sixteenth century Londoners were particularly encouraged to come over and settle there. The nationalists adhere to the original name of ‘Derry’, from the Irish, Doire Colm Cille. (A temporary solution devised during the ‘Troubles’ was to focus on the grammatic divider in Londonderry/Derry and refer to it as ‘Stroke City’.) Kevin’s statement makes clear the extent to which, as someone from a Catholic nationalist background, the set of laws he is being asked to administer is one to which he can only give provisional assent, unlike the Monteith family for whom his mother worked. What the play stresses is the class issue, particularly in Kevin’s protest that he was led to entertain notions beyond his station in life by a socially deluded father: ‘any honesty that might have been born in us was smothered by a great intellectual dishonesty that led us to believe we were a family apart, the children of a post office official whose great talents were crushed in the mill of a civil service department’. But the class issue that The Francophile consistently foregrounds is shadowed throughout by the historic legacy of colonialism and how it recapitulates the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of McConachie’s containment in a Northern Irish context. The directions the two Logue daughters have taken mirror those of the two sisters in To This Hard House. Their social ambitions, like their brother’s, have been framed and formed by the affected phrases of their father Willie’s

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‘half-smart talk’: ‘when he said, “Chris is destined for a business career”, it sounded the grandest thing in the world. […] [And] Una was “to care for the sick”’, either as a nurse or doctor (given the Logue emphasis on the professions, the latter is by far the more likely career choice). Una does not appear in the play. She has moved to London and married a man old enough to be her father. Nothing is said of any career path she may have been pursuing. Instead, her social and professional ambitions have been realized by how she chooses to be known in England: as ‘Mrs Doctor Michael Boyd Hepburn’. In To This Hard House, Rita Stone moved to England to realize her musical ambitions, though what has been reported back to the family about her professional progress falls far short of that ideal: playing piano in a third-rate establishment at an English seaside town. What Rita Stone and Una Logue share dramatically is their offstage location in England (‘outside’ in both a dramatic and geopolitical sense) and their severing of all contact with their family ‘back home’ in Northern Ireland. Late in the play, when Chris is staying with her sister in England, Una refuses to take a phone call from her father, telling Willie through a third party that she does not wish ‘to be disturbed’. It is in the dilemma facing the other sister, Chris, that The Francophile reveals a structural similarity to Hard House but also a considerable advance in technique. What the two plays share is the seduction of one of the daughters by an unworthy suitor who leads her to England with the promise of marriage and then abandons her; in the end, both daughters are left alone, isolated and betrayed. One young woman returns home, the other stays on in England; but each is sundered from family relations and from a confidence in her own sense of self. What makes The Francophile a more satisfactory and developed version of the scenario is the fact that Chris’s father has colluded in what befalls his daughter. And part of the development of that scenario is a greater specificity in the Northern Ireland setting, a specificity with regard not only to Belfast and London to the east but with Donegal to the west, now referred to and drawn into the drama for the first time. Willie Logue is a fantasist, one of the first of many in Brian Friel’s plays, a man who compensates for his lowly and circumscribed position in life by imaginatively constructing and pursuing an alternative existence. Where all of his children have received formal education right through to third level – Kevin’s legal training has seen him attend Queen’s University in Belfast and King’s College in London – their father has been an auto-didact all his life, following no coherent plan of reading but rather giving himself over to the enthusiasm of the moment. Willie’s current passion is for all things French: ‘Take the French now. There’s a cultured people for you.’ To impress the family lodger, Gerald, he proceeds to itemize the ‘people of genius’ to be found in France, beginning with Debussy and Pasteur and ending with Blondin and Michelangelo. When Gerald points out that Michelangelo is Italian, Willie merely shrugs off the factual error: ‘French … Italian … let’s not

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quibble about it. You’ll agree that he is in the grand tradition.’ The point for Willie is that all the people of genius he cites are from the European mainland, well beyond the three cities of Derry, Belfast and London between which his three children are divided. In a single act of cultural translation, he feels he can pass over and elide the tangled political divisions making up Ireland and England, or, to put it another way, the Republic, the North and the other island, or, most controversially of all for an Irish nationalist, the British Isles. When his bitter lawyer son needles him verbally, Willie can retort that ‘you’re just a Derryman’. The severe limitations to Willie’s learning are exposed when the lodger identifies him as ‘a Francophile’. Willie, who is ‘hearing the word for the first time’, responds uncertainly until it is defined for him as a ‘lover of French things’. Recovering some confidence, he can agree with the identification, although ‘I’ve been at the language only seven months’. The roles occupied here by Willie and Gerald are very similar to those of Casimir and Tom Hoffnung in 1979’s Aristocrats. Casimir is the greatest of Friel’s fantasists, as a later chapter will explore. His stories about the great people who have visited O’Donnell Hall in the past founder on his claim that he remembers Yeats. Tom, the visiting American academic who is conducting an empirical inquiry into the history of the Big House, logically points out the contradictory fact that Yeats died in the same year as Casimir was born. But Casimir’s fantasies receive a much greater degree of cultural endorsement than Willie’s ever do. What Friel has begun to articulate in his drama, however, are the conditions that give rise to them. The one Logue child who is still living at home is the youngest, Chris. She would like to emigrate to England but is reluctant to break away from her father, who depends on her. It is the nature of that dependence that generates the play’s most serious complications. Though Willie’s professional aspirations for his daughter may have had her ‘destined for a business career’, by staying in Derry her employment is as a draper’s assistant. Of all Willie’s children, Chris is the one who has invested most in her father’s cultural aspirations, and at great personal cost. She collaborates in speaking broken French with him, matches him spontaneously in the outbursts of Gallic physical mime to which he is given, and conducts an imaginary affair with her father that is incestuously close to a romance. While Willie works in the post office by day, he submits poems to the local evening paper, and it is Chris who shares his delight when one is published. The plot of the play resembles To This Hard House, in that the daughter is going to leave Northern Ireland for England with a young man who reneges on a promise of marriage. But in The Francophile, far from opposing his daughter’s liaison, the father colludes in and promotes it. The object of Chris Logue’s ardour is no less the object of Willie’s: a visiting Frenchman, M. Georges Tournier, allegedly a traveller for a French wine firm who has, as Kevin acerbically puts it, agreed ‘to hold a conversation with Miss Euphemia Pink’s pupils of the Municipal Technical College’. We hear details of the romance between

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the Frenchman and the Derry woman at one remove. He never visits the Logue household, and the mother is quick to scent that he thinks socially they are beneath him. Instead, Chris spends her time ‘gallivanting off to Belfast’ and threatening to leave her job in Derry. One other significant geographic consideration complicates the conduct of the courtship. For the very first time, Donegal enters Friel’s drama. Given the play’s location in Derry, this may not be completely unexpected; but given the containment of Friel’s radio plays within the ‘inside’ of Northern Ireland, it was by no means inevitable. The way in which Donegal enters the drama is both distinctive and relevant to my argument. When Chris reports that Tournier ‘thought it would be a pity to go off without seeing Donegal’ and wants ‘to go for a drive around the coast this afternoon’, Willie responds to the idea with his characteristic enthusiasm, installing himself as the guide who could show the visitor all the tourist spots and converse with him in French. The link with Donegal is familial; Maggie Logue hails from there and the proposed itinerary could include a stop at ‘your ancestral home, Margaret’. But Maggie is completely opposed to the idea. After all of the anticipatory verbal touring around the Inishowen peninsula in which he has indulged Willie in the end is left behind and Chris goes on her own. The proposed trip to Donegal signals the youngest daughter’s exit from the play; she never returns. In the following scene, Willie attempts to account for her non-appearance. Rather than confronting the fact of his daughter’s seduction and elopement in which his role has been akin to that of a pimp, Willie instead proposes a political reason for the couple’s disappearance: the hard fact of the border between Donegal and Derry. The border is now pressed into service as an extension of his fantasy: Trouble at the border … aye, that’s more like it … he took an unapproved road and the police stopped him … he’s in some police station at the moment and he doesn’t understand what it’s all about … he doesn’t understand the rules and regulations. … Maybe he’s waiting for me to come and explain it all away. Willie is now the Derryman and not the Francophile. He is all too conversant with the ‘rules and regulations’ that operate in the north-west of Ireland beneath the geographic continuity of the terrain, determining what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ Northern Ireland. Kevin urges the family to consider the ‘facts’ and ‘the evidence’ about the mysterious Frenchman by looking again at the geographic specificity of the location, now in terms of the practicalities of transport. He suggests that it is a bizarre itinerary that sees the French visitor ‘drop off in Derry for a few days’ while on a trajectory from the US to France. If he came to the island by boat, he would have disembarked in Cork. If he travelled by plane, he would have had to land at Shannon Airport. The unlikelihoods pile up under Kevin’s forensic

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examination and the ground is laid for the news that Chris has been abandoned by the ‘real’ Frenchman in London and has decided to stay with her sister. Both Friel’s play and its Francophile flinch away from the depth and degree of Willie Logue’s responsibility for what has happened to his daughter. Kevin delivers the accusation that their father did not let any of his children ‘grow naturally’ (which raises the question of what that might mean for a Catholic growing up in Northern Ireland), but Willie seems more stunned than comprehending in his response. With both daughters gone and his son ‘standing in the doorway, uncertain’ whether to take the lowly office job he has been offered, Willie’s final response is to retreat into the fantasy once more by announcing jubilantly that he has the answer to their problems: ‘Next winter, I’m going to take up Esperanto – Esperanto!’34 The play and its central character have veered away from the tragic implications of what has been unfolded and opted for an unsatisfactory comic ending, one which seeks to restore Willie’s initial position as an innocent fantasist. The name ‘Willie Logue’ suggests from the start that Friel’s play and character bear a strong relation to Willie Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Both Willies are dreamers, and have infected their children with aspirations; but they have failed to supply them with the practical skills to attain them. The ‘children’ are now in their mid-thirties and more unsettled than ever. Willie Loman’s final fantasy is to conclude that he is worth more dead than alive, and so to contrive his own death in a car accident in order to provide his family with the life insurance; it is Miller’s final sardonic insight into the logic of capitalism by which Willie Loman has lived his entire life. No such tragic illumination accompanies Willie Logue’s final return to fantasy, which rather operates at the expense of the no-less-serious issues raised by Friel’s play regarding Northern Irish society. Rather, the ending confirms and contains the play (however uneasily) within the familiar category of ‘Ulster Comedy’, which had been such a feature of the Ulster Group Theatre’s work over the decades. Sam Hannah Bell quotes the comic actor James Young’s subtitling of the Group Theatre as ‘the Home of Ulster Comedy’, noting the extent to which it had ‘developed its own type of farcical comedy’ over the years and endorsing the view whereby the audiences ‘came out in better humour than they came in’.35 Crystal Melarkey, the master of ceremonies in the popular travelling theatre of Friel’s Crystal and Fox (1968), bitterly remarks that ‘All the hoors want is a happy ending.’36 The Francophile was to be one of the rare occasions in a Friel play when that wish would be granted; but the playwright’s awareness of the compromise involved in making of his complex play an ‘Ulster comedy’ may well have helped fuel the Fox’s observation. When he came to speak of Belfast as a theatre city in February 2009 – on the naming of Queen’s University’s new Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research in his honour – Brian Friel did not let the sense of occasion blunt his unequivocal

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judgement: ‘Belfast hasn’t had a vibrant theatre tradition.’37 He went on to discuss the two Belfast theatres that were to stage his early plays, the Lyric and the Group. With the first, ‘the signal was very worthy and very worthwhile, but it wasn’t strong enough to be heard in a city of this size and cultural diversity’. Regarding the theatre that premiered The Francophile in 1960, he offered carefully limited praise to the ‘old warhorses’ of the Group because they ‘kept the tradition going’. But that tradition was one that also threatened to stifle his development.38 Friel’s second stage play, The Enemy Within, seeks to escape containment by getting out of Ireland altogether. It is one of the very few of his plays to do so, taking its literal location as the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. There, Columba is the abbot of a community of some two hundred monks. With Ireland at the time of the play’s composition in the early 1960s considering membership of what was then called the European Economic Community, the diverse membership claimed for the ethnic makeup of the monks – ‘there are scores of young men from all over the world: French and German and Italian and Spanish and, of course, Irish’39 – deliberately places Ireland in a European context. But the Anglo-Irish context is equally present, represented dramatically by the arrival of the new novice, Oswald, from a well-to-do family in southern England. Oswald’s complicated relationship with Columba will be explored later in the book in the context provided by Friel’s 1980 play, Translations. The community is run along communal lines, with a division of labour among the various monks according to their talents. Dochonna is a standing joke in this respect, having turned his hand at various times to being a ‘sacristan, cook, smithy, carpenter, weaver, mason, silver-smith, novice-master, personal attendant to the Abbot, and now scribe. No wonder we call you our “all-round” man!’ (53) Columba makes decisions and gives orders when he is with his right-hand man, Grillaan, but he also leads by example, and is out helping the younger men with the harvest when the play begins. But for all that we hear of the European diversity of the nationality of the monks on the island, what we witness (other than with Oswald) is Columba in the company of fellow Irishmen. This nationalist grouping extends to include the younger men – notably a young Irish novice called Brendan – but focuses primarily on the five surviving members of the original dozen monks who founded the monastery. The remaining four veterans surrounding Columba are reduced to three; the scribe Caornan dies while the abbot is away in Ireland. There is much banter between the men as to who is the oldest. Columba prides himself on having retained his youth and vigour, but when he is with the other four his shared memory shows that he is as old as they. The stage directions indicate very carefully that Columba varies between appearing vigorous – ‘there is vitality, verve, almost youthfulness in every gesture’ (16) – and looking his years – ‘tired, weary, apathetic’ (55). Over its duration the play works to establish a very precise correlation between that all-too-visible oscillation between physical

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well-being and infirmity, and Columba’s troubled relationship with his native land. Columba has lived long enough to have become a myth, a name, and it is his reputation that has brought most of the young novices to Iona. The play explores the conflict between the public and the private man, and as will so often prove the case in Friel there is a strong element of demythologizing. One of the stories holds that if a young monk spends the night on a certain slab of rock where Columba once rested, ‘they are guaranteed to be freed from home-sickness and longing for the native land’ (22). The devastating irony is that the reverse holds for the abbot: Columba is the one who cannot free or cure himself of home-sickness. As he says, whatever his public renown as an organizer and a builder of churches and schools, ‘the inner man – the soul – [is] chained irrevocably to the earth, to the green wooded earth of Ireland’ (21). When Columba proclaims to his aged fellow exiles that ‘I remember everything’ (18), the answer resounds backwards from Hugh O’Donnell in the later play Translations: ‘To remember everything is a form of madness.’40 As Columba works in the green fields of Iona, he describes a geographic doubling whereby one scene displaces another, and he is translated back into the affective landscape of family and Ireland from the workaday reality of community and Scotland. In a trice, he is working with his brothers in the field until at ‘any minute mother would come to the head of the hill and […] summon us in for food’. (21) In this all-male drama, the placing of the mother at the centre of the vision of Ireland as home identifies that landscape as feminine and quasi-Oedipal, both maternal and ‘seductive’ (70). Central to the drama of The Enemy Within are the two visitations Columba receives from Ireland, or more locally from the province of Tirconaill and the city of Derry. The three acts are structured around these visits from members of his family and their call to Columba to return to Ireland and lead them in yet another of their local feuds. As long as he stays in exile in Scotland, on what he calls late in the play ‘my island’ (70), he can at least struggle with the enemy within to follow his religious calling. But when he is assailed from without as from within, even the spiritual exemplar Columba is sorely tempted. His unified vision of Ireland can only be maintained at the distance Iona provides, and from the perspective of exile. Once he comes closer to home, or rather once it comes to and for him, the abbot is torn by rival claims, by competing factions. The first arrival he recognizes as an Inishowen man, a kinsman of his cousin Hugh who needs Columba’s sanction and personal presence to help him in a local fight to defend family land. Even though Columba points out that the Cumine brothers he will oppose are also his cousins, the appeals to family loyalty and love of home prove too strong, and he departs. His oldest friend and closest confidant Grillaan, who logically and rationally opposes the fatal tie of blood sacrifice and love of country, argues with Columba for him to sever ‘the last tie’ to

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his country and choose between being ‘a priest or a politician’ (33). Friel’s staging places Columba ‘in the centre with GRILLAAN on the one side of him [and] BRIAN on the other. He is torn between the two’ (33) but finally exits with the latter on a course for Ireland.41 When he returns to Iona in Act 2, Columba declares that he feels ‘fresh as a novice’ (39), buoyed as he is by contact with Ireland and family. But when Grillaan later pushes him on the outcome of the battle, Columba is sombre as he recounts seeing Colman Beg being slain and falling from his horse. Staring at the corpse and recognizing a man with ‘a look of my father’ (48), the man of God identifies the self-immolating futility of a family feud such as this and vows ‘never again’. That resolution is tested a mere few weeks later when in Act 3 there is another visitation from Ireland. On this occasion, the family claims bear even more closely on Columba. His brother Eoghan (identified by the family name of ‘Ownie’) and nephew Aedh, who is also his godson, have come like previous Irish visitors to enlist Columba’s spiritual and personal authority to lead them in a raid. The purpose on this occasion can be justified in spiritual terms since the aim of the attack will be to rescue Aedh’s wife and child from ‘being held by them heathen Picts’ (63) in Antrim. Aedh’s wife is a convert to Christianity and her pagan clan have now claimed her back. If Columba leads her rescuers, their success can be interpreted as a victory for Christianity. The terms of Christian and Picts will readily translate into those of Catholic native and Protestant planter when Friel treats of the chieftain Hugh O’Neill marrying the upstart planter Mabel Bagenal in 1988’s Making History. The appeal from his brother and godson contains some significant contradictions, especially in relation to the amount of bloodshed that will be involved. With Columba at the head of the rescue mission, such is his natural authority that his brother claims scarcely a blow will need to be struck. When Columba’s growing interest is apparent, Eoghan warms to his theme and predicts: ‘We’ll rally a legion if you are leader’ (66). Among those his brother promises will lend their support are the Cumine brothers, the very pair who were on the opposite side a month previously. When Columba notes this reversal with surprise, Eoghan responds: ‘This is family, Columb! […] And in a matter like this – a religious matter – all personal differences are forgotten. Yes, the Cumines that you routed a month ago, they are going to supply the horses and the food – provided you lead us. […] Is it a bad thing we are asking of you – […] that you unite under the banner of Christ the cousins that have fought against one another for generations?’ (65–6) When the enemy is viewed and categorized in sectarian terms such as these, former enemies on one side of the religious divide can bury their former differences and unite to justify bloodshed. When that motive is absent, the pre-existent family feud can and does reassert itself. On this occasion, Columba manages to resist the cry from home and the two men depart for Ireland with their curses ringing in his ears: ‘may your

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work wither and die with you! And may my grandchildren and my great grandchildren curse you every day they draw breath!’ (70) As the abbot of Iona declares when they have left, he is a ‘real exile’ (71) now. The Ireland described in The Enemy Within is a pre-partition island. The place names resonate with the later history of what will befall them: the River Boyne is as yet innocent of the battle between King James II and Prince William of Orange. When Columba turns his back on his brother and godson, he can return to lyrically invoking a feminine and unified country: ‘Soft, green Ireland – beautiful, green Ireland – my lovely green Ireland’ (70). As Friel’s development as a playwright demonstrates, in contrast to the abbot of Iona, he is going to find a place of inner, not outer, exile, turning and returning back to the country and its public demands. In Friel’s 1963 play The Blind Mice, the scene returns from Scotland to ‘a provincial town in the north of Ireland’.42 The scenario is of a community celebrating a hero’s return: the release of a local Catholic missionary priest after five years’ imprisonment by the Communist Chinese. The ‘turn’ comes when it transpires that Father Chris Carroll was only released when he signed a confession ‘and renounced his allegiance to his faith’. The bishop justifies what the Irish priest has done by reference to Cardinal Mindszenty, who was imprisoned by the Hungarian Communist Government in 1948 and who is quoted as saying ‘that he would not be responsible for any document he might sign while they had him’.43 In the face of the stories being printed in the local newspaper, Father Chris finally has to confess to his family that he did not succumb because of being tortured by the Chinese but because of a radical transformation he experienced over five years of increasing loneliness and despair. He found that the prayers of Holy Mother Church, in both Latin and English, no longer succoured him; their words turned increasingly hollow, their promise of redemption increasingly remote. The only enduring spiritual legacy of his years of training as a Catholic priest in mid-twentieth century Ireland was that of eternal hellfire and unending punishment: ‘the only certainty I had was eternal damnation’. The condition he then entered was a profound emptiness, arising from a sense he had been abandoned by God, but suggesting also a prelude to a new form of spiritual belief, one closer to the Eastern religions of those who hold him captive. This openness to other forms of worship is reinforced by Chris’s pleasure when he saw the smiling face of the Burmese man who was his captor reappear in the grille. He has longed throughout for the need to receive the formal sacrament of confession and to pray. When neither of these finally avails, Chris draws on his own resources to improvise a series of verbal and physical rituals, ‘riddles I had learned at school and […] fairy tales mother read to us when we were children’ and to begin a physical routine of pacing the cell while singing ‘Three Blind Mice’. At the close of the play, as Chris succumbs to a nervous breakdown and is led upstairs singing the nursery rhyme, the rest of the family stare at one another in grief and baffled family pride.

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Initially, the local community is all set to welcome the returned hero from the missionary fields. Every social dignitary in the town is either on the phone or through the door to congratulate the proud mother. There are bonfires burning in the town and banners proclaiming his return. A reporter from a London newspaper has even come over to cover the event. But when the news of the priest’s apostasy is revealed, the bunting is taken down and the family is shunned. This is a scenario to which Friel will return. In Living Quarters (1977), Commandant Frank Butler is given a hero’s welcome back to Ballybeg after having heroically rescued his men while on active service for the United Nations in the Middle East. By the time of the celebratory dinner, everyone but the honoured guest knows that his beautiful young second wife and his son have had an affair during his absence and that Frank is a cuckold. In Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), another priest – the Mundy sisters’ older brother Father Jack – returns from missionary service in the African country of Uganda. All of the planned local celebrations are called off when it becomes clear that the devout Catholic missioner who initially went out to convert has instead ‘gone native’ and been converted to local African rituals and beliefs. In The Blind Mice, what complicates the scenario of the public hero and the fallible private man pursuing ‘his own distinctive search’44 is the play’s location in the North of Ireland. Chris’s father Arthur Carroll only makes a few appearances in the family parlour where the entire play is set. Mostly, he is hard at work on the far side of the door in the public house that sustains their livelihood. The father’s character is epitomized by the fact that he doesn’t shut the shop on this day of his son’s return but that, in the words of his other son John, it’s ‘business as usual’. This patriarch is cut from the same cloth as Gar’s father, S. B. O’Donnell, in Philadelphia, Here I Come! who still insists on his son doing a full day’s work in the shop on his last day in Ireland. Arthur Carroll’s reaction to news of a parade that evening to welcome his son home is precisely the reverse of everyone else’s: he views the prospect with alarm, since in the context of Northern Ireland a parade in the town for the returned missioner means a Catholic parade, one that will drive away and provoke the Protestant half of his clientele: ‘There’ll be a riot, that’s what there’ll be! The other side won’t stand for it! And half my trade comes from them! […] Every time a cheer goes up, a customer of mine goes down the drain!’ The predicted riot does come, not from the Protestant clientele but from the Catholic faithful who have been thronging the Carroll pub to sing ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ only to discover that ‘the hero they had been prepared to welcome has turned out to be a fraud’. Since the Carroll family live in Northern Ireland, Arthur points out that there’s a clause in the insurance stipulating that riots are not covered. The mother Lily makes the more pertinent observation, when John says they will need to call the police for protection: ‘Protection from what? From our Catholic neighbours? Is this Ireland we’re in? Are we Christians at all?’ That question can be formulated even more

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directly in relation to what occurs in Dancing at Lughnasa in terms of the renegade Father Jack, when the setting is the almost entirely Catholic small town of Ballybeg in County Donegal in the-then Irish Free State: ‘he never said Mass again. And the neighbours stopped enquiring about him. And his name never again appeared in the Donegal Enquirer. And of course there was never a civic reception with bands and flags and speeches.’45 When The Blind Mice was staged in Belfast at the Lyric in October 1964, it was the mention of riots that the local reviewer reporting for The Times of London picked up on: ‘the mob, when they learn the truth […], are enraged and their hooliganism was something in which a Belfast audience, knowing of mob violence within its own streets in the past few days, could well believe’.46 The spiritual dilemma of the central character, which is at the core of Friel’s play, is scarcely mentioned by the London reviewer; local Northern Irish politics take precedence. What the restoration of the first three plays staged by Brian Friel reveal is that two of them foreground priests as their protagonists.47 The Enemy Within and The Blind Mice take their dramatic bearings from the inner struggle of St Columba and Father Chris Carroll, to reconcile their vocation as priests with the direction in which their lives are taking them. Columba has planned what he imagines to be an ideal final arrangement for the dying scribe, Caornan: to bring him back to his home place ‘and a large, well-lit room in the Clonmore house’.48 But Caornan dies while Columba is in Ireland and has spoken at the last of his urge to go, not back to Ireland, but further north into Scotland in search of greater isolation and penance. Grillaan contrasts the two monks in a key speech: In some men, Abbot – as it was with Caornan – sanctity is a progression, a building of stone upon stone, year after year, until the edifice is complete. In other men, it is in the will and determination to start, and then to start again, and then to start again, so that their life is a series of beginnings. You are of the second kind, Columba.49 And so, as it turned out, was Brian Friel as he took on the vocation of fulltime playwright. His career as a dramatist is marked by his refusal to rest content with what he has achieved, but rather ‘to start again, and then to start again’, to set off in strikingly new directions, never afraid to court failure. This one-time seminarian at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth abandoned his training as a Catholic priest; and his plays are critical of the conventional clergy for their failure to, in Gar Private’s words, ‘translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that will make life bearable for us all’.50 As Thomas Kilroy has observed of St Columba and Father Chris, they provide early evidence of Brian Friel’s ‘lifelong treatment of the nature of spirituality’.51 In what he has endured in five years of isolation, the missionary priest of The Blind Mice has come up against

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the limitations of the language of conventional prayer, whether in Latin or in English, and in his spiritual isolation has sought and found refuge in words and rituals that more properly belong to the world of play, whether of children or of the theatre. There is a direct line of continuity between these early priest figures of the occluded Friel canon and their later shamanistic variants, Frank Hardy faith healer and Father Jack practising his Ryangan rituals. It is no accident that, when exposed to the process of live theatre with Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis in 1963, Friel was to describe what he discovered there as ‘a dedication and a nobility and a selflessness that one associates with a theoretical priesthood’.52

2 Friel and the Director: Tyrone Guthrie and Hilton Edwards

In 1999, on the occasion of Brian Friel’s seventieth birthday, a festival of his plays was staged, primarily in Dublin at the Abbey and the Gate theatres, to honour the achievement of Ireland’s greatest living playwright. Friel broke his customary silence and contributed to the festival booklet a series of single lengthy paragraphs outlining his views on seven key elements of the theatrical process: words, great actors, amateurs, music, directors, translations and the legacy of theatre. What he has to say about these topics divides into the positive and the negative when it comes to theatre professionals. On the subject of great actors, Friel counts as one of the ‘joys and satisfactions’ of his life in the theatre ‘the experience of working with them in the rehearsal room’.1 And his love of actors suffuses the other categories. In relation to his versions of Chekhov and Turgenev, Friel concludes that ‘maybe the pleasure I got from doing those four Russian plays had to do with the actors I had in all four. […] And with actors like those I had in Derry, Dublin and in London any half-decent translation must be exciting’.2 However good these actors were, presumably all of them could not possibly merit the epithet ‘great’, however defined. Friel makes clear that what he values is the actor per se and what they contribute to the theatrical process. He suggests that their contribution may be the crucial one, since while he doesn’t quite go so far as to say that his own translations may only be ‘halfdecent’, the primacy of the verbal text is not being asserted in this declaration of what makes for ‘exciting’ theatre. The entry on directors is the longest and the most negative, an extreme contrast to the views on actors. It begins in the same way, reflecting on 40 years in theatre during which he has worked with ‘dozens of directors’ and generalizing that, ‘with a few exceptions, they have been very agreeable to work with’.3 With the very next sentence, however, Friel makes it clear that in contrast to his dependence on the actor he finds the relationship with directors an unnecessary one since the profession of director is inessential to the creation of theatre. No individual director is singled out for obloquy, since Friel makes it clear that it is the role of the director rather 32

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than any one director that he is out to question and condemn – at one point likening them to bus conductors, who were once deemed necessary but are now seen as superfluous– ‘After all these years I’m still not at all sure what this person contributes.’ He points out that for over two and a half thousand years in theatre there was no such thing as a theatre director and that they have only emerged in the past 150 years or so. In writing his ‘Note’ on ‘Amateurs’ Friel has embraced the notion of progress in the theatre by contrasting the necessary role of the energies of the amateur actors in the founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1904 with an ever-increasing and necessary professionalization of actors in the present. Friel is not willing to concede the necessity of the director’s role nor its centrality to the creative process of making theatre. They are convenient for taking necessary tasks from the other people involved: actors, producers, etc. But he has never been offered ‘a unique interpretation’ of any of his texts by a director; has seen the contributions of great actors sapped rather than enhanced in directorial hands; and concludes his anathematization by describing directors as ‘interlopers’ who ‘attempt to usurp the intrinsic power of the play itself’. Friel might well have concluded here but he goes on to add a final, contradictory paragraph in which he praises the work of great directors. Since it flies so much in the face of almost everything he has said, and since I wish to explore this baffling contradiction throughout this chapter, I will quote most of the closing paragraph: Of course, there have been a handful of magnificent directors in the short time of their existence – people like Stanislavsky, Guthrie, Grotowski, Brook. But their talent lay not in offering personal interpretation of a text but in exploding a whole calcified tradition, in turning upside down the whole practice of theatrical presentation so that we all saw it anew. They didn’t offer us deep personal revelations but an entirely new kind of experience in the theatre. But innovators like that come around all too seldom.4 There is the staggering oxymoron at the centre of the first line here – ‘magnificent directors’, a hugely complimentary qualifier by the usually understated Friel to a profession he has just denounced as bogus and unnecessary. Admiration is extended to four named individual directors, but the suggestion is that more could (and might) have been added. Of those he lists, Stanislavski and Grotowski were long dead before he began his career as a playwright, and Friel could only have made his assessment by hearsay. And Stanislavski effected the overthrowing of a ‘whole calcified tradition’ of presenting a dramatic text, particularly in relation to acting and performance, while working on the then-contemporary plays of Anton Chekhov. Friel is surely thinking of Peter Brook in relation to the latter’s ground-breaking production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream of the 1960s. But by 1999 Friel and Brook had struck

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up not only a personal relationship but a professional one, Brook’s daughter having directed a production of Friel’s 1990 play, Dancing at Lughnasa, in Switzerland. But it is on the ‘magnificent director’ Tyrone Guthrie I wish to concentrate. He never directed a play by Brian Friel (the reasons for which will be explored), but Guthrie played a crucial mentoring role in the life of the young aspiring Irish playwright that will be examined by way of unpacking some of the complications and contradictions in Friel’s view of directors and directing. In the first half of 1963 Friel spent a number of months in the United States as the guest of Sir Tyrone Guthrie at the theatre Guthrie had just founded (and which bore his name) in Minneapolis in the American Midwest. The various accounts Friel has written of the visit are inconsistent and somewhat contradictory. Did he write to Guthrie on his own initiative or was he the recipient of an invitation from the great man? Was he already working on his breakthrough play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, or did he only sit down and write it after his return to Ireland? How long did he spend there, exactly? Periods between three and six months have been suggested. The diary he kept that might provide us with these salient details is in the Friel Archive in the National Library, but under lock and key for several decades to come. What is not in doubt is the importance of the experience for Friel, providing what he was later to describe as his ‘first parole from inbred, claustrophobic Ireland’.5 And however he defined his role there, settling finally on the term ‘observer’, there is no doubt about what he did and what he witnessed. Friel was to sit in on rehearsals of the two plays Guthrie was preparing for the opening of this theatre he had founded in the US, employing the director’s long-cherished ideal of a thrust stage rather than a proscenium, so the plays could be performed to an audience on three sides, and dedicated to a classical repertoire. For its opening season, that repertoire would include a modern-dress Hamlet with George Grizzard as the Prince and Jessica Tandy as Gertrude and a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, both of which Guthrie was to direct, and Molière’s The Miser, directed by the assistant artistic director, Douglas Campbell. Both of the Guthrie productions were to be designed by Guthrie’s long-term collaborator from his days at the Old Vic, Tanya Moiseiwitsch. To all outward appearances, Tyrone Guthrie was English – in many ways, a quintessential English director, speaking a mixture of ‘luvvie speak’ and idiomatic phrases that the American actors often found hard to interpret: ‘They smiled their actors’ smiles when they were told they were “clever pussies”, “rather charming”, “very sweet”. They were clearly puzzled by words like rather “slappedy slip”, “too – you know – too bunny-rabbitish”, “a bit on the fuddy-duddy style”; criticism was implicit in the tone of voice, but what was the guy trying to stay?’ This account of Guthrie in rehearsal is from an article written by Brian Friel for the American Holiday magazine of May 1964, which has not been reprinted in either of the two collections of Friel’s essays, diaries and interviews and which is the only one of the several accounts by Friel of his

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Minneapolis sojourn to quote directly from Guthrie.6 The title of Friel’s article is ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, and it would puzzle almost any general reader, certainly in the 1960s, as a description applied to Sir Tyrone Guthrie. For was not Monaghan in Ireland and had not Guthrie been born in that conservative English watering-hole, Tunbridge Wells? His career had been mainly conducted in the heart of the British theatrical tradition, directing Shakespearean productions memorable for their theatrical verve and textual clarity with all of the knights (Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud). In the late 1950s and early 1960s Guthrie struck out for the New World, first to found the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Canada, and now the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. But Guthrie’s English identity was complicated by Scottish and Irish roots – his father and mother respectively. Guthrie’s mother came from County Monaghan and he himself used the family home of Annaghmakerrig there (which he came to inherit) as a base from which to plan and make his worldwide theatrical sorties. He in turn bestowed Annaghmakerrig on the island of Ireland, to be supported and administered as an artists’ and writers’ centre by the Northern Irish Arts Council and the Republic of Ireland Arts Council. Guthrie’s autobiography is divided up into chapters on places, and none is more revealingly rueful than the chapter on his ‘home’, Ireland, from which he spent almost all his working life in exile. Early on, Guthrie gave up all thought of an artistic involvement in the Abbey Theatre, not least because he hadn’t a word of Irish. Late in life he sought a belated involvement in Ireland’s theatrical present and future through sponsoring and encouraging two young Irish playwrights: Eugene McCabe, born in Glasgow but long resident in Co. Monaghan; and Brian Friel, another Northerner living in Donegal along a partitioned border. Guthrie first encountered Friel’s work when he read one of his short stories in The New Yorker in 1960 and wrote him a fan letter stressing their shared Ulster background; he made sure to get to the Abbey’s 1962 production of Friel’s second play, The Enemy Within, and wrote him a detailed critique afterwards. Friel identified the apparently English Guthrie as hailing from Monaghan in both the title and text of his article, and described him in terms of a nationally hybrid personality: ‘a mixture of Scottish, Irish and English blood, the son of a doctor, the grandson of a clergyman [living in] a huge rambling house overlooking a lake in a very remote and heavily wooded part of County Monaghan’.7 In a prose piece entitled ‘Self-Portrait’ Friel writes of his decision to give up teaching in 1960 and dedicate himself full-time to his career as a writer. He makes it explicit that what he envisaged was a career as a playwright rather than as a short story writer by going on to lament his lack of education in the theatre: I found myself at thirty years of age embarked on a theatrical career and almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of play-writing and playproduction apart from an intuitive knowledge. […] So I packed my bags

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and with my wife and two children went to Minneapolis in Minnesota where a new theatre was being created by Tyrone Guthrie and there I lived for six months.[…] I learned a great deal about the iron discipline of theatre [and] those months in America gave me a sense of liberation – remember, this was my first parole from inbred, claustrophobic Ireland – and that sense of liberation conferred on me a valuable self-confidence and a necessary perspective so that the first play I wrote immediately after I came home, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, was a lot more assured than anything I had attempted before.8 I want to concentrate on Friel’s detailed and revealing account of Guthrie in rehearsal from ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, to observe the observer observing a process close at hand that was to lead him to declare how much he learned while there about ‘the iron discipline of theatre’.9 I also wish to supplement Friel’s account with two others. In the Guthrie Theatre archive at the University of Minnesota is a newspaper article from May 1963 by Herbert Whitaker entitled ‘Tyrone Guthrie at Work’ whose author sat in on those very same Hamlet rehearsals Friel attended. Not that the auditorium was filled with eavesdroppers. Whitaker had badgered Guthrie for a full ten years on the subject before being given permission to sit in and record what he saw. The only other viewers Whitaker notes are Lady Guthrie and the lead actress from the Chekhov. The third account of Guthrie in rehearsal is the invaluable and detailed account provided by Michael Blakemore in his 2004 memoir, Arguments with England. Blakemore has made his reputation as a director, most notably in his long association with the plays of Michael Frayn. But he first emigrated to England from Australia as an actor, and it is on that period of his life and career the memoir concentrates. He describes his theatrical apprenticeship as an actor under a range of directors, but the two central experiences are with Laurence Olivier and Tyrone Guthrie (arch rivals at this point). What emerges most forcefully when all three accounts are compared is the fact that Guthrie pays as much attention to actors in the small roles as he does to the star turns. Blakemore is particularly acute on this, cast as he is in the small role of the First Lord in Guthrie’s 1959 production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. He singles out a moment when having set up the scene where Blakemore and his fellow actor (playing the Second Lord) are taking a stroll ‘after a good dinner in the Mess’, Guthrie sends them off to work on the scene.10 When they return with a piece of business Blakemore has devised, ‘it went into the production just as we’d devised it in the corridor’. The occasion was significant for Blakemore as that in which ‘Guthrie gave me my first taste in direction’. Whitaker notes how Guthrie intervenes in two minor players making a long walk across the stage by bringing on a third to interrupt them; the scene gains point and demonstrates how ‘Guthrie is a master of such instant composition. He

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moves people instinctively.’11 Guthrie’s prompt copy of his translation of Three Sisters in 1963 bears this out, filled as it is with details relating to body language: ‘She [Masha] stamps.’ ‘She moves about.’ ‘They [the three sisters at the close] huddle together.’12 Friel also noted the democracy of Guthrie’s approach to directing, his ability to make ‘the most unimportant court extra feel that the action depended entirely on him alone’. This democracy was also evident when the ‘entire company came together’: ‘Then came the first fumbling attempts to vitalize the dead script with action, to inform it with life; and at this stage the director became conductor of his orchestra of players; and at this stage, too, Guthrie began wooing his company […] so that they worked enthusiastically for him.’13 The metaphor of the director as analogous to an orchestral conductor is one Friel uses on other occasions (though, significantly, not in his 1999 note on ‘Directors’). The metaphor of director and cast as conductor and musicians at least allows the director a central and necessary role in the bringing of a work to an audience, with the related acknowledgement that the script or score does not attain full existence until it is performed. Friel uses the metaphor primarily from the point of view of a writer who does not want his ‘score’ tampered with or altered in rehearsal. As he emphatically states in ‘Self Portrait’: ‘I look to the directors and the actors to interpret that score exactly as it is written.’14 But the alchemy that occurs when director and actors work on a script is missing from the definition of the theatrical process in the ‘Self-Portrait’ of 1972, as it is not from Friel’s rapt account in 1964’s ‘The Giant of Monaghan’ of Guthrie directing his actors. For the most part, the rehearsals in Minneapolis might have seemed rather aimless and low key if you were to view the director, who ‘wandered around the empty seats, for the most part just listening and encouraging, occasionally pulling up an actor for a gauche movement or a faulty pronunciation’.15 Friel is not fooled by this seeming inactivity on Guthrie’s part: ‘As in all creation there were ninety hours of perspiration for every hour of inspiration, and Guthrie’s job was to elicit from his actors as close an approximation to the performance he had in his mind as they were capable of giving.’ Here, the director is not a mere functionary. His role in the theatrical process is directly equated with the playwright, as a fellow creative artist striving to translate his or her vision into the concrete, carnal reality of the stage. Friel’s most exalted writing occurs when he describes the director’s flash of inspiration after the long blank periods in which nothing appears to happen. He writes of Guthrie’s direction in terms that echo frequent passages in Friel’s own writing, his diaries describing the possible weeks spent facing a blank page before the breakthrough occurs: But then the hour of inspiration would come, lasting maybe twenty minutes, maybe five, and at those moments, perhaps at the play-within-theplay scene or the closet scene or the nunnery scene, [Guthrie] radiated

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his infectious excitement so that the actors caught it, responded to it, excited him in turn. Then, in those precious times of action and reaction, director and cast worked in such intimate communication, so intensely, so vibrantly, so fluidly, that the distinction between director and directed seemed to disappear; they were in perfect unison, conductor and orchestra, inspiring and complementing each other, informing and being informed, so that the scene suddenly matured in meaning and significance and beauty, and there was captured a realization of something much deeper and more satisfying than the conscious mind of the author had ever known. These lines uncannily echo the closing speech by Michael in Dancing at Lughnasa, describing and evoking a moment of pure theatre as ‘dancing as if language had surrendered to movement – as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness’.16 Guthrie’s presence is acknowledged in these famous lines by the reference to ‘ritual’, the word that best describes the way both men came to view the nature of theatre, and which is briefly evoked by Friel’s comment that what he witnessed at the Guthrie was being performed by a ‘theoretical priesthood’. But the main emphasis in terms of the impact of the Minneapolis sojourn on Friel’s playwriting was in terms of keeping an audience entertained: I learned, in Guthrie’s own words, that theatre is an attempt to create something which will, if only for a brief moment, transport our few fellow travellers on our strange, amusing, perilous journey […]. I learned that the playwright’s first function is to entertain, to have audiences enjoy themselves, to move them emotionally […] and – again to quote the great man himself – ‘to participate in lavish and luxurious goings-on’.17 In the light of his experience of the process of live theatre at the Guthrie, observing ‘the great man himself’ directing, Friel’s judgement on the three plays he had written and seen staged during the previous five years of his career is severe: ‘I made the startling and humiliating discovery that the few plays I had written were not the masterpieces I had thought them to be but were, in sad truth, tedious and tendentious and terribly boring.’18 The Enemy Within, the only one of the three to be published, in its representation of St Columba on Iona sounds the theme of exile that will resonate throughout his career and many of the lines still stand up. But it cannot be denied that all three of the early plays, whose dramatic qualities and thematic concerns were examined in the previous chapter, share a tendency towards the didactic (‘tendentious’) and a dogged, linear exposition. The play he was to produce in the wake of what he later termed ‘the Guthrie high’ he experienced in Minneapolis was to be of a very different kind.19

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In certain respects, Friel’s 1964 play Philadelphia, Here I Come! resembles a standard Abbey Theatre play of the 1950s, both in its choice of subject – emigration – and in its cast of secondary characters. There is the loyal housekeeper, Madge, who acts as surrogate mother to the 25-year-old Gar O’Donnell; there is the alcoholic schoolteacher, who comes by on Gar’s last night before he emigrates to the US; there is the local priest, dedicated to his nightly game with Gar’s father more than to the spiritual needs of his parishioners; there is Gar’s former girl friend, Katie, now married to the local doctor; and there is the gang of unruly youths, the ‘boys’ with whom Gar has hung around for years. A central focus of the play is the generation gap between father and son, a war of mutual silence and recrimination with an occasional lessening of hostilities. This generation conflict, central to all of Friel’s early plays, undergoes a significant shift in Philadelphia from the perspective of the father or older man to that of the younger. The Guthrie apprenticeship may be seen to have had its primary impact in the theatrical solution Friel devises to represent the divided feelings of his protagonist. He divides young Gar into two characters, a public and a private, to be played by two different actors. As the stage directions and the play itself make clear, Gar Public ‘is the Gar that people see, talk to, talk about’20 – the one that would take the role, as it were, in a naturalistic play, displaying different facets of his character to the different people he encounters: mute and incommunicative with his father, affectionate and joshing with the housekeeper, defensive with his former girlfriend and rather on edge with his former companions. Private Gar is an original creation that transforms the nature of the play, rendering it both more psychologically acute and more self-consciously theatrical. ‘PRIVATE GAR is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id’ (27). As such, Gar Private can act as an interrogative force, asking Gar Public questions about his reasons for leaving, and probing him on areas he might otherwise prefer not to recall. Private’s probing prompts the play’s two flashbacks, first dramatizing directly the night of his breakup with Katie Doogan and then the return of his Aunt Lizzie from the US, which is central to Gar’s decision to emigrate. Already employed by world playwrights like Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1948), flashbacks were an innovation in the predominant naturalism of most Irish theatre of the time. The flashbacks are made possible by the break from realism that the use of the Gars has established: ‘They arrived in the afternoon; remember? […] and you couldn’t take your eyes off Aunt Lizzy, your mother’s sister – so this was your mother’s sister – remember?’(60). As Private Gar speaks these lines, three actors so far unseen have moved into the kitchen, playing Aunt Lizzie, her husband Con Sweeney and their American friend – and we realize we have moved six months into the past. But although his ability to prompt and activate Gar’s memories is important, what the presence of Private Gar most effects is to

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open up the conventional Irish stage to a much greater range of theatrical influence. This psychological double act provides the dynamism on which Philadelphia, Here I Come! runs. It ventilates and gives light, colour, humour and a variety of perspectives to the human dilemma at its core, freeing the representation of that dilemma from a naturalistic bind. Rereading the play in the light of Friel’s detailed descriptions of Guthrie in rehearsal, it is difficult not to see some resemblance between that figure’s behaviour and the representation of Private Gar. Like Guthrie, Private Gar is an extremely restless presence onstage, working on Public Gar when he threatens to become immobile and introspective. At the start of Episode Two, ‘PRIVATE is slumped in the chair, almost as if he were dozing. […] Then, suddenly, PRIVATE springs to his feet: ‘What the bloody hell are you at, O’Donnell? Snap out of it, man! Get up and keep active!’ (55–6). As Public does so, Private starts singing ‘a mad air of his own making’ (56) and goes on to deliver a couple of standard jokes. Private Gar has freedom of movement to roam around the stage while Public Gar and the other ‘realistic’ characters are bound to the prescribed rituals of their everyday dialogue and routines. Private questions them on what they are saying and the motives behind their actions. He clicks his fingers and claps his hands. He insists that momentum be maintained, warns that silence is the enemy. But he also works to uncover the emotions at work underneath, particularly in relation to the uncommunicative father, taxing him with a key memory of Gar’s childhood when all are saying a decade of the rosary. The figure of Gar Private resembles nothing so much as Tyrone Guthrie in rehearsal with his actors, insisting that the play must be kept entertaining. This raises the question: why did Tyrone Guthrie not direct Philadelphia, Here I Come!? In the remaining seven years of his life, Guthrie did not direct a single Friel play. Christopher Fitz-Simon, in his biography of the co-founders of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, explicitly raises this question: ‘why Friel did not ask [Guthrie] to direct it remains a mystery, but may be explained by Friel’s modesty about his own work’.21 Did Friel not want Guthrie to direct the play? ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, written a year after the Minneapolis sojourn and in the immediate aftermath of Friel having written Philadelphia, suggests otherwise. In his last paragraph on the great director, Friel looks to the future and to the possibility that people will associate the name of Guthrie, both man and theatre, with classics alone. Of course he has done his best work in classical plays – but only, I believe, because he has found modern plays too limited, too constricting for his boundless humanity. And within the next decade should some dramatist in some remote country write a play that throbbed with love and fun and sorrow and joy – and with a dash of horseplay thrown in for good measure – then the giant from Monaghan

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would leap across [the] seas with a resounding ‘Whoop!’ and pick up the script, and, if necessary, stage the show in a garage. Meantime, until that dramatist appears, Guthrie is content to go on rescuing the classics from the dons and presenting them in as entertaining a way as he can.22 This hardly suggests ‘modesty’ or reserve on the part of the playwright. Instead, it exudes confidence in the play and a challenge to the director – to forgo the safety of classical drama and expose himself to the risks of contemporary work, where the name of the director was less likely to be attached to the end product than it was when a fresh interpretation of a Shakespeare text was produced: Guthrie’s Hamlet but Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!, whoever may finally have directed it. Upon completing the script of Philadelphia at the end of September 1963, Friel immediately sent a copy to Tyrone Guthrie at Annaghmakerrig. Guthrie sent a brief first reaction on 3 October, saying how moving he found the play, and then furnishing a more detailed critique two days later. In his comments, Guthrie pays a great deal of attention to the secondary characters, praising the portrayals of the housekeeper Madge and the schoolteacher Boyle for their emotional and cultural accuracy: ‘The whole treatment of Madge […] is so true to life as lived in the Northern latitudes of our Puritan isle; just so exactly like the women who have formed my own life.’23 But Guthrie finds the boys, the Canon and in particular the father too unsympathetically rendered: ‘He [Screwballs] doesn’t show a single gleam till the very final scenes, and I think the audience should be gently tipped off, subtly and not a bit sentimentally, that he is missing the dead wife and is as lonely as Gareth.’ A handwritten note by Friel on Guthrie’s letter reveals that he carried out all Guthrie’s suggestions. In the final version of the play the moments that provide a deeper emotional understanding of the boys and of S. B. O’Donnell are conveyed primarily by gesture rather than by language and show how much Friel had learned from his exposure to the process of live theatre. After all his hectic bravado, ‘big, thick, generous Ned’ pauses in the doorway as he leaves, takes off the ‘broad leather belt with the huge brass buckle’ (75–6) and gives it to Gar. The two key moments in the play that convey the father’s distress at his only son’s imminent departure are entirely silent: one when he is reading the newspaper and realizes he is holding it upside down, the other in a very rare moment when S. B. O’Donnell is alone on stage: ‘He moves slowly towards the table, sees the cases, goes over to them, touches the coat [which is lying across them], goes back towards the table, and sits there, staring at the bedroom door. He coughs’ (91). On the Canon, Friel is unrepentant, and the savage accusation Private Gar directs at him is undiluted: ‘you could translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that would make life bearable for us all’ (88). Guthrie’s critique of Philadelphia delays but finally has to address the central device of the two Gars: ‘Now for it: I can’t decide whether the

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dodge of having two actors play Private and Public, Ego and Alter Ego, is justified. I guess it ought to be tried.’ The letter is framed with superlatives, but the overall impression it leaves is that Guthrie would have been happier with a more conventional play, one in which the central character was played by one rather than two actors. The archive also reveals that Guthrie was invited to direct the first production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! . When Friel’s London agency Curtis Brown heard of Guthrie’s interest in the play, they wrote to him and asked him if he would be interested in directing the premiere, which was now scheduled for the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival in October. Guthrie’s reply of 27 March 1964 reiterates his admiration for the play but expresses his regret that he is unable to direct the production because of his commitments at the Guthrie in Minneapolis: I think that so long as I am here, which means until the end of 1965, I would not be able to direct Philadelphia, Here I Come! I want to make it perfectly clear that this is not due to lack of interest in the play, which I like very much, but I think it needs careful casting and I don’t feel sufficiently in touch with the available actors to be able to do this quickly, and I don’t see the time available for collecting a cast as well as rehearsing the play.24 Guthrie was in Dublin for the Theatre Festival six months later and saw the production at the Gaiety, again sending Friel a detailed critique in which he agreed that the double act of the two Gars did work on stage and stating how fortunate Friel was to have had the play directed by Hilton Edwards. A reason Guthrie may have been reluctant to undertake the direction of Philadelphia was that the 1964 Festival also featured a production of the first play by Eugene McCabe, King of the Castle, which had just been awarded the Irish Life Prize for Best Play of the Year by a panel of judges whose chair was – Tyrone Guthrie. The direction of the McCabe play was by the actor Godfrey Quigley. In the remaining six years of his life, Guthrie’s commitment to Friel and McCabe did not abate. In a 1969 syndicated interview in the US, the acknowledged director of classic repertory theatre is asked about the contemporary stage. He rubbishes most of what was then described as the Theatre of the Absurd, including Beckett, but declares his admiration for the plays of Harold Pinter, who ‘has already exercised a remarkable influence on dialogue and the way we listen to speech in our time’.25 Guthrie places the greatest emphasis in his comments on contemporary playwrights by invoking the names of ‘two Irish playwrights in whom I am very interested: Brian Friel, he did Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which has been seen here, and Eugene McCabe. His work hasn’t been done outside Ireland yet.’ In the same year, 1969, Guthrie directed a new play by McCabe, Swift, with an ailing Micheál MacLiammóir in the title role, at the Abbey

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Theatre. In 1970, at the time of his sudden and unexpected death, he was considering a production of Friel’s 1966 play, The Loves of Cass McGuire.26 Guthrie was not just being exculpatory in saying Friel was in good hands with the person who ultimately directed Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Friel was indeed fortunate, for this play as for his next three, to have the Gate Theatre’s Hilton Edwards as director, since his innovative play utilized all of Edwards’s directorial strengths: controlled histrionic action with a blend of the performative and the realistic; a choreographic precision of overall movement, especially for the delicate interplay between Private and Public Gar; and an unparalleled technical skill in lighting to convey the atmosphere of a play. The lighting is particularly important in Philadelphia when it comes to managing the flashbacks in the front area of the stage, the apron, which Friel explicitly designates as a ‘fluid’ space (27). In 1928 Edwards, who acted as well as directed, and his partner Micheál MacLiammóir, who acted but was also a playwright and stage designer, founded the Gate Theatre in Dublin, which was deliberately intended to offer an alternative of European avant-garde theatre to the Abbey’s nationalist repertoire. The playwright Brendan Behan memorably described the theatrical difference between Dublin’s two leading theatres as Sodom and Begorrah, adverting to the fact that for over 50 years in the supposedly irredeemably puritanical and censorious capital of Ireland, Edwards and MacLiammóir lived openly as a gay couple, known familiarly as ‘the Boys’ (the title of Christopher Fitz-Simon’s invaluable joint biography of 1994). Friel does not number Hilton Edwards among the ‘handful of magnificent directors’ enumerated in his 1999 piece on the subject; but the phrasing makes clear that his list is not exhaustive. In 1978, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Gate Theatre, and in the immediate aftermath of MacLiammóir’s passing, Friel contributed an essay to the Festschrift published in the Boys’ honour, declaring his gratitude at being ‘able to express in public my great affection and admiration for these two great men of Irish theatre’.27 He wrote of their five-year collaboration in the following terms: My education with Hilton and Micheál began in 1963. Before that I had taken a few stumbling steps into drama. I then went to the United States where I learned what I could. In the years following my return to Ireland I wrote four plays, all of which Hilton directed and Micheál designed. Hilton was then in his early sixties, Micheál a few years older, with over three hundred productions under their belt. I was thirty-four, with two flawed plays behind me. And for the next five years we worked together in Ireland and in England and in America. I like to think that I came into their lives at a point when they were ready for something new. I know that they came into my life at a point when their practical skill and their vast experience and their scholarship were of most value to me. I am not aware that I have any theatrical pedigree; but if

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I had to produce documentation I would be pleased to claim – to paraphrase Turgenev’s comment on Gogol – that I came out from under the Edwards–MacLiammóir overcoat. This account is slanted towards representing his work with both partners as equal. But MacLiammóir only designed the fourth play of their collaboration, 1968’s Crystal and Fox; Alpho O’Reilly designed the setting for Philadelphia. The collaboration with Hilton Edwards, however, was as central and important as he claims. Edwards directed four Friel plays in succession, and in the case of Philadelphia and 1967’s Lovers not just the Irish premieres but the subsequent American productions, which were both great successes and which subsidized Friel in the wilderness years that were to follow. Edwards, in particular, came into Friel’s life at a point when his practical skill and vast experience and scholarship as a director were a huge resource to the young playwright, as he himself acknowledges. Friel wonders aloud elsewhere in his remarks why, for all the theatrical stylishness it contributed to the Irish stage, ‘the Gate never produced a major writer’. This was not quite true. Its inaugural production in 1928, The Old Lady Says No!, provided the debut of a major dramatist in the shape of Denis Johnston. His play had been rejected by the Abbey Theatre (hence its title) because of its overt debt to German Expressionism. The Old Lady and Philadelphia have a great deal in common. Both were written by young men as original Irish plays, not just new but works that were uneasy and impatient with inherited forms. The Old Lady began as a conventional, indeed traditional, historical melodrama with a love scene between the revolutionary Robert Emmett (played by MacLiammóir) and Sarah Curran. They are interrupted by British redcoats, and the actor playing Emmet is hit over the head and knocked unconscious. A distraught assistant director comes onstage and, addressing the audience, asks if there is a doctor in the house. The delirious Emmett ends up wandering through an Expressionist 1920s Dublin, confronting its modernity and asking what has become of his revolutionary ideals. To signal the crucial moment of transition from a conventional nineteenth-century love scene into the ‘mind’ of the protagonist, Edwards worked out a rhythmic interaction between syncopated percussion and black and white lighting effects. In Philadelphia, the opening scene functions as a traditional play with and between the young Gar and the housekeeper Madge. The transition from one order of reality to another, from naturalism to psychologized and overtly theatricalized space, occurs when Gar moves into the bedroom and begins to alternate highly stylized, Beckettian criss-cross lines with an off-stage presence who then enters. The bedroom has been ‘in darkness’; clearly, a more complex cue than just raising the lights is called for to signify that Gar is crossing a threshold and encountering his alter ego. The unparalleled theatrical demands for the Irish stage of both the Johnston and Friel plays required Edwards’s experience in

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world drama, in particular his skill at transforming a fixed conventional setting into a fluid psychological space. Since MacLiammóir from 1962 on had been taken up with his one-man show on Wilde, The Importance of Being Oscar, Edwards was not only free to direct Friel’s plays both in Ireland and on extensive American tours but was relieved of the necessity of having to provide a starring role for his partner in the plays he chose to direct. This obligation had attended almost every Gate production from The Old Lady in 1929 to the early 1960s and had helped to reduce severely the number of new Irish plays produced there. Besides MacLiammóir being too old for either of the lead parts, Philadelphia is founded on the absence of a star part (something that Guthrie clearly jibbed against). Instead the roles were taken, memorably, by Patrick Bedford as Public Gar and Donal Donnelly as Private Gar. All of the technical aspects of the play are designed to serve the rapport between the two Gars (as of the actors required to play them). The verbal extravagance and physical mime in which the two engage, breaking into song and dance and verbal improvisation, is European theatre of a very different kind from that which had predominated in Irish plays up to that point. Here, the Gate ‘style’ was wedded to an important Irish dramatist. Friel lauded that style and its importance in the Irish context as follows: they offered us, insisted on, almost flaunted this stylishness during the years when the native drama saw ‘truth’ only in cloth caps and naturalistic speech and peasant quality. […] they rescued us from an overindulgence in our most narrow and most provincial concept of ourselves. Nothing terrifies the Stage Irishman more than the mention of the word Gate. The second quality that Friel attributes to them is Hilton’s insistence on a firm commitment to professional standards in the theatre. It is, according to Friel, the mark of ‘an artist’. Friel and Edwards worked in close collaboration during the rehearsal period and the two-week Festival run of Philadelphia, Here I Come!. In a practice that Friel was soon to forgo, alterations were made to the script. In its original form, the play ended with an epilogue in which the two Gars were placed high on the stage in two seats representing the aeroplane of the following day, bound for Philadelphia from Shannon Airport, while the rest of the cast stood on stage looking up at them: ‘Look out! They’re all down there, Father and Madge, and Daddy Senator and Tom and Joe and Ned and Master Boyle and the Canon.[…] Philadelphia, here I come – city of brotherly love […] too late, too late – you had your chance, laddybuck.’28 Guthrie had objected to the epilogue, as did Edwards, and it was removed. This gave Madge the last word, in what amounts to a choric commentary. She raises her hand in a sort of vague benediction, then shuffles towards the scullery: When the boss was his [GAR’s] age, he was the very same as

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him: leppin’, and eejitin’ about and actin’ the clown; as like as two peas. And when he’s (GAR) the age the boss is now, he’ll turn out just the same. And although I won’t be here to see it, you’ll find that he’s learned nothin’ in-between times. That’s people for you – they’d put you astray in the head if you thought long enough about them (98). Both Guthrie and Friel felt that Madge should have the last word, if necessary speaking straight out to the audience – something Cass McGuire was to do in Friel’s next play. But Edwards argued for the last word going to the two Gars and that their final exchange be moved up two pages, as it is in the printed text, which now concludes: ‘God, Boy, why do you have to leave? Why? Why?’ PUBLIC: ‘I don’t know. I-I-I don’t know’ (99). Friel conceded that the change worked better in performance and did not end the play on a nihilistic note, as he had originally intended. The lengthy running time, two hours and forty-five minutes, remained a concern, with the playwright resolutely refusing to cut his text. The number of young men in the boys’ scene was reduced to two, but after Friel objected strenuously the missing young man was restored. During the two weeks’ run, however, he sensed that the boys’ scene was too long and decided to cut its opening by four to five minutes. In general he and Edwards continued to consult with each other in order to maximize the play’s effectiveness as a piece of live theatre. Bedford and Donnelly in rehearsals had displayed a concern about whether the audience would understand and buy into the double lead, to which Edwards riposted: ‘If you believe it, so will they.’29 The production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival proved a landmark event, not only in the career of Brian Friel but in the history of contemporary Irish drama. I have already quoted playwright Thomas Kilroy on the inspiration it provided for someone who sought to write innovative plays in what seemed the doldrums of the Irish stage in the early 1960s. The director Joe Dowling, who was subsequently to become Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre and currently holds the same position at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, was then a young 16-year-old who was so overwhelmed by the experience of the play that he attended it on almost every night of its Festival run.30 A key element in Dowling’s subsequent theatrical career was his directing of Friel plays, from the late 1970s premieres of Living Quarters and Aristocrats at the Abbey through the Field Day production of 1982’s Communication Cord to the 2007 American premiere of The Home Place at the Guthrie; Dowling also directed the breakthrough Abbey production of Faith Healer at the Abbey in 1980 after its Broadway failure, persuading Friel to let him do so. The impact of Philadelphia, Here I Come! on playwright Kilroy and director Dowling indicates the extent of the play’s word-of-mouth success in building its reputation and contributing to its original sell-out run, its revival by the Gate in 1965 and subsequent success on Broadway, where it ran for over

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300 performances. One would guess little of this from the largely uncomprehending reviews the play received from Irish theatre critics at its opening, a case of what might be called ‘praising with faint damns’. By far the most interesting review was that carried by the Sunday Independent on 4 October 1964. It was written by Frank O’Connor, one of the greatest contemporary writers of the Irish short story. O’Connor, as one might have expected, extols Brian Friel as ‘a very fine short story writer’, and this is how he chooses to regard Philadelphia, Here I Come!: as a fine short story, which might have made ‘a beautiful, gentle play’ but which has instead been turned into ‘a rip-roaring revue’.31 Friel the short story writer has in O’Connor’s view fallen ‘into the wicked clutches of the wicked magician, Hilton Edwards, seeking whom he might devour’, and this theatrical Mephistopheles has wrought a negative metamorphosis. O’Connor proceeds to damn most of the play’s ingredients, from the divided hero, ‘Taciturn and Talkative’, to the anti-clerical portrait of the Canon, sparing only the acting of Eamonn Kelly in the role of the father, the play’s most traditional element. His review concludes by noting that Hilton Edwards gave us ‘a magnificent production’, that ‘the performance was a brilliant success, and the audience loved it’ but it was of the wrong play, since the ‘wicked magician’ had turned an Irish play into an evil compound of Anton Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, the French avant-garde theatre and German Expressionism. The answer was not long in coming. The Sunday Independent of the following week ran not only a lengthy, no-holds-barred riposte from director Edwards but (what was virtually unprecedented before or since) from the playwright himself. Edwards begins by identifying the charge O’Connor has made against his professionalism: ‘As he has accused me of directing Brian Friel’s play with a lack of integrity and a wilful distortion of an author’s purpose to a degree which, if correct, amounts to my betraying a trust, I feel that the time has come to rend the veil of the sanctuary in which lurks the image of Frank O’Connor as a sacred cow.’32 The director’s main purpose is to show up O’Connor’s ignorance, wilful or otherwise, of the theatrical process: ‘Mr O’Connor seems to find it difficult to dissociate cause from effect in the theatre and […] gives to the subaltern the credit due to the superior.’ Edwards can appreciate that Brian Friel may not have written the play O’Connor wanted him to write, which is another matter, and defends himself from the charge of deliberately distorting Friel’s text by pointing out that ‘at my invitation the author was present at the rehearsals and not only approved of every step taken but, with myself, is still endeavouring to extract from certain scenes a greater degree of comedy than we have so far achieved’. Finally, he turns O’Connor into a version of Private and Public Gar and glances at his lack of success when the short story writer contributed plays to the Abbey Theatre in the 1930s: ‘Both Frank and his alter-ego O’Connor (or should it be the other way round?) have time and

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again proved themselves by the very nature of their talent and temperament unsuited for theatrical adventure. Faced with the excitement of the stage, discrimination seems to desert them.’ Where Edwards goes for the high splenetic style, Brian Friel’s reply is shorter and more ironic in its remarks on Frank O’Connor but unstinting in its praise of and support for his director: It is beyond question that Frank O’Connor is the best short story writer in Ireland, perhaps the best in the world; and I have learned so much from him and admire him so unreservedly that I read his review of my play not as a critique but as the delightful fiction that it was. But, in case some people should think that he was serious, I would like to point out that I was grateful to Mr Edwards for the magic he worked with my play, that the magic was always discreet and in tone, and that flattered as I am by the epithet ‘innocent’ I am afraid I cannot accept it in this context. I connived as best as I could. So I plead with Mr O’Connor not to beat Mr Edwards to death with his programme because I want Mr Edwards alive and perceptive as he is for my next play.33 Friel would never so ‘connive’ again. The experience of that next play, The Loves of Cass McGuire, was to prove less happy and to culminate in a traumatic experience for the author, which fundamentally altered his relationship with the directors of his work. The script of Cass McGuire, after an arduous five months of notes and four months of writing, was sent to Hilton Edwards on 7 April 1965 and accepted by him two weeks later. The play itself can be seen as complementary to its predecessor. Where Gar O’Donnell emigrates to the US at the age of 25, the 70-year-old Cass McGuire returns to Ireland after 50 years in New York, where she has led a hard and demanding life. She is loud, vulgar and flashily dressed, ‘smokes incessantly and talks loudly and coarsely’.34 Cass McGuire, returning to the Ireland of the 1960s in the first wave of modernization, finds it very different from the country she had left a half-century before or the Ireland of her imagination. The aspirant bourgeois family of her brother Harry is horrified in turn by the returned Yank’s vulgarity, drunkenness and waywardness, and contrives to have her placed in an old people’s home, ironically titled Eden House. Although he decided to exercise his option and direct the play, Hilton Edwards’s response was mixed. He was alert to the high degree of theatre professionalism in its writing and stageability but rather lacking in enthusiasm for Cass’s character and a play that was more like Chekhov than he might have preferred.35 Guthrie’s response to the script was ecstatic: he welcomed the Chekhovian atmosphere and thought Cass a wonderful part; he recognized that Friel was deliberately moving into a more poetic register, one in which various levels of illusion were being set one against another and the norms of realism challenged. It should be no surprise that The Loves of Cass McGuire was the Friel

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play Guthrie showed most insight into and interest in directing. It is sadly ironic he did not do so sooner, since he was in the midst of rereading Friel’s play for a production in 1970 when he died. Once he committed to the play, Hilton Edwards tackled it with his usual professionalism. His technical skills came to the fore in working with Friel to clarify issues relating to both time and place as the play moves backwards and forwards in time and between three locations: Cass’s bedroom, her brother’s house and the old people’s home. Edwards addressed the latter problem through an economical and inspired use of props. In place of a complete set change, which would seriously damage the necessary fluidity of the play (to a much greater degree than Philadelphia), places are identified by objects on the wall – a fireplace in Harry’s house is replaced by a list of rules and regulations in Eden House – or by a change of light fittings – a crystal chandelier for Harry and a common light pendant for Eden House. Both Guthrie and Edwards were of one mind that the casting of the central role was crucial – here was a star part for the right actress. What complicated this decision was the question of whether The Loves of Cass McGuire would receive its premiere in Dublin at the Gate Theatre or in the United States. Friel and Edwards favoured the former, not least because it would give the production more authenticity but also a real opportunity to settle before being played before a non-Irish audience. But the economics were daunting, and in the end they agreed to producer David Merrick’s wish to premiere it in the US, where his production of Philadelphia was still running in New York. This meant that the cast was almost entirely American, since Actors’ Equity was strict in the matter, and Hilton Edwards was auditioning in a context where he was unfamiliar with the acting pool. In the end, the stage and film actress and screenwriter Ruth Gordon was chosen to play Cass, although neither playwright nor director were entirely persuaded of her suitability for the role. The production went out on the road for the customary US tryout at various locations – in this case two weeks in Boston and two weeks (ironically) in Philadelphia – before the official opening in New York in October 1966. But during this time alterations were made to the script, speeches cut up and rearranged, by a concerned management. When word reached Friel he was furious and set off to Philadelphia with a lawyer in tow. As Patrick Burke puts it in his own consideration of the complex subject of Friel and directors: ‘Friel threatened legal action in 1966 during the premiere run of The Loves of Cass McGuire in the USA when, in his view, the powerful Merrick organization was playing fast and loose with his text.’36 With the threat of legal action, Friel’s own script was restored, and this was the version that opened the following week in New York. The restoration of the original script notwithstanding, the production of Cass McGuire played for less than 21 performances on Broadway. Brian Friel did not hold Hilton Edwards personally to blame for what happened, as is clear both from their correspondence after the debacle37 and

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from the fact that Edwards went on to direct the next two Friel plays, Lovers (1967) and Crystal and Fox (1968). But the theatre professional who has suffered most from Friel’s reaction to this traumatic experience of his text being mutilated is the director rather than the producer or producers. For what became clear from 1966 onwards is that Brian Friel now holds the text of his play, when he has spent his time writing it through the many drafts he always undertakes, as finished, complete and not to be altered in rehearsal. When an Irish production of Cass McGuire was performed at the Abbey in April 1967, with Siobhán McKenna in the title role, it proved a great success, in marked contrast to the American experience. But in his exchanges with Friel, any suggestions by the play’s director Tomás Mac Anna for textual emendations were politely but firmly rejected; and when Siobhán McKenna declared a preference for a radio version of the play that had been broadcast, she was told by the playwright (via Mac Anna, who had relayed the comment) that she should ‘concentrate her artistic contribution exclusively to her interpretation of the part’.38 The line that went out to all subsequent directors was: this is the script as I have written it; either take and direct it as it is, or send it back. In a lengthy 1968 interview conducted with Friel when he was in New York to see Edwards’s production of Lovers, Lewis Funke asked: ‘What do you think the relationship between a playwright and a director should be? Should a director have a good deal of control or do you feel your ideas should carry?’39 Friel’s reply was uncompromising: ‘I’m afraid I’m very arrogant about this. […] My belief is absolutely and totally in the printed word, and that this must be interpreted precisely and exactly as the author intended. The ideal relationship between the writer and the director is one where the director interprets to the best of their ability what the author intends, and only this.’ But then Friel goes on to speak warmly of his collaboration with director Edwards in terms that bespeak mutual respect, sympathy, understanding and responsibility: ‘Hilton Edwards and I have worked together for three or four plays and we understand each other. We’ve got to a stage where we don’t really have to sit down and discuss in great detail the character, because he knows what I am doing. In fact, he usually works alone the first week [of rehearsals] but then I come in and work with him for the last two weeks.’ During the course of this interview, Funke asked Friel if he could see himself directing his own work, now or at any time in the future. Friel gave an unequivocal ‘no’, saying that he did not think he had the right temperament or approach for the job: ‘All I know is that I can’t talk to actors very well […] there is a sort of private language that is spoken between directors and actors. You jump up and you say, “Darling, that was absolutely beautiful but…” This is the sort of language that I can’t tolerate, and I don’t think I’m ever going to learn it, so I can’t see myself having this job.’40 Some decades later, Friel changed his mind and chose to direct two of his own plays, Molly Sweeney at the Gate in 1994 and Give Me Your Answer, Do! at the

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Abbey in 1997. The first, as a series of monologues for three actors, was a relatively straightforward assignment. With relation to the more complex demands of staging Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Patrick Burke has written: ‘[Friel’s] direction of a notable team of actors was amateurish, especially in poor blocking and masking.’41 When the play was subsequently given a new production at London’s Hampstead Theatre, where it was directed by Robin LeFèvre, critics who had seen both productions commented on how much more of a shape the play assumed or revealed under LeFèvre’s direction. Friel’s then recent experience of directing his own work and how his efforts were received by critics and others may well have contributed to the negativity of his description of directors and directing in the piece he wrote in 1998, with the metaphor of the bus conductor replacing the orchestra conductor. Or it may be part of the ambivalence amounting at times to outright contradiction that Friel has displayed throughout his career on the subject. By 1970 Friel’s views on the role of the director, especially in the wake of the Cass McGuire debacle in the US, had hardened into the ‘arrogant’ belief he outlines above. No subsequent director of his work was to be given anything like the leeway to comment on and make changes in his text that he extended to Guthrie and Edwards. In March 1970, Guthrie died, suddenly and shockingly, while at Annaghmakerrig; he was only 70. Edwards was still alive, though approaching 70, and would direct for another decade. But the creative partnership with Friel had ended. This may have had something to do with the playwright’s desire for a less dominant personality to fulfil that role. Or the end may have come with the US production of Friel’s Crystal and Fox in 1969 in Los Angeles at the Mark Taper Forum. As Christopher Fitz-Simon describes it: ‘Hilton Edwards experienced the same kind of difficulty he had had in New York with Ruth Gordon [when she played Cass McGuire] – but on this occasion with the whole cast. For the first time in the United States he was confronted with a company none of whose members he knew; he did not seem to be able to understand any of them, and they, brought up in another tradition, understood neither his methods nor his language.’42 This time around, in contrast to the earlier experience with The Loves of Cass McGuire, Edwards regarded himself as primarily responsible for the US failure of Crystal and Fox, and there is no letter from the playwright to suggest otherwise. In the words of his biographer Fitz-Simon, ‘for Hilton it was a dispiriting conclusion to the “Friel years”’.43 For his next two plays Friel was to place responsibility for their direction in the hands of actors. Donal Donnelly, Private Gar from the Gate production of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, directed The Mundy Scheme, Friel’s 1969 satire of Irish politicians; and Vincent Dowling, an actor at the Abbey Theatre, directed 1971’s The Gentle Island, though at Dublin’s more commercial Olympia Theatre rather than at the Abbey.44 In Crystal and Fox, Friel’s depiction of the ramshackle life of the touring fit-up company headed by the manager Fox Melarkey and

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his actress-wife Crystal was close enough to Edwards and MacLiammóir’s participation in such a company headed by Anew McMaster in the late 1920s to enable Edwards the director to bring its mix of onstage and offstage life in the small towns of Ireland to convincing life. (It was when McMaster had recruited the English Edwards to his Irish touring troupe that ‘the Boys’ met for the first time.) But Irish politics, the subject of Friel’s Mundy Scheme, was a different matter, and a matter to which the Englishman Edwards had been largely indifferent, despite his four decades of residency in Ireland. For the internal machinations of the Taoiseach [prime minister] and Cabinet colleagues in his political farce, Friel may well have felt that a native Irish director was needed. The letters between the playwright and the director Donal Donnelly stress the need to tell Edwards that he will not be directing The Mundy Scheme, so that he does not hear first from another source. But they equally emphasize the need to do so with the utmost delicacy, so as not to hurt the professional pride of someone with whom they had both worked so closely. Although he was not to direct it either, it is the 1971 play The Gentle Island that most bears the imprint of Hilton Edwards’s person and personality. For that play features the first appearance of a homosexual couple in a native play on the modern Irish stage. In his stage representation, Friel was drawing on his own experience as a young heterosexual and married Catholic nationalist from Northern Ireland entering into the gay demi-monde of the Gate Theatre in Ireland’s capital city during the early 1960s. There is only one comment in Friel’s reprinted interviews that alludes to Edwards’s gayness; it is revealing as much for what it does not say as much as for what it does. Friel is asked by The Guardian’s Peter Lennon in 1964 if he had ‘any problems with the interpretation’ of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, presumably by the director.45 Lennon has described it as ‘a rather subtle and gentle play’, and in his reply Friel counters that he thinks it ‘an angry play’, which was ‘very raw in the beginning’ but which he ‘toned down’. In this, Friel acknowledges the influence of Edwards and almost exactly reverses the charge that Frank O’Connor was to lay at the director’s door, of coarsening the work of the subtle and gentle short story writer. Friel then discusses Edwards directly in terms of his handling of Philadelphia: Then Hilton Edwards, the producer [recte ‘director’], is an Englishman. He did a very fine job but there were some things he found it hard to grasp. For example, the man travelling around with the Irish couple from America. He wanted to know what relationship that man had with the woman – or even with the husband. But there was no definite relationship. I think you find that a lot in Irish marriages: there is another man floating like a satellite around the couple. A person in whom the wife confides, probably. There is nothing sinister in this and certainly nothing sexual, but English people would find that very hard to grasp.

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There is an ambivalence here on the score of the director’s Englishness. In the Gate Theatre Festschrift’, Friel praised Edwards’s professionalism, particularly in regard to acting, for insisting that there is a ‘firm and final distinction between the professional and the amateur theatre’. He attributed this view unhesitatingly to Edwards’s Englishness: ‘Hilton, wise in his English blood, knows the necessity.’ That ‘total dedication to a life in the theatre’ pursued across five decades by the Englishman Edwards ‘has made the professional theatre a possibility for all of us’ who work in Irish theatre.46 But Edwards’s Englishness becomes a liability when it encourages him to seek sexual sub-texts in a dramatic situation that, according to the playwright, is innocent of them. At his most extreme in his opposition to assigning an independent role to directors, Friel has insisted that their function is to carry out what the writer has intended, and no more. This asserts an absolute intentionality with regard to the playwright and his script. When witnessing Guthrie directing, however, Friel has counter-claimed approvingly that the director and the actors have released a meaning in their theatrical alchemy that the writer may never have intended or been aware of: ‘they were in perfect unison, conductor and orchestra, inspiring and complementing each other, informing and being informed, so that the scene suddenly matured in meaning and significance and beauty, and there was captured a realization of something much deeper and more satisfying than the conscious mind of the author had ever known’.47A further element in bringing such a sub-text to the fore in the Gate production of Philadelphia was the casting of Patrick Bedford in the role of Public Gar. Bedford was, in Fitz-Simon’s words, ‘Hilton’s particular friend’.48 Although Edwards and MacLiammóir were ‘emotionally interdependent’ throughout their long lives together, this did not mean they were sexually monogamous. Both had affairs with other men; but the emotional reality was that MacLiammóir frequently played the role of injured party towards Edwards and his young man. By 1964 Edwards and the younger Bedford had been in a relationship for almost ten years even as he and MacLiammóir continued their tactical romantic manoeuvres towards each other. In his response to Edwards’s production of Philadelphia in 1964, Guthrie said in relation to the acting: ‘Paddy Bedford did very well, I thought, and wasn’t nearly so queeny as I’d feared – indeed, really not queeny at all.’49 Clearly, there had been an expectation that Bedford would respond to the ‘camp’ aspects of Private Gar by giving an overtly gay performance; Guthrie’s comments suggest that the gay sub-text was subtly conveyed. But his letter to Friel makes clear that all involved in the production of Philadelphia, the author included, were alert to this aspect of the play in performance, and that it was not just a case of the English director foisting a gay sub-text on the ‘innocent’ Irish playwright. These gendered undertones became manifest in The Gentle Island, the play Friel wrote several years after moving away from his working relationship

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with Edwards and MacLiammóir. Set on an island off the west coast of Ireland, there is one family remaining after the remarkable mass emigration scene at the opening: a father, two sons, and a daughter-in-law. Into this deceptively ‘gentle island’ arrive two men from Dublin. In their scenes together, it is clear that there is an emotional and physical relationship between them. One of the gay couple is described as ‘a plump, balding middle-aged man’;50 and the description is inscribed into the script when Sarah refers to him as ‘this wee fat, bald man, with a checked shirt and ‘an ugly, sweaty face (37). This description cannot help but evoke Hilton Edwards, whose physical appearance was immediately recognizable because, as well as engaging in the anonymous task of direction, he also acted on stage and in film in addition to strolling ostentatiously around Dublin arm-in-arm with the more outré MacLiammóir. Edwards is described by his biographer in the following terms: ‘pudgy as a young man, in his forties he became portly, though not obese’.51 No comparable physical description is given in The Gentle Island of the portly man’s partner, save that he is ‘twenty years younger’ (25); so there is no danger of (mis)taking him for MacLiammóir. That young Shane is physically attractive becomes evident when the sexually frustrated and childless Sarah comes on to him and is rebuffed. Her response is to taunt the father Manus with an account of how Philly, his son and her husband, is down in the boathouse making love to the stranger: You don’t want to see […] that he’s down there with that Dublin tramp, Shane. That they’re stripped naked. That’s he’s doing for the tramp what he couldn’t do for me. […] And that if you’re the great king of Inishkeen, you’ll kill them both. (61) When Manus has Shane in his sights, and falters, Sarah pulls the trigger. The badly wounded younger man is taken back to Dublin and the heterosexual couple resume their relationship, never referring directly to what has occurred. The ‘blight’, the ‘canker’ that Manus asserts ‘them queers’ have brought into their midst (72), has been cauterized and the native islanders’ purity restored. But what the play has demonstrated graphically, as Frank McGuinness recognizes, is that homosexuality in this play is ‘no disease, this is no alien love. It is native to this place, and therefore natural.’52 If Hilton Edwards directly contributed to the representation of Irish gayness in The Gentle Island, then 2005’s The Home Place is directly informed by the figure of Tyrone Guthrie in its representation of an Anglo-Irish landlord at the time of the Land War in the 1880s. What seals the connection is Friel’s bestowing on Christopher Gore the catch-phrase that all those who attended Guthrie’s rehearsals remember. As Michael Blakemore describes it from an actor’s perspective: ‘If an actor didn’t give of his best he was in trouble and there could be no excuses. “Rise above it!” was [Guthrie’s] famous

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injunction to anyone who came to him worried, depressed or just plain ill.’53 This advice, which Guthrie directed to others, must have been applied with no less force to himself; the apparent aimlessness is countered by the iron self-discipline, as Friel’s account of the director at work in Minneapolis fully recognizes. In The Home Place the central character initially applies his oft-repeated phrase, ‘Rise above’, to himself, as a family legacy handed down with the estate: ‘Rise above, Father always said – rise above – rise above.’54 The phrase is implicitly extended to an entire caste, those who have come from England to Ireland as planters and who, no matter how many generations they remain, will always be regarded by the native population as non-Irish, as outsiders. Christopher comes to this recognition in a speech late in the play: I’ll rise above. The planter has to be resilient, hasn’t he? No home, no country, a life of isolation and resentment. So he has to … resile. […] And that resentment will stalk him […] down through the next generation and the next and the next. The doomed nexus of those who believe themselves the possessors and those who believe they’re dispossessed. (71) The phrase in the play’s title, ‘the home place’, is referred by Christopher Gore, not to the Ballybeg estate on which he and his family have lived for generations but to the place in England from which they have originated and to which they return every summer: ‘And the truth is I hated being shipped over to the home place every damned summer’ (12–13). Despite this avowal of loyalty to his home in Ireland, on other occasions Christopher speaks of nostalgia for the England he remembers, verbally constructed as a place of pastoral plenitude, ‘a golden and beneficent land’ (64). A further detail linking Christopher Gore and Tyrone Guthrie is the location of the former’s home place in Kent, the same county as Tunbridge Wells, where Guthrie was born and raised. Friel has precisely inverted the relationship between Guthrie and his home place. Where the young Tyrone Guthrie was brought back every summer to the Irish Big House of Annaghmakerrig for his roots to be renewed, Christopher Gore was sent in the opposite direction. Gore’s allegiances remain ambivalent and shifting between Ireland and England and which country may properly be regarded as the truer ‘home place’. With regard to Guthrie, as has been noted, Friel divined three different strains of national allegiance: English, Scottish and Irish. Alec Guinness, a frequent visitor to Annaghmakerrig during the period when he was being directed by Guthrie, noted: ‘And yet, for all its Irishness, the house remained the house of a Scot. I never felt such awareness of Tony’s Edinburgh forebears as I did there.’55 Mike Wilcock, who cites this remark by Guinness in his extended discussion of Friel and Guthrie, wonders whether differences between the native Irish playwright and Anglo-Irish director

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might have been lessened because they met in the neutral context of the US and that their differences would have registered with more force on home ground. Though both were Irishmen with a strong streak of the rebel, they came ‘from different sides of the Irish cultural divide’: nationalist and planter.56 And in some of Friel’s most negative statements about directors (‘I think we can dispose of them very easily again’),57 Wilcock detects the native playwright wishing to see off the role of the director as planter. In the case not only of Sir Tyrone Guthrie but of Hilton Edwards also, Friel was having to reckon with two influential and forceful personalities who for all of their long-time residence in Ireland remained resolutely English. But the issue is more complicated than this and, with regard to Friel and Guthrie, is played out in relation to the central figure of Chekhov. As Friel attended Guthrie directing Three Sisters in 1963, he would have witnessed the many occasions on which the director made frequent changes in the text of his own translation of Chekhov’s Russian original, in the interests of making the lines more speakable. Guthrie’s working copy of the script frequently has typewritten lines and phrases replaced by handwritten alternatives, as when the Doctor’s phrase, ‘Anyway, what the hell?’, is struck out and replaced with ‘Besides, it’s all the same’.58 When Friel came to write his own version of Three Sisters for Field Day almost two decades later, the act was both a ‘homage to Guthrie’59 but also a reaction against the type of English those American actors were being required to speak: ‘I think that the versions of Three Sisters which we see and read in this country [Ireland] always seem to be redolent of either Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set. Somehow the rhythms of these versions do not match with the rhythms of our own speech patterns, and I think that they ought to, in some way.’60 In the decade before 2005’s The Home Place, Friel had engaged most consistently with Chekhov, writing a version of Uncle Vanya, dramatizing the short story ‘The Yalta Game’ and in 2002’s Afterplay, construing a meeting in a Moscow café between two of Chekhov’s characters, Andrey from Three Sisters and Sonya from Uncle Vanya, years after the events in their original plays had concluded. As well as being an original play by Friel, The Home Place can also be viewed as a version of a Chekhov play, especially when Christopher Gore is directly equated with the ‘doomed trees’ on the estate being marked for extinction (72). The play is less a translation than a transplantation of Chekhov, with the Russian Big House, its estates, the gentry and the peasants finding a very precise equivalent in Ireland. The British director Max Stafford-Clark noticed the Chekhovian nature of the Irish Big House while a student at Trinity College Dublin during the 1960s and encouraged playwright Thomas Kilroy to write a version of The Seagull that transposed the action and characters to Ireland in the late nineteenth century.61 Friel is doing something similar in The Home Place. The same comparison that struck Stafford-Clark must have occurred to Friel when he visited Tyrone Guthrie in the Big House at Annaghmakerrig earlier in the 1960s. When

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Guthrie finally directed a play at the Abbey theatre, Eugene McCabe’s Swift in 1969, the Monaghan playwright described how the Anglo-Irish director handled the native team of Irish players: ‘It was the ancien régime, the landlord dressing down the peasant.’62 All of this and more lie behind the lineaments that Guthrie has contributed to the landlord Christopher Gore in The Home Place. There is considerable insensitivity shown by that landlord when he musters several of his tenants – two women and a young boy –so that they can have their heads measured by the visiting anthropologist, Christopher’s cousin Richard. But Christopher Gore remains the central dramatic focus of the play and the dilemma he is caught in – being of two places and countries but belonging to neither – is treated with insight and sympathy by Friel. In writing of The Home Place in the TLS, Chris Morash praised a writer who has ‘crafted a world whose political and philosophical concerns go to the heart of the theatrical experience’.63 It is the profound engagement with Guthrie and with Edwards that has in part enabled that development of ‘a particular theatrical world’. Friel may describe the role of the director as an ‘interloper’, someone coming disruptively into the midst of an otherwise happy company of playwright and actors. But so many of his plays have hinged on just such a disruptive and uneasy encounter, whether it is the arrival of the two gay outsiders from Dublin on to the gentle island, or the disturbing presence of the threatened landlord among the Ballybeg natives at the outset of the Land Wars in The Home Place. The more extreme of the native characters are unequivocal in their condemnation of these ‘interlopers’, scapegoating them for the changes that have occurred in the local community. The plays themselves know otherwise. They take the larger view and see that it is out of that uneasy co-presence of native and outsider, of the complex emotional and cultural interchange that ensues, that Friel’s plays again and again take us to ‘the heart of the theatrical experience’.

3 Fantasy in Friel

This chapter will examine the operation of fantasy in Friel’s plays. The subject has scarcely been commented upon in the extensive critical writing on Friel, and yet there is no getting around the prominence of fantasy in the work. Of the pre-Philadelphia plays, The Francophile is the outstanding example, as the title itself suggests. The figure of Willie Logue, the Catholic post office worker in Derry whose latest cultural obsession is for all things French, is merely the first of a succession of characters in Friel’s drama who prefer to exist in the domain of fantasy rather than submit to their social surroundings and context. As the previous chapter argued, Philadelphia, Here I Come! enabled the Irish stage to go beyond a narrow realism through the self-consciously theatrical device of the two Gars. In the scenes between them in Gar’s bedroom, the dominant mode is fantasy, whether in the series of heroic roles that Public Gar performs (star athlete, concert performer, fighter pilot) or in the sexual fantasies that the duo construct. Friel’s next play, The Loves of Cass McGuire goes even further in the direction of fantasy, especially when the rebellious 70-year-old is confined to the institutional Eden House. That development is aided by the deployment of music – specifically Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde – as a cultural counter-reality and as an important structuring device. The supreme fantasist in Friel’s dramatic oeuvre is Casimir in Aristocrats (1979), the son of a Catholic Big House who devotes much of his verbal and performative energies to peopling his family home with celebrated European writers. The complex and delicate development of fantasy in Aristocrats will be traced not only in relation to the earlier dramatic works but to ‘Foundry House’, the short story on which the play is based and from which it was developed. In such works as The Plague of Fantasies (1997), the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek has built on Lacan’s psychoanalytic writings to complicate and foreground the subject of fantasy. The usual contrast is between reality and fantasy, with the latter operating as a mode of escape from an intolerable social structure but one that is ultimately self-deluding. In such a reading, reality is the norm from which the fantasist deviates and to which he or she 58

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is finally recuperated or from which they remain permanently alienated. The standard Freudian reading, by introducing the concept of repression, takes an important step in undermining the normative centrality of reality. It forges a profound link between the coercive strategies of the dominant society and the lengths to which prohibited and repressed desires will go to find articulation. But what Z˘iz˘ek does is even more thoroughly to challenge the strict separation between fantasy and reality by showing the interconnectedness of the two. He argues that society is deeply structured upon an unacknowledged and fixed substratum of fantasy, which the operation of a more overt fantasy then challenges and calls into question. Far from standing in strict opposition, one underpins the other. The key term for both Lacan and Z˘iz˘ek is ‘ideology’, which the latter usefully defines as the ‘politically instrumentalized legitimization of power relations’.1 The politics of Friel’s plays are centred on power relations, particularly as embodied in the Father as the agent of the Law. There are two symbolic zones in Philadelphia, Here I Come! – the kitchen and the bedroom (the rest of the space is dark and ‘fluid’)2. While the two Gars are enacting their fantasies of desire in the bedroom, the kitchen is dominated by the figure of the father and his authoritarian practices (though the housekeeper Madge does her best to mediate and palliate them). In Aristocrats, the fantasizing Casimir is even more the victim of a disciplinary father who, as a former Judge, now explicitly is the embodiment of the Law. This figure of patriarchal authority in Aristocrats is far from impressive: bed-ridden, incontinent, confined to an offstage space, District Justice O’Donnell is reduced to his voice, broadcast through a sound system on to the stage; and at the close of Act 2 he staggers onstage to die. He can hardly be held up as a robust realistic alternative to the fantasies of Casimir. Rather, the representation of the Father in Friel’s drama bears out Z˘iz˘ek’s contention that ‘ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself’.3 In Z˘iz˘ek as in Lacan, realism is not the Real. Rather, realism and fantasy interact against a background of the Real, the source of trauma that each of them is reluctant to confront. The term ‘Francophile’ must have put off the play’s first producers, the Group Theatre in Belfast, since a new title was demanded – and supplied: the less satisfactory This Doubtful Paradise. When the term is first used by their lodger to describe Willie Logue, his reaction is one of uncertainty: GERARD: You certainly are a Francophile. WILLIE (hearing the word for the first time; unsure): Yes? Yes… GERALD: That is the word, isn’t it? A lover of French things. WILLIE: Of course … a Francophile. … That’s the word … […] But only a recent convert to … Francophilism, Gerald […] I’ve been at the language only seven months … only a gentleman’s knowledge so far. … But in time

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I hope to acquire a proficiency that will enable me to dip into the French classics … Emile Zola, M. Jacques Maritain, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.4 The comedy arises from the gap between what Willie is (the everyday social self) and what he is representing himself to be (the imaginary self) – and that gap is exploited when the limits of his knowledge of French culture are exposed by the addition of Ibsen and Rossetti to the above list. On other occasions, his use of the French language betrays that even at seven months the lessons in the language have been rudimentary. His performance as a Frenchman cannot be sustained, and when the verbal mask slips we hear the Derryman beneath. But his sincerity, his own self-belief in the role, is what sustains Willie and enables the audience to view him as comic rather than just absurd. It is when the role begins to permeate and affect how he views others that it becomes something more complex and destructive. When Willie meets a ‘real’ Frenchman, he insists on investing him with the full panoply of French culture and promoting him into the aristocracy. This might merely extend the comedy were it not that Willie effectively hands over his daughter Chris, who participates in her father’s fantasy through her speech and actions, to the visiting Frenchman. The net result is that she is seduced and abandoned. But there is more to Willie’s fantasizing than his current flirtation with a French persona. It is the extent to which his notions of social betterment have permeated his children’s education that strikes to the heart of the play. Chris works as a draper’s assistant but is represented to the French visitor as ‘a couturière’. But it is the bitter and drunken Kevin, the prodigal son who returns from Belfast, who makes the greater case against Willie’s fantasizing. Kevin is not back for a couple of days’ break from being a barrister in Belfast, as he initially suggests; he has been struck off permanently for conduct unbecoming. As much as his sister, Kevin absorbed his father’s talk about ‘the most dignified profession’; it fed his social ambitions to study at Queen’s and enter the legal profession.5 The critique is directed not at the social structure that has failed to accept him, however, but at the father who nurtured such ambitions in the first place. Kevin’s critique is further articulated by his mother Margaret (Maggie): Let us see ourselves for what we are, working people, Willie, […] and not the quality that we thought we were. Willie is passed over for promotion but resolves to keep on working in the post office. When his currently unemployed son is offered hours in the same place, Kevin declines, remarking that he does not think himself ‘qualified for office work’. The social critique is unclear. Willie’s lack of educational opportunities in his own life have turned him into an auto-didact. He and

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his wife have seen to it that their son does not suffer from the same educational deprivation. But Kevin neither values the education he has received nor seems able to turn it to account. His accusing question to his father, ‘Why did you not let us grow naturally?’ begs the question of what that means in terms of the social order they inhabit. And Willie’s final retreat from self-questioning and a glimmering tragic awareness, into a sudden decision to drop French and take up Esperanto, reinstates the fantasizing and leaves the ideological frame undisturbed. With Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), the range of what was permissible and what could be expressed on the Irish stage was expanded considerably by the radical innovation of the two Gars. They can entertain sexual fantasies and engage in greater verbal freedom than would have been acceptable in either the public space of the play or in the usual theatrical fare of the time. But not only has the young protagonist been split in two. So has the stage space. The instructions for the play’s setting are explicit in their insistence that the entirety of S. B. O’Donnell’s premises, the combination of shop and living quarters in which the whole play is set, is not fully represented, as it would be on a naturalistic stage. Instead, the design highlights three spaces. The first is the kitchen, which the father enters and leaves at regular intervals throughout, coming either from the shop or from his bedroom for his meals. Even though the kitchen is traditionally figured as a domestic space, and hence associated with the feminine, in Friel’s stage directions it is gendered as masculine, ‘sparsely and comfortlessly furnished – a bachelor’s kitchen’ (26); or as the stage directions for the setting of Translations put it, ‘there is no trace of a woman’s hand’.6 This remains the case, even though Madge the housekeeper works in the kitchen and furnishes the meals to which both S. B. and Gar sit down. As the drafts reveal, Friel in the course of writing the play considered the possibility that S. B. and Madge might be married. But this is eliminated in the final version. Madge is an employee in the kitchen, rather than someone who presides over it as the married woman, a fact that all the more stresses its patriarchal character as S. B.’s domain. The other site is the bedroom, the zone in which Gars Private and Public most fully interact as they perform a range of cultural and sexual fantasies. S. B. never enters this space; Madge traverses both. When she comes into Gar’s bedroom and the double act is temporarily suspended, there is the suggestion that he is being caught out masturbating: ‘Gee, Mary and Jay! Will you quit them antics!’ (46) When Gar defends himself in the face of this charge by declaring it a ‘man’s room’, she returns him to the status of a boy by insisting on her maternal function of having bathed him every Saturday night until he came to the age of puberty at 14. What Madge has interrupted is a seduction scene conducted in an exaggerated American idiom with Gar Public sexually propositioning a ‘li’l chick’ represented by Gar Private. In Gar’s bedroom, there is a great deal more fluidity with regard to national and gendered identity than there is in the strictly enforced traditional

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masculine roles (especially those between father and son) of S. B.’s kitchen. Friel denied the illusion of realism represented by the traditional stage setting of a house and instead introduced an overtly symbolic setting. As Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek argues, fantasy teaches us how to desire and structures what we desire: ‘a fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its co-ordinates, that is, it literally “teaches us how to desire”’.7 What is articulated in Philadelphia, Here I Come! is Gar’s desire to emigrate from Ireland, to go and live and work in the United States. Emigration has been a fact of Irish life for centuries and, after the brief economic boom of the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s, is once more in play. During the Famine years, the choice was between staying in Ireland and dying or leaving Ireland and possibly dying. That stark choice has long receded, but the economic necessity of emigration has remained fairly constant. Emigration is a concern throughout Friel’s drama, and is often specifically identified as an important theme in his notes. Few counties have suffered from it as much as Donegal, with its poor natural resources, and its further impoverishment of being cut off by partition from the port of Derry. ‘Next parish Boston’8 one of the characters in Wonderful Tennessee cries as they stand on Ballybeg Pier; and in so doing they point the way entire Donegal families have gone and suggest an underlying historical reason why the area in the play’s present is so derelict and abandoned. But Philadelphia, Here I Come! does not suggest that Gar’s motives for emigrating are primarily economic. If his computations of his earnings when he is planning to marry Kate Doogan are modest, they are reliable; he is employed in a family business that, as the only son, he stands to inherit. When S. B. recalls the young Gar in a discussion with Madge, what he remembers is his young son saying ‘“I’m not going to school. I’m going into my daddy’s business”’ (96–7). The 25-year-old Gar no longer plans on going into his father’s business; he intends going to live in Philadelphia, working in a hotel job, which is ‘as good as you’ll get’ (63) for a newly arrived immigrant with no specialized skills. What is it, then, that Gar wants? Why is he leaving? When Private puts the question at the close of the play, Public can only stammer by way of reply: ‘I-I-I don’t know’ (99). The US holds out the promise of greater possibilities in the way of social progress and upward mobility. But the fact that Gar replies that he wants to be President of the US shows that what he is projecting is fantasy, not a personal fantasy but the national American myth that every man can grow up to be President. Private unhelpfully points out that the man has first to be an American citizen; he might also have pointed out that Gar is already grown up. When Gar then declares for being a US Senator, his choice glances off the social intimidation he experiences when he tries – and fails – to ask Kate Doogan’s father, who serves in the Irish Senate, for his daughter’s hand in marriage. What Gar wants to achieve cannot readily be articulated or comprehended in a simple phrase, as the play’s final line demonstrates. ‘A greater degree of personal freedom

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and fulfilment’ will serve but remains very general. A more accurate term would be ‘desire’, and that cannot readily be named. It can, however, be represented and, as Z˘iz˘ek outlines, is best represented through fantasy. The coordinates of Gar’s desire are given and structured by the fantasies enacted in the double act of Private and Public. Many of them hinge on success in the sphere of performance: as a sportsman or as a musician. But the kernel of his fantasies is inevitably and inescapably sexual. In one scene, Private interrogates Public as to why he is leaving and contrasts Ireland, the ‘country of your birth’ (32), with America as a ‘profane, irreligious, pagan country of gross materialism’ where ‘lust – abhorrent lust – is everywhere indulged in shamelessly’. Public does not disagree with this evaluation but rather hopes it proves true. The gender-changing scenarios they perform rely on the reputed lack of sexual inhibitions to be found in young American women. Gar mocks his friends Ned, Tom and Joe for their sexual fantasies about the foreign women who holiday in Ballybeg or the returned female emigrants who bring back a whiff of sexual liberation; instead, he predicts how in reality they will ‘take an odd furtive peep into the lounge at those English women who won’t even look up from their frigid knitting’ (77). His own case is hardly much better, as he projects himself out of Ballybeg on to the streets of Philadelphia where he will adopt the lingo and macho pose that will (he imagines) draw the women to him. The scenarios he constructs of his sexual pursuits in the US are modelled on the movies he has seen and are shaped like them by the pursuit of desire, pointing beyond the date to ‘afterwards in my apartment’ (46). The sudden entry of Madge into Gar’s bedroom occludes the sexually explicit outcome much as the fadeout in Hollywood genre movies draws a veil over what occurs after the couple kiss. We have seen Gar kiss in Philadelphia, in the crucial flashback scene where he is shown repeatedly kissing Kate Doogan. The excited acceleration and fragmentation of his speech signal his mounting sexual desire: ‘Kate – Kathy – I’m mad about you: I’ll never last till Easter! I’ll – I’ll – I’ll bloody-well burst! [He catches her again and kisses her.]’ (40) The triple ‘I’ll’ binds this declaration of desire intimately to Gar’s final line in the play and his confession that he does not know why he is leaving. The explicit declaration of desire cannot be allowed to continue but must be channelled and converted into socially acceptable and regulatory norms. Private echoes the Canon in voicing the Catholic Church’s repeated warnings of the possible consequences of where unregulated sexual activity, ‘long passionate kisses in lonely places’, might lead. Gar’s response is immediately to speak of the daughters and sons they will have (after they marry at Easter), to convert his sexual desire into the ideology of marriage for the purposes of child-bearing and to attest to the inordinate nature of that desire by coming up with the fantastic phrase – the ‘father of fourteen children’ (45). Kate immediately starts thinking about the economics of their (married) life together: ‘How

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will we live?’ (40) From this, the trajectory of the scene is to Kate Doogan’s home and the abortive attempt to talk to her father, who counters by promoting a more socially acceptable candidate for the role of son-in-law. The present of the play makes clear that Gar O’Donnell has not stopped desiring Kate Doogan, even though she is now a married woman. After she visits him to say goodbye and wish him well in America, Private gives vent to a verbal expression of unsatisfied sexual desire and longing: ‘Kate … sweet Katie Doogan … my darling Kathy Doogan’ (80). This verbal exhalation of longing does not lead to any dramatic or playful enactment of a mating ritual between the two Gars. Instead, Private verbally cautions himself with ‘Oh God, Oh my God, those thoughts are sinful’, and we can only guess at the erotic scene he is imagining between Kate and himself. We witness operating here what Z˘iz˘ek defines as ‘the mechanism of self-censorship’, which is ‘only operative insofar as it remains censored’.9 Like the two pornographic novels that are discovered when the writer Tom’s manuscripts are being archived in Give Me Your Answer, Do!, the contents of Gar’s sexual fantasies about Kate Doogan remain undisclosed and unrepresented. They underlie and indeed power the operation of all the other fantasies in the play, but do so precisely because they remain under prohibition. If the bedroom is the site of fantasy in Philadelphia, then the kitchen is the domain of fact, of social reality. The early intimation of what form an exchange with his father might take is the brief intrusion of S. B. O’Donnell into the fantasy stretch of Episode One. What proves so shocking is not the normative appearance of the old man but the negative transformation it wreaks in Public Gar. From the confident, expressive young man of the opening scene with Madge, he is turned into a stuttering lout, as Christy Mahon is by the reappearance of his father in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907). In an exchange that consists entirely of monosyllables, Gar struggles – and fails – to remember how many coils of barbed wire were delivered that day. The exchange between father and son is tongue-tied and banal, confining itself to the deliberately restricted and non-emotive zone of materialistic matters, reminding us that the relationship is more that of employer to employee than that of father to son. The kitchen is presided over by the clock and is a zone where the principal concern is measurement. What mainly operates between father and son is silence, and it is the void of that silence that Gar’s fantasizing, the verbally hyperactive exchanges between Private and Public, serves to fill. Z˘iz˘ek observes that, ‘in psychoanalytic treatment, the obsessional is active all the time, tells stories, so that things will remain the same, so that nothing will really change’.10 When Public lapses into ‘a moment of silence’ at the beginning of Episode Two, Private immediately leaps to his feet and unleashes a verbal barrage of lame jokes and linguistic nonsense: ‘Ta-ra-del-oo-del-ah-dol-de-dol-de-doldel-ah’ (56). The lack of content in these self-confessedly empty signifiers proceeds from the fact that, as Z˘iz˘ek puts it, ‘what he is most afraid of is the

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moment of silence which will reveal the utter vacuousness of his incessant activity’. As the play repeatedly displays, someone caught in Gar’s dilemma ‘will talk continuously […] in order to prevent the awkward silence in which the underlying conflict might emerge’. The disciplinary father, in Friel as in Z˘iz˘ek, becomes the embodiment of the Law and wields power over the son as victim. Friel is not content to leave this at the level of patriarchy but always adds a detail concerning the fathers that knits them into the hegemonic exercise of power in the society, at however local a level. Frequently, the father is a judge, as in Aristocrats or Molly Sweeney, bringing the procedures of the courtroom to bear on the conduct of family life. In Philadelphia, S. B. O’Donnell is not just a shopkeeper but also a County Councillor. Scott Boltwood has picked up on this detail to comment: ‘his position as “county councillor” denotes both local influence and institutionalization into the bourgeois ruling class, such as it is in rural Donegal’.11 Friel extends his political vision further by bringing into S. B.’s household and onto his stage key figures from the surrounding society, the priest and the schoolteacher, ‘dedicated moulders of the mind’ (52), as the latter sardonically remarks. At one point late in the play, Private Gar rounds on the Canon, as the old cleric trots out his inanities and plays his nightly game with S. B., and describes the social inertia as a failure of translation: All things to all men – because you could translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that will make life bearable for us all. […] Isn’t this your job? – to translate? Why don’t you speak, then? (88) In his critique of all three patriarchs, endlessly squabbling among themselves over petty issues and lacking any social or political vision, Friel dramatizes what Z˘iz˘ek has aptly described as a ‘breakdown of community’.12 This breakdown, when approached in psychoanalytic terms, extends the relationship of son and father into the child’s relationship with both parents. As Z˘iz˘ek puts it, ‘at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am to others’ and, accordingly, the child’s efforts centre on an attempt ‘to form an identity that would satisfy his parents, would make him the object of their desire’.13 In Gar’s relationship with his father, this is something he has signally failed to do. The relationship with the mother is more complex, not least because Gar’s mother died three days after she gave birth to her only child. In the Joycean formulation ‘amor matris/love of mother’ subjective and objective genitive, only the latter is operative. In this play, the relation between fantasy and the mother takes the form of the Oedipus complex. For much of the play’s first two episodes, Gar concentrates on reconstructing his mother’s erased history, which perforce concentrates on her courtship, marriage, honeymoon, his birth and her death. Like Oedipus, Gar is both

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the detective determined to expose what has been covered up – the source of the trauma afflicting the O’Donnell household – and the guilty object of his own inquiries, his birth having been responsible for ‘killing’ his mother. In this pursuit, Gar is particularly reliant on Madge’s oral testimony: ‘She was small, Madge says, and wild, and young, Madge says, from a place called Bailtefree beyond the mountains’ (37). Scott Boltwood has demonstrated that the marriage between Gar’s parents can be dated to 1937 and the year of De Valera’s Constitution binding women to the home; and he argues that this political suppressing of women’s energies can be read into the fate of the ‘wild’ Maire from Bailtefree when she tethers herself in marriage to the much older man.14 Even when Gar brings his father into the picture, he still alludes to Madge’s testimony but with the sense that he is now adding his own voice to the memorial reconstruction, a product of pure desire. Gar describes the occasion when S. B. O’Donnell saw Maire Gallagher for the first time (an event their son could not have witnessed) by ventriloquizing that ‘he – he couldn’t take his eyes off her’ (37). The Freudian repetition/ slip over the subject of the male gaze gives the game away. Gar first sees his mother’s sole surviving sister, Aunt Lizzy, when she returns from the US to make him the Philadelphia offer. His Oedipal response is described in the words and testimony of Gar Private and its echo of his father’s desiring gaze: ‘you couldn’t take your eyes off Aunt Lizzy, your mother’s sister – so this was your mother’s sister – remember?’ (60) In Z˘iz˘ek’s terms, what underlies the compact between fantasy and reality and gives them their shared symbolic consistency is what he terms ‘the phantasmic narrative’15 or frame. In Philadelphia, the narrative of Gar’s mother’s marriage provides that frame. When Z˘iz˘ek adds that this narrative is marked by a ‘temporal loop’ and ‘involves an impossible gaze […] by means of which the subject is already present at the act of his conception’,16 he helps us to interpret Gar’s obsessive circling back to his parents’ marriage. This process culminates in impossible efforts to view his own conception as the son tries to follow his newly married virginal parents on their honeymoon when ‘she and old Screwballs [went] off on a side-car to Bundoran for three days’ (37). Both of the play’s flashbacks bring to light psychoanalytic material relating to Gar’s desire and what is impelling him to emigrate. The first, involving Katie Doogan, has already been examined. The second is the return of his aunt and uncle from the US the previous summer, accompanied by an American friend. Gar tries, and fails, to get from his aunt a complete memorial reconstruction of his mother’s wedding day. This is the first of the three contending narratives in the scene, all connected to the women in Gar’s life and all marked by varying degrees of impossibility or fantasy. Friel deliberately makes the day of Aunt Lizzy’s visit the same as Katie Doogan’s wedding, not only to account for S. B.’s absence but also to make clear the emotional connections operating within Gar. There is the Freudian wish-fulfilment of his mother’s wedding day, his marriage to her, which can be reconstructed

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in the Imaginary, with Gar displacing his (absent) father. There is the now purely fantastic marriage with Katie Doogan, all the more compelling as a figure of desire because she is no longer socially real. There is Aunt Lizzy, married to Con and a good Catholic, but willing to flirt continuously with Ben Burton and to admit Gar to her affections. In conjuring up the scene, Private harps on how verbally and physically vulgar the real Lizzy Gallagher turns out to be, the fleshy counterpart of Gar’s idealized mother. As the stage directions indicate, Lizzy is a ‘toucher’ in a play in which there is very little physical contact: ‘she has the habit of putting her arm around, or catching the elbow of, the person she is addressing. This constant physical touching is new and disquieting to PUBLIC’ (60). Lizzy’s vulgarity initially keeps Gar at bay. But as she broadens her identity into the litany of the five Gallagher girls, Maire and Una and Rose and Lizzy and Agnes, ‘either laughing or crying’ (65), and makes the severe contrast with the O’Donnell paternal line, who are ‘kinda cold’, Gar is stung into acceptance of her offer for him to come to the US by the fear of losing his ‘capacity to feel deeply’.17 Private Gar stands by helplessly as Public succumbs ‘with happy anguish’ to a mother’s embrace and the term ‘my son’ (66). Gar is no longer caught between the impossible impasse of the ideal mother and the too-real father, between the seductions of a Hollywood America with a succession of femmes fatales and the reality of his father removing his false teeth at dinner, but between two surrogate mothers: the Madge of Ballybeg who dominates in the play’s closing scenes and the Lizzy/Elise of Philadelphia to whom he is bound. Nevertheless, Gar makes one final effort to bridge the gap and come to terms with his father through the celebrated ‘blue boat’ episode. He centres his hopes for dialogue on a memory he has cherished of when he was a child, when ‘a boy and his father sat on a blue boat on a lake on an afternoon in May, and […] he wonders now did it really take place or did he imagine it’ (89). At this point Gar is willing to leave open the question of whether the ‘blue boat’ incident is fantasy or reality, whether the memory is historically accurate or a narrative constructed out of his desire to be at one with the father (his deliberate use of ‘once upon a time’ acknowledges this element of wish-fulfilment). In the event, the father has no recollection of the incident. As soon as this emerges, Private responds with mocking laughter and the declaration ‘it never happened! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha’ (95) in ways that suggest he has no wish for father and son to be reconciled. As much in reaction to Private’s mockery as S. B.’s negative response, Public retreats one final time to his bedroom. He has not been able to translate the private language of his desires into the public realm of dialogue with his father at the kitchen table. In the play’s most pervasive irony, in the scene that follows between S. B. and a returning Madge in the kitchen, the father articulates a complementary memory of walking with young Gar as a boy in a ‘wee sailor suit’ that Madge denies could ever have happened: ‘A sailor suit? He never had a sailor suit’ (96). When S. B. is in the kitchen and Gar is

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not present, the father can express his own fantasies. He is able, when alone, to physically (if not verbally) articulate his suppressed feelings about what is taking place, walking over and silently touching the packed suitcase of his departing son. But for most of the play father and son do not enjoy such privileged isolated moments. Rather, they exist in their complementary symbolic domains, which are even more psychological space than physical. S. B. and Gar complement each other because (in Z˘iz˘ek’s terms) Gar’s relentless fantasizing, which might be taken to signal escape and liberation from the constraints of life in Ballybeg, does nothing of the kind. Rather, it exists in deep collusion with the reality represented by his father, as a fundamental antagonism that establishes the dynamic between them. Gar may or may not get on a plane the following morning and go to his mother’s sister in Philadelphia. But the underlying phantasmic frame giving consistency to his desires will remain unaltered and untransformed, as the stuttering final line of the play acknowledges. In his next play, The Loves of Cass McGuire, as the last chapter argued, Friel inverts the process he had dramatized in Philadelphia. Rather than the story of a 25-year-old young man emigrating to the US, this dramatizes the return of a 70-year-old Irish woman from the country she left half a century earlier to the ‘new Ireland’ of the 1960s, which is enjoying the first flush of material prosperity. The play represents this precursor of ‘Celtic Tiger’ Ireland through Cass’s brother, Harry McGuire, a successful businessman, his wife Alice and their family. All four of their children have entered the professions: one son is an architect, another a priest, the daughter a doctor and the youngest, Dom (the only one we see) still studying for his Leaving Certificate exam (not, as the first scene demonstrates, very assiduously). The maiden aunt they welcome home shocks their bourgeois notions. She is verbally coarse, physically raucous, smokes incessantly and is frequently drunk. Cass speaks a brash, vital New York-ese acquired in the fifty years she has worked as a waitress in a busy hashhouse (which her family describe as a restaurant); she has some bawdy set-pieces that she likes to recite, and far from being euphemistic about natural functions takes care to stress all the syllables in the word ‘ur-eye-nal’ when she drops it into the conversation.18 Her movements are physically assertive and when she enters for the first time she ‘charges on stage […] shouting in her raucous Irish-American voice’ (14). Cass’s overt physicality has the reverse effect on the rest of her family: ‘Everyone on stage freezes.’ It also turns out that the ‘maiden aunt’, as she is repeatedly described, may be anything but. Her stories of life in New York frequently refer to Jeff Olsson, a man with whom she lived for many decades but to whom it becomes equally clear she was not married, either because one or both of them did not want to or because (as is intimated) he was already legally married. It is her partner’s death that has precipitated the return to Ireland. But that Ireland, certainly as represented by her brother and his bourgeois family, has great difficulty in accommodating the unruly

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presence of Cass McGuire and plans soon emerge after her drunken night on the town for the old woman to be installed in a home, ironically entitled Eden House. The play seems even more prescient now in its demonstration of how Irish women who did not conform to the expected norm of maidenly or marital submissiveness were over many of the twentieth century’s decades incarcerated in what the play describes as an ‘asylum’. At its beginning, The Loves of Cass McGuire appears to be unfolding in chronological succession, with the scene-setting of Harry McGuire’s prosperous household and the discussion of Cass’s unruly behaviour while she is offstage, still sleeping off a hangover upstairs. But the presumption that naturalistic norms are operating cannot survive Cass’s raucous entrance, with Friel’s stage directions deliberately allowing for the possibility that she comes on ‘either from the wings or from the auditorium’ (14). As Anna McMullan has written, Cass McGuire’s explicitly theatrical entrance ‘not only disturbs the middle-class propriety of Harry’s living-room, but the parameters of dramatic illusion, and the narrative coherence of realist mimesis’.19 She arrives on stage to challenge her brother’s authority, not as to what her ultimate fate might be but as to what kind of play we are about to witness, how she is going to be dramatically represented. When Harry insists that the play has already begun, Cass ripostes that her ‘story begins where I say it begins, and I say it begins with me stuck in the gawddam workhouse’ (15). Cass then inspects the set and decides that it will do just as well to portray Eden House. To Harry’s dramaturgic protest that the story unfold ‘in proper sequence’ (16), Cass retaliates by cueing the lights to come up on her bed in Eden House. She situates herself and the narrative of the play in the ‘home’ in which she has already been placed, thereby apparently turning the first scene in Harry’s house into a flashback. But the play does not observe the temporal coherence of Philadelphia, Here I Come!, firmly anchored as it is in Gar’s last night in Ballybeg and only departing from it on two clearly marked dramatic occasions: the breakup with Katie Doogan and the visit home of Aunt Lizzie. Instead, the scenes in this play fluctuate both spatially and temporally, not only between Eden House and Harry McGuire’s home but between the present and the two pasts that – for all of Cass’s insistence that she wants to live in the present – continue to intrude on her: her fifty-year life in New York as an Irish-American and her years as a girl becoming a woman in the Ireland of the early twentieth-century. The form of Cass McGuire, therefore, is not linear and chronological but fragmentary. In relation to psychoanalysis and narrative, Z˘iz˘ek argues that the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment is not for the analysand to organize his [or her] confused life-experience into (another) coherent narrative, with all the traumas properly integrated and so on. It is not only that some narratives are ‘false’, based upon the exclusion of traumatic events and patching up the gaps left by these exclusions – Lacan’s thesis

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is much stronger: the answer to the question ‘Why do we tell stories?’ is that narrative as such emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession.20 Cass and Friel’s play refuse to integrate her trauma within an orderly narrative. Instead, they leave open the gaps between its different elements in a style that is deliberately fragmentary. Z˘iz˘ek goes on to argue that ‘even the most harmonious work of art is a priori fragmentary’ and to praise the artist who has ‘the capacity to turn this lack into an advantage – skillfully to manipulate the central void and its resonance in the elements that encircle it’. In the final analysis, ‘Art is thus fragmentary, even when it is an organic whole, since it always relies on the distance towards fantasy.’21 That explicit linkage of fantasy and the fragmentary has a distinct bearing on The Loves of Cass McGuire, which cedes a more dominant place to fantasy than any play so far written by Friel. The extreme of fantasy in the play is represented by the two characters Cass meets as fellow inmates of Eden House, Trilbe Costello and Mr Ingram. Both are cultured, she a former elocution teacher, he a musician. Their joint presence in the refuge of the asylum forms a critique of the McGuire family and their philistinism (Dom is seen reading a lurid pulp magazine instead of doing his homework). This critique is consolidated by a repeated shared refrain from one of W. B. Yeats’s earliest and most romantic poems: ‘But I, being poor, have only my dreams. […] I have spread my dreams under your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’ (31). The key cultural resource in establishing a counter-truth to the dominant ideology of 1960s Ireland is not poetic, however, but musical. In this play even more than in its predecessor, music has emerged (in Harry White’s persuasive formulation) not as a source of ‘emotional mood and colour’ but as an important dramaturgic and structural device in its own right.22 Music was significant but still incidental in Philadelphia. The emotional climax was achieved through the Mendelssohn violin concerto, which cued Gar’s memory of the blue boat: ‘D’you know what the music says? (To S. B.) It says that once upon a time a boy and his father sat in a blue boat on a lake on an afternoon in May’ (89). If the classical repertoire is used to evoke the power of memory, the raucous thumpetythump of the popular céilí music works to obliterate such reflection and propel Gar into an Irish-American future. Either way, all of the music in Philadelphia is sited and sourced in Gar’s bedroom. When it is picked up by the Canon and S. B. O’Donnell in the kitchen, it registers as ‘noise’ (90), mere acoustic dissonance. In The Loves of Cass McGuire the dominant classical presence in musical terms is Wagner. He and his operas are explicitly associated with the one stage prop that is not subject to transformation, the winged chair, because it is so overtly a product of fantasy and can only exist in Eden House. (Hilton Edwards stressed this in his directorial notes on the play.) At a key point in each of the three Acts, first Ingram, then Trilbe and

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finally Cass sit in the winged chair and speak what Friel characterizes as their ‘rhapsodies’ (9), elaborate verbal narratives that match a fantasy marriage to an operatic mise-en-scène. In the script, these verbal rhapsodies are scored against a musical background, notably Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Friel found that during rehearsals two of the actors spoke their lines so well that the music was ‘a distraction’ (7) so he eliminated it; but he has retained it in the script. The problem with the presence of the music in the script of Cass McGuire is not so much, as Harry White objects, that there is ‘simply too much’23 of it (there is even more Chopin in Aristocrats but there its presence is integral). Rather, the Wagner music does not connect centrally with the character and desires of Cass McGuire, as the Mendelssohn does with the yearnings of Gar O’Donnell. To her, the name ‘Wagner’ calls to mind a well-known mayor of New York rather than a classical composer. Her keynote song is ‘Oft in the stilly night’ by the Irish laureate of exile, Thomas Moore, and it is that haunting melody that plays and preys upon her memory. The Wagner music and resonances not only do not carry through to the other, ‘realistic’ half of the play – where they could function as a critique of a cultural vacuum – but the only way they can be connected to Cass is for them to be imposed on her. This is in effect what happens in the course of the play. The fantasy life of Eden House represented by Trilbe and Ingram’s dream narratives steadily and progressively usurp on Cass’s independence, until it is finally extinguished. This usurpation is measured by the progressive loss for Cass of her extra-theatrical existence. The figure who makes her entrance from the auditorium maintains a life-saving dialogue with the audience. As she explains to a baffled Trilbe: ‘I’m sorta – you know – having an odd word with the folks out there. (Indicates audience)’ (29). Trilbe looks but can see nothing, a condition to which Cass herself is reduced in Act 3, when she finally embraces the disturbing ‘truth’ of the two inmates in the rest home. The Loves of Cass McGuire finally fails to satisfy in what it seems to be claiming for the fantasy world of the winged chair, precisely because that one location does not interact meaningfully with the rest of the play. The most complex and interesting development is in the connections Friel suggests between the social reality of the outside world and the fantasies on which that reality relies for its very existence. As Z˘iz˘ek puts it, ‘ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our “reality” itself’.24 Nothing demonstrates this proposition more clearly than the opening scene, which is set in the normative household of Harry McGuire, before either Cass or Eden House make an appearance. Present onstage are Cass’s mother, still alive at 89, and her grandson Dom, whose homework she is ostensibly supervising. But in theatrical fact ‘Mother’ as she is symbolically referred to in the cast list is addressing an imaginary class in the role of a teacher while Dom is reading a True Detective comic.

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The methods of teaching – by repetition and memorization – and the subjects referred to, which include Greek and Latin, refer to a mode of pedagogy that had remained in place for decades of the Irish Free State’s existence and which had just been rendered redundant in the early 1960s, especially with the abolition of Latin from the Catholic Mass in the wake of Vatican II. The content of Mother’s questions has to do with identifying cardinals of the Catholic Church and indicates, whatever the ostensible subject being taught, the pervasive role of that church in education in Ireland. Dom responds to the questions his grandmother asks him with extremely inappropriate answers lifted from the pulp magazine he is reading: the name of the new cardinal is a captain from Vice-Squad headquarters in New York. These two ‘realistic’ characters are therefore represented as deeply enmeshed in fantasy. Dom confesses that an interest in prurient sex is what drives him to read these magazines. But what he does more revealingly is to extend his own fantasies to incorporate his grandmother by stating his career plan when he leaves school: to go into business for himself as a brothelkeeper with his grandmother as the madam. The teenager indicates that his grandmother will keep order in the house of prostitution by using the same disciplinary procedures with which she has kept school and ruled over the household. When the domain of Eden House is introduced, Trilbe Costello speaks and behaves as if she is addressing a class of children who are there to take elocution lessons; teaching was her profession before she ‘retired’ and entered the home. This unmistakable doubling between Mother and Trilbe is the first and most extended example of the parallel developed by Friel between Harry McGuire’s bourgeois home and the asylum of Eden House. The play in its unfolding suggests that far from operating in two mutually exclusive zones of reality and fantasy, the locations support and are framed by the same ideology in which ‘reality’ is supported by and founded on a ‘fantasy-construction’. This argument is extended to Harry and his wife Alice after they have consigned Cass to Eden House and so removed her as a disruptive force from their outwardly successful lives. When husband and wife come to visit her on Christmas Day (the time of year is one of the play’s most ironic comments on Cass’s fate), the audience may presume this is no more than some residual kindness or formality, compounded in no small degree by guilt at what they have done. But, as Harry confesses to his sister, they have sought out her company because, with regard to their grown-up children, ‘it seems they can’t come’ (55) home for Christmas. There has been no contact with their architect-son in seven years; their daughter’s marriage is in a bad way; and their priest-son has been moving from one religious order to another. The duologues between Harry and Cass and Alice and Cass begin with the realistic framing of the McGuire’s Christmas visit to Eden House; but even though the other inmates remain present in the scene, the lighting falls on the two speakers. The fact that they wake Cass up to make their confessions

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suggests that these revelations are as much wish-fulfilment as fact: the private thoughts of the visitors given voice or the summoning-up by Cass of consoling fictions from her brother and sister-in-law. When she takes her turn with Cass, Alice is determined to keep up the façade of bourgeois respectability and material success in relation to how her family has turned out: ‘The children are all coming – all of them’ (57). But her remark about the priest, Tom – ‘people say he’s like my father’ – sets up an association that unravels all of the ‘truths’ she is claiming for her offspring. For the town gossip about Alice’s cultured and respectable father, as Cass reveals in her role as truth-teller, was that he sexually molested young people: ‘Married to Alice, only child of Joe Connor, the lawyer, who couldn’t keep his hands off young girls’ (15). Friel raises the possibility that Cass knows this because as a young girl she was herself the recipient of Joe Connor’s unsavory attentions. As she relates: ‘every evening we’d be coming home from school we’d meet him at the courthouse steps and he’d call one of us over and (suddenly realizing) and … he’d say, “How are youse, girls?”’ (37). Alice has of course always denied the charge; but once introduced it becomes associated with any mention of her father. Her positing of a similarity between her priest son and her father, therefore, associates the sexual molestation of a minor with the young clergyman and suggests a motive for his being repeatedly moved from religious order to religious order other than mere personal restlessness. The court cases of the 1990s and 2000s, which have brought now-aged Catholic clerics up on charges of child and sexual abuse, often refer back decades, to a time when it might have been ‘known’ there was widespread sexual abuse of those children in their care but in which the charge was routinely denied by their church superiors and the offending party merely moved on to another parish.25 In the overt fantasy of Eden House, Trilbe at one stage reads a passage from a newspaper, which appears to come out of nowhere but which makes its contribution to the pattern and association the play is building. The account is of the funeral of a Christian Brother, attended by ‘two bishops and three ministers of state’ (50). The Christian Brothers were the religious order charged with the education of young Irish boys. This Brother was the principal of a secondary school, and both Trilbe and Ingram remember him, in a line with unmistakable sexual innuendo, as a ‘very … athletic principal’ (51). This ‘fact’, naturally, is not recorded in the newspaper; but what the death notice does purportedly claim is that the Christian Brother is survived by ‘three sisters and three brothels’. Trilbe can only conclude that this must be a misprint, since he ‘would never have left three brothels, would he?’ The loaded term ‘brothels’ echoes off the exchange between Dom and his grandmother in the opening scene and its connection with the Christian Brothers. It suggests a gloss on Blake’s maxim in the ‘Proverbs of Hell’ that ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion’.26 The fluidity of the play’s careful intermingling of reality and fantasy climaxes when Harry ends his confession to Cass

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by saying he wishes he could stay with her rather than returning to the physical comforts and supposed consolations of the dream-home he has constructed for his wife and family. The final fantasy construction to be explored in The Loves of Cass McGuire is its political sub-text. The entrance of ‘Mother’ at the very start is accompanied by one of the most loaded stage directions in a Friel play. She is sitting immobilized in a wheelchair but ‘were she able to walk around she would have the authority and self-possession of a queen’ (11). This deliberately references the concluding line of Yeats and Lady Gregory’s 1902 play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, when the boy is he asked if he saw the Poor Old Woman as she departed the cottage with his about-to-be-married older brother and instead replies: ‘I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.’27 In the Ireland of the 1960s, Friel’s Cathleen ni Houlihan is fossilized, senile, paralysed and ‘monumental’ (11), a moving statue. And what of her daughter? Anna McMullan notes that in Eden House Cass is rechristened ‘Catherine’ by Trilbe, which makes of her ‘another Cathleen, retired to a rest home, and consumed by dreams of upward mobility’.28 Apart from one fleeting (and ironic) cry of ‘Up the Republic!’ (33) by the most cynical inmate of the home, there is little to tie the events of the play to the contemporary political landscape, since the focus (as so often with Friel) is primarily on a family. But the dates are suggestive. Cass had left Ireland, we are told, some 51 or 52 years before, and in the drafts of the play Friel keeps making minor alterations to the date, suggesting 1914 or 1915 as the date of her departure. She left, the play suggests, because a local priest broke up her relationship with the young man she loved and because she is following in the footsteps of her father, who disappeared to Scotland some years earlier where he is leading an alternate life with a second family. The date that emerges from the circling of Friel’s revisions is 1916; and both that year and 1966 resonate, the latter the year in which The Loves of Cass McGuire was first produced and also the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising commemorated in both the Republic and the North of Ireland. In the 1967 production of Cass at the Abbey Theatre, the title part was taken by the iconic actress, Siobhán McKenna, who had played such roles as Cathleen ni Houlihan and Synge’s Pegeen Mike repeatedly throughout her career; the production was directed by Tomás Mac Anna, who had written and directed the elaborate pageant Aiséirí (Gaelic for ‘Resurrection’ or ‘Rising’) the previous year in the Phoenix Park.29 Fintan O’Toole picked up on these associations when reviewing a later production of the play: When, in the third act of Friel’s The Loves of Cass McGuire, one of the residents in an old folks’ home asks who General Custer was, another, an Englishman, replies: ‘Wasn’t he one of the leaders of your Easter Rebellion?’ Written at a time when the Republic was wallowing in the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the play is, among

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other things, an astringent antidote to the historical self-congratulation of the time.30 Far from either endorsing or condemning the Easter Rising, the characters in the play to whom Cass returns – her extended family of McGuires – make no reference to nationalist or republican politics whatsoever. The play’s only overtly political references all proceed from and are located within the fantasy context of Eden House. At the end of Act 1, when Cass fiercely declares her desire to maintain her independence and sense of self in the place to which she has been confined, Pat supports her with a cry of ‘Up the Republic!’ (33). The one other area in the play where there are references to the Irish political struggle, so lacking in the 1960s present, are in the past: Cass’s teenage years before she emigrated and her 50 years in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen. In a monologue to the audience at the start of Act 2, the only ones with whom she can share her political dreams, Cass recalls the Christmas of 1942 when Jeff Olson gave her a brooch, shaped like a shamrock and emblazoned with ‘green and white and orange diamonds’ (34). When Cass’s turn comes for her rhapsody in Act 3, she imagines herself on a ship in mid-Atlantic, ‘sailing home to Ireland, see’ (54), accompanied by all of the companions of her American sojourn, bound together by the concerts they have organized in New York for political organizations in Ireland: ‘the boys on the run and the church building and the prisoners’ fund back home’. This fantasy of hers resonates off the huge betrayal Cass experiences in the play, as political as it is personal. The modest sum earned from working in the hashhouse has been repeatedly reduced by the money she has sent home to Ireland on a monthly basis to support ‘the kids’ birthdays … and the doc’s bills … and Father Tom’s education’ (39). Harry proudly declares they have used or spent none of it and remains oblivious to the mortification and pain his sister suffers that everything she has tried to invest in, to affiliate herself with, has been rejected and denied. When Cass McGuire is first threatened with Eden House and retorts that she has not got a dime, Harry is able to assure her that her stay there will be funded by the money she sent home but which has never been used. Cass returns from one form of exile to another, to inner exile in an Ireland that in no way lives up to what she had imagined in the US. The fantasy constructions of Cass’s time in New York that she verbally delivers to us and the surreal scenarios enacted in Eden Home that we witness provide the political sub-texts to the ‘reality’ of the affluent, modernizing Ireland that Harry McGuire’s family embodies. When Harry declares that he would rather stay with Cass in Eden House, he is registering a strong sense of emotional loss. But he is also acknowledging the political void and avoidance of same that all of the characters’ various fantasies encircle. One of the most memorable characters who people Friel’s drama is Casimir O’Donnell in 1979’s Aristocrats. He is also the supreme fantasist

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in the canon, exhibiting a greater range and complexity than Willie Logue in both his character and the kind of his fantasizing. The O’Donnell family in Aristocrats mark a distinct progression up the social scale from the humble background of father, son and housekeeper in Philadelphia, Here I Come! and the aspirant bourgeoisie of The Loves of Cass McGuire. District Justice O’Donnell, the father, comes from a long line of highly placed members of the judiciary and lives in a Big House environment. But the O’Donnell family is Catholic rather than Protestant, and much of the drama of the play issues from that important distinction. Casimir, the nervous, excitable son, tells the visiting American academic Tom Hoffnung a succession of stories about the many famous figures who have visited the Big House over time, to an extent and to a degree that strains credulity. Tom exposes Casimir’s claim to have met W. B. Yeats personally by checking on the chronological facts and pointing out that Yeats died in the same year as Casimir was born. His brother-in-law Eamon consoles the crushed Casimir by pointing out to him that there are ‘certain truths […] that are beyond Tom’s kind of scrutiny’.31 The ‘truths’ of Casimir’s fantasies will be explored in due course. The play contains a second fantasy, one by which it is framed and which pervades its atmosphere, and that is the myth of the ‘Big House’ itself in Irish culture. The latter fantasy is central to the short story, ‘Foundry House’, on which the play Aristocrats is based and from which it developed. The short story is among Friel’s most accomplished; but a comparison between story and play reveals the latter as much more epic, layered and open-ended in its implications. Where Aristocrats is an ensemble piece, ‘Foundry House’ is centred on one character, Joe Brennan. He is not a member of the aristocratic Hogan family who occupy the Big House, named after the foundry that traditionally funded the family’s fortune. Rather, Joe is a child of the gate lodge to the estate, his father a worker in the factory all his life. The story demonstrates how (in an apt term borrowed from the play) Joe’s imagination has been permanently ‘pigmented’ by growing up in proximity to the family of the Big House. In the present of the story, he brings his wife and their nine children to live in the gate lodge where he was reared. As his wife caustically points out when Mrs Hogan comes calling, Joe Brennan (now bald) is no longer the curly-headed cherub who played with the Hogan family’s son Declan as a child. The call is not a social one; Joe is invited to the house to set up a tape-recorder in order for the Hogans to listen to a message sent home from Africa by their one daughter, a nun. Joe duly attends and plays the tape. Friel’s narrative stresses the grotesque disparity between the Hogans as they are remembered by Joe and what he encounters when he visits Foundry House in the present. Declan is now a priest, highly nervous and excitable and prematurely white-haired (he is still in his thirties). But it is the delayed entrance of the father (it is even more delayed in the play) that provides the greatest physical shock and

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contrast between the God-like patriarchal image of ‘the large, stern-faced man with a long, white beard’32 Joe remembers and the fleshy, decaying reality of the dying man with which he is confronted: ‘trembling, coloured in dead purple and grey-black, and [with] eyes, wide and staring and quick with the terror of stumbling or falling’ (84). Joe does not have to witness what has become of the blushing, blue-eyed Claire in the intervening 20 years because she is physically absent. Her recorded voice on the tape recorder makes him recall that he has probably never heard Claire’s voice before. She speaks in the present with the mechanical stresses and up-anddown inflections of an elocution teacher. (There is a clear echo of Cass’s mother and of Trilbe in this detail; in the play, she is described as speaking in ‘a child’s voice’.) When Claire plays the violin on the tape, a fault in the recording results in a ‘shrieking monotone’ (87). The father responds by lurching to his feet, pointing at the machine and crying out his daughter’s name before he collapses. It is not evident (as it is in the play, which reproduces this incident) whether he dies or not. The story flashes forward from Mr Hogan’s physical collapse to Joe’s return home later, where he is quizzed by his sceptical wife as to how he got on with his ‘fancy friends’ and the ‘grandeur’ of it all (89). Joe gives a version of events that obliterates what has actually occurred. He insists the tape played through to the end and Friel’s story ends with Joe repeatedly crooning into his child’s ear: ‘The same as ever […] A great family. A grand family’ (90). In Aristocrats, the character of Joe is split into two and developed. The two working-class outsiders from the town who enter the Big House of the O’Donnells are Willie Diver and Eamon. The play more fully addresses the issue of class surrounding the relationship of Ballybeg Hall to the town from which it takes its name and which it surveys from a height. Willie occupies the handyman/labourer half of Joe’s narrative function. He is invited to be the ‘guest’ when the absent sister’s tape is played, just as Joe is in the story; and he spends the opening minutes of the play putting up a baby alarm downstairs so the father’s voice can be heard. District Justice O’Donnell is now almost entirely bed-ridden. His only onstage appearance occurs when his daughter’s recorded voice draws him downstairs to call her name in response. This emerges as ‘an almost-animal roar’ – ‘Annaaaaaaaaaaa!’ (304) – and a physical collapse, at the climactic end of Act 2. Otherwise, the Judge’s voice is only heard over the baby-alarm. The father of the O’Donnells is almost entirely caught in the delirium of the past, still delivering judgments from the bench, some of them on individual members of his own family. When Casimir enters at the end of Act 1, bearing a carefully prepared lunch tray, the sudden eruption of his father’s voice barking his name reduces his quaking son to his knees. Willie is witness to all of this. There is no Mrs O’Donnell; in line with the scenario of Philadelphia, the conflict between father and son is played out in the absence of the long-dead mother. But the significant addition of three women to the play – Casimir’s

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sisters, Judith, Alice and Claire – greatly extends and complicates the drama, not only of the father-son conflict but also of the Big House fantasy. (The women’s presence and function will be more fully examined in a later chapter.) Although Willie is clearly in love with Judith, the oldest sister, he is socially kept at a distance, in line with how Mrs Hogan behaved towards Joe. Nowhere is this more evident than in Judith’s preparations for the impending marriage of the youngest, Claire, the reason why the family have reassembled in Ballybeg Hall. Willie is called upon to make the transportation arrangements for the day but has pointedly not been invited to the wedding. Joe Brennan’s other half, the character who has imbibed the mythology of the Big House, is realized in the character of Eamon, another of the local ‘lads’ from the town. Eamon (as he himself admits) has fallen in love at some stage with each of the three O’Donnell sisters, but when rejected as a suitor by Judith has married the alcoholic Alice. Eamon’s grandmother has worked in service all her life at the Hall and reacts with heart-scalding shock and disapproval when she learns her grandson is to marry ‘Miss Alice’. Eamon is hyper-articulate and has a keen understanding of just why he – the outsider looking in rather than the aristocrats themselves – is the one who does not want the House to be broken up and sold at the end: Don’t you know that all that is fawning and forelock-touching and Paddy and shabby and greedy peasant in the Irish character finds a house like this irresistible? That’s why we were ideal for colonizing. Something in us needs this … aspiration. (318-9) He is the one who understands the fictions that Casimir produces and perceives that (in Seamus Deane’s words) they are ‘rooted in the human being’s wish for dignity as well as in his tendency to avoid reality’.33 The son of the Big House is no longer a priest. In ‘Foundry House’ Joe notes how both Declan and Claire, in pursuing a religious vocation, have turned their backs and walked away from everything the house and their background could offer materially. There is still a nun in the O’Donnell family, Sister Anna. The other three sisters were trained up to be ‘young ladies’ and so effectively – as Alice mordantly remarks – to do nothing. Casimir has sought to escape the historical legacy and contradictions of his background, not by becoming a priest, but by opting out of the (male) family tradition of studying the law. The emotional and psychological ties that still bind him emerge in his inventive, ceaseless fantasizing about the O’Donnell family history and its association with great cultural figures from around Europe. For each of the objects in the drawing-room he has a story to tell, one which is designed to evoke a famous figure from the past and their social interaction with the world of the O’Donnells. At first these have a certain plausibility and seem little more than socially conscious name-dropping, with Casimir giving researcher Tom Hoffnung the ‘facts’. As the academic puts

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it, ‘this is where Gerard Manley Hopkins used to sit? is that correct?’ (264). But as the play goes on, the list becomes increasingly absurd, culminating with a surrealistic birthday party for Balzac and Tom’s empirical proof that Casimir could not personally recollect Yeats. Tom glosses over the disparity by saying it was natural Casimir should translate a story he had heard many times as a child into a personal narrative. This half-truth is as far as Tom’s ‘kind of scrutiny’ can carry him. What Aristocrats goes to considerable lengths to demonstrate is that memory in Friel’s drama is best understood in cultural rather than purely personal terms, that it operates as something constructed, made. The O’Donnells of Ballybeg Hall – Casimir in particular – have sought to shore up their uncertain sense of self, their lack of political and cultural importance, by developing a mythology, a pantheon of the great and good who have been personal friends of the family. In one sense, they have done so because in the Irish Big House context they are unusual in being Catholics rather than Protestants. The O’Donnells suffer a double isolation: cut off from the rest of Ballybeg by their aristocratic status, cut off from other Big Houses by virtue of not being Protestant. But as Tom Hoffnung accurately remarks, there historically existed in Ireland a ‘Roman Catholic big house – by no means as thick on the ground [as the Protestant] but still there’ (281). That people think otherwise has to do with mythology, specifically the mythologizing of W. B. Yeats as cultural propagandist for the Irish Literary Revival. The start of the Theatre Movement involved three landlords from the west of Ireland – Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, George Moore – and the suburban middle-class Yeats. Martyn and Moore were both from Catholic landowning families. Within a few years they were gone, and Yeats embarked on his mythologizing of the Big House setting as the locale of an idealized Protestant Ascendancy34: Lady Gregory’s Coole Park, the Gore-Booth sisters at Lissadell. Yeats’s myth of the Protestant Big House is challenged by Casimir’s counter-mythologizing, where the great figures tend to be Catholic with papal associations: either famous English Catholics of the nineteenth century who came for a time to Ireland (John Henry Cardinal Newman to found University College Dublin or Gerard Manley Hopkins to teach there) or native Irish Catholics who went on to a world career. Most of the figures Casimir mentions – Newman, Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton – were apotheosized in Catholic homes and schools in the North: figures who had achieved prominence in the cultural sphere and who had not renounced their faith. One example will serve: Count John McCormack. Casimir weaves one of his most opulent narratives around the famous Irish tenor, claiming that Justice O’Donnell used his influence to secure the singer his papal knighthood and that his mother was lifted temporarily out of her depression when the visiting McCormack invited her to dance. In 1986, Brian Friel edited and introduced the transcribed oral history of a Donegal weaver, Charles McGlinchey, in The Last of the Name. In the course of a very long life, McGlinchey had left his Donegal home on

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only two occasions. One was to travel to Dublin to attend the Eucharistic Congress in 1932 when John McCormack sang ‘Panis Angelicus’ to an audience of over one million in Croke Park.35 Casimir’s pantheon of the famous people who visited Ballybeg Hall is empirically and historically false; these figures did not crowd into Ballybeg Hall to meet the O’Donnell family. But they were nonetheless beloved presences in the homes of Northern Irish Catholic families, giving a greater sense of cultural self-worth to a colonized people for whom economic and political opportunities were few. In one of his notes for Aristocrats, Friel wrote: ‘The Protestant Big House was a tangible symbol of political and national superiority. The Roman Catholic Big House was an act of faith – a tentative aspiration.’36 Yeats constructed an elaborate mythology in his poetry, prose and drama about the cultured lives led by the inhabitants of the Protestant Big House. But that fantasy has been taken as the social reality, not least because it was underwritten and given substance by what Friel describes as ‘political and national superiority’. The mythology expressed by Casimir is always a self-evident cultural fantasy, never any more than a ‘tentative aspiration’, because it is founded on so little actual power. But this enhances rather than diminishes its claim to be and possess a kind of truth. Z˘iz˘ek’s analysis of how fantasy operates applies with particular force to Aristocrats. It is not the first time Friel has dramatized a dominant father oppressing an intimidated son. But Justice O’Donnell is more explicitly a symbol of the Law than any previous patriarch. His relationship with his son is much more evidently one of domination, with Casimir on more than one occasion reduced to a tearful, gibbering wreck by the sound of his master’s voice over the sound system. Z˘iz˘ek writes about the bond that exists between the master and the servant and ‘what makes us accept the framework of the social relationship of domination’.37 In the explicit context of his discussion of fantasy, he identifies pleasure (more precisely, jouissance) as the payment that is offered as compensation for the service that the servant extends to the master. What Z˘iz˘ek recommends as the way to proceed is not to abandon the fantasy, since it is so intimately bound up in the subject’s reality, but to distance it, to introduce an enabling gap by which the relationship can be critiqued: ‘The crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude […] which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master is to traverse the fantasy.’ This precisely describes the way in which Casimir operates as a fantasist in the play. Where Willie Logue in The Francophile is always in thrall to his latest obsession (this year, French; next year, Esperanto), Casimir O’Donnell deploys a free-wheeling and inventive style that traverses any number of possible personal and cultural fantasies. Friel describes Father Declan in ‘Foundry House’ as ‘fluttering and birdlike’ (80). Drawing his father into the living-room, the priest speaks ‘in a hypnotist’s voice’ with his ‘arms outstretched and beckoning’ (83); when ready to introduce the tape, he stands

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‘poised as a ballet dancer’ (85). In translating the story to the stage, Friel has been able to develop the performative possibilities suggested by these phrases in the creation of Casimir. The part was specifically written for the great Irish actor John Kavanagh, whose distinctive loping stride and mobile, leering face were put to memorable use in the first 1979 production by Joe Dowling. Friel gives an elaborate description of Casimir, his rapid physical movements (especially ‘the way he walks – rapid, jerky, without ease or grace’ [255]) and facial mannerisms (especially his ‘habit of suddenly grinning and giving a mirthless “ha-ha”’). But Friel is equally careful to stress that Casimir is ‘a perfectly normal man with distinctive and perhaps slightly exaggerated mannerisms’. If Casimir was not ‘normal’, then it is possible to evaluate and dismiss his fantasizing as just that. His father’s evaluation of Casimir’s ‘abnormality’ was delivered on the occasion when he judged his son: ‘“Had you been born down there” – we were in the library and he pointed down to Ballybeg – […] you’d have the village idiot. Fortunately for you, you were born here and we can absorb you.” Ha-ha’ (310). Casimir, according to his creator, is a normal man with slightly exaggerated mannerisms. As Z˘iz˘ek points out, nothing is truer in Freudian psychoanalysis than ‘its exaggerations’. The ‘truth’ of exaggerations, he argues, is that they render in clearer outline ‘the ideological form with regard to its designated concrete social content’.38 Casimir’s performance of fantasy is at the centre of the play and serves to lay bare the social reality from which the Judge thinks he has removed himself, first to Ballybeg Hall, then to the upstairs bedroom where he lies, dying, but from which he continues to issue commands. The scene of the Catholic Big House has undergone a significant shift, along the lines examined in Chapter 1. ‘Foundry House’ is placed squarely in Northern Ireland: ‘the main Derry–Belfast road ran parallel to the house’ (76). Aristocrats, like so many of Friel’s plays, is set in County Donegal. Northern Ireland is never mentioned in Ballybeg Hall and would have remained unspoken were it not for the presence of the American academic. Tom Hoffnung questions Alice on her father’s view of the Civil Rights campaign in the North. She answers: ‘He opposed it. No, that’s not accurate. He was indifferent: that was across the border – away in the North’ (272). Tom’s quiet reply is to point out that the North was ‘only twenty miles away.’ This is one of the very few explicit references to the border in the whole of Friel’s drama. A final point to be considered is the presence of music in the play. The importance of music to the dramatic and emotional structure of Aristocrats is enunciated by Casimir at the very start: ‘When I think of Ballybeg Hall it’s always like this: the sun shining; the doors and windows all open; the place filled with music’ (256). This is what we behold visually on the stage at this point and also what we hear, since the offstage Claire plays music by Chopin on the piano for most of the first act: a memory and a fantasy made present and enacted, performed. The prominence of music serves to connect the play with the two discussed earlier in this chapter, Philadelphia, Here I Come! and

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The Loves of Cass McGuire. In the face of the cultural and emotional deprivation he faces, Gar retreats to his bedroom and mixes Mendelssohn with céilí. Cass McGuire’s alternative to rejection by her family is the refuge of Eden House and the music of Wagner. There has not been much music in the plays in between but it returns full force in Aristocrats, not least because of the conjoined return of fantasy as a central theme. Of the four O’Donnell family siblings, Judith and Alice may be seen at surface level as the realists, Casimir and Claire as the fantasists. It is of course more complicated than this, as I have sought to demonstrate regarding Casimir. Judith explains to Eamon the life of exacting drudgery she is compelled to follow in order to maintain Ballybeg Hall and to care both for her bed-ridden father and the manicdepressive Claire; but she has suppressed the deeper reality of a child she has given birth to and had adopted. Alice is keen to give Tom Hoffnung an accurate account of the O’Donnell history and speaks of the troubled relationship with her husband, Eamon, but can only truth-tell when she is drunk. Claire spends much of the time playing or listening to Chopin; the alternative is to contemplate her impending marriage to a bald, corpulent man old enough to be her father. While Claire is playing, she and Casimir enact an elaborate verbal pas-de-deux by which he tries correctly to identify the precise Chopin piece. There is throughout, particularly in Casimir’s rhapsodies about Claire’s qualities, a suggestion of an incestuous attraction between the two. Z˘iz˘ek has written of Schumann in relation to his beloved wife, Clara that he desired her proximity yet also wanted her ‘to remain at a proper distance in order to retain her sublime status’.39 In Friel’s drama music operates to mobilize fantasy, in particular desire, in relation to a given object but needs to maintain its distance in order for that romantic fantasy to be preserved. Act 3 of Aristocrats is set after the death and burial of the father. It has generally been interpreted as the O’Donnell family now moving beyond their ‘crippling illusions’ and facing reality.40 Certainly, the latter is the case for the freed-up carer, Judith, who can sell off the bankrupted estate and claim her child. Alice speaks to Eamon of rebuilding their relationship and bringing back to London with them the octogenarian Uncle George, the final character in the ensemble, who though making the occasional entrance (and rapid exit) has not spoken a word throughout the play. This act, of ‘adopting’ Uncle George, can symbolically compensate for the loss of her father and the fact that she and Eamon have been unable to have a child. But what lies in store for the two fantasists? Claire may say she suddenly wants to give up playing Chopin but all the future holds then is marriage to Jerry. Casimir has spoken throughout of his German wife Helga and their two children back in Hamburg and has made elaborate (and always abortive) attempts to contact home via the Ballybeg telephone exchange. Casimir carries out such an elaborate pantomime of heterosexual married love throughout Aristocrats that Eamon is led to see this as yet another of his fantastic fictions. The exiled characters in the play are depicted leading lonely lives, and Casimir may well

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be no exception; this is one reason the emotional lure of old family ties is still so strong for characters in their thirties. Perhaps he returns to Hamburg to a solitary life and has wished to reassure his family that he has been a success at marriage. Friel’s notes to the play suggest that he has always considered Casimir’s German wife a reality; at one point, she was to accompany her Irish husband on his return visit home for Claire’s wedding. But if the flesh-and-blood Helga does show the contempt for her impractical husband that is suggested and if the English-speaking Casimir cannot exchange a single word with his German-speaking sons, then the removal of fantasy or illusion from his life is scarcely either an option or unequivocally desirable. Besides, as Friel’s treatment of the subject throughout his career demonstrates with ever greater subtlety and sophistication, fantasy is not something that operates at the opposite pole from so-called reality and that can merely be treated as escapism or compensation for lack. It is the necessary complement to reality – in Z˘iz˘ek’s terms a ‘social reality’ [which is] itself ‘an escape from some “traumatic”, real kernel’.41

4 Brian Friel and Contemporary British Drama: The Missing Dimension

In the late 1950s, when Brian Friel began to write and have plays produced, there was very little in the contemporary local context to stimulate an apprentice playwright. Irish drama featured single successes like Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow in 1954 and Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge in 1960 but nothing sustained.1 Samuel Beckett was operating in a different language and culture, at too great a remove to have an immediate influence.2 In England in 1956 John Osborne had inaugurated what, for better or worse, soon became known as the ‘Angry Young Man’ revolution. This movement helped to transform post-war British theatre, replacing the wellmade plays of Terence Rattigan with something much more realistic in its ‘kitchen-sink’ style, extreme in its politics and antagonistic to the established order. What has been all too rarely commented on is Friel’s creative engagement with the British theatre of the mid-twentieth century, even though he has commented positively on many of the key names associated with that movement: ‘I admire […] a lot of English dramatists, [John] Osborne, [John] Arden and [Arnold] Wesker.’3 The time is ripe for an act of historic recovery of a necessary and missing context for Friel’s theatre, and I think it no accident that critical attention is now being directed in that quarter. In ‘Irish Drama and the Occlusion of Influence’, Nicholas Grene makes the point that ‘Irish and British playwrights necessarily share a common environment’ but points to the ‘oddity’ whereby ‘these obvious facts of a common theatrical and communications culture should be so obscured from view that all of us, critical interpreters and playwrights alike, do not immediately see it like that’.4 The tendency of Irish drama to quarantine itself from any acknowledgement of outside influence is derived by Grene from the founders of the Irish Dramatic Revival, who wished to claim a new beginning and to defend their plays from the hostile nationalist charge of outside ‘foreign’ influence. This has bred a tradition of tracing all subsequent Irish playwrights ‘back to Synge, Yeats and Gregory, rarely to any non-Irish antecedents’.5 In regard to the contemporary Irish stage, Grene’s charge needs to be qualified. There is growing critical acknowledgement of the relation of Irish theatre to world 84

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drama that is not afraid to claim affinity and even influence: the connection between the plays of Brian Friel and those of nineteenth-century Russian playwrights Ivan Turgenev and Anton Chekhov has been well flagged, for example, not least by the dramatist himself. But on the score of that intimate connection between Irish and British theatre in the contemporary context the discussion does not extend beyond the end of the 1960s, both in comments by Friel himself (his admiration of contemporary English playwrights like Osborne and Wesker, cited earlier) and in particular in the press reviews and critical writing on his work. What muted a fuller critical acknowledgement or discussion of Friel’s engagement with plays from the neighbouring island for a full three decades was the eruption of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland. In the wake of the Belfast Agreement in the mid-1990s there is a more enabling context to speak of an Irish playwright widely perceived as nationalist in crucial and intimate dialogue with English dramatists and to recognize how Friel’s plays never refrained from that necessary dialogue at any stage of the past half-century. This chapter proposes, accordingly, to examine the intertextual connections between two Friel plays of the late 1960s and mid1970s and two major plays from the contemporary British canon of the same period: 1968’s Crystal and Fox and John Osborne’s The Entertainer of 1957; 1975’s Volunteers and David Storey’s The Contractor of 1970. It is not anger that Friel values in John Osborne but hope, as one of ‘the optimistic people who happen to use black canvases’.6 Osborne’s achievement for Friel was that ‘he changed the direction of theatre’ by striving to direct the medium ‘away from Shaftesbury Avenue’.7 Accordingly, it is not Look Back in Anger the Irish playwright values most but The Entertainer of the following year. Osborne’s play centres on the figure of Archie Rice, a 50-year-old musichall entertainer who (like the medium in which he appears) is on his last legs. When he bemoans the condition of the audiences he has to confront and their lack of appreciation for what is on offer, his father Billy remembers that when he was a young performer, London audiences were the ‘best audience in the world’.8 Archie Rice is too young ever to have had that experience and turns instead for his rare occasion of a rapport between audience and performer to Ireland and the fit-ups. Archie’s speech is one of the play’s most memorable and amusing set-pieces, both referring to and exemplifying the theatre of which it speaks: I was in a little village in Donegal once. On the Irish fit-ups. (To Billy.) You remember. The morning we arrived there, a man came up to me and said: ‘Oh, we’re great students of the drama here. Great students of the drama. Our dramatic critics can lick anyone – anyone!’ Turned out he was the local blacksmith. He said, he said: ‘If you get past an audience here, you’ll get past any audience in the world.’ It was true too. Think I got a black eye. (75)

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Archie’s speech is reminiscent of the more extensive sojourn of an English actor in the Irish fit-ups in the same decade. In the early 1950s, the playwright Harold Pinter was plying his earlier trade as an actor, touring Ireland as a member of Anew McMaster’s troupe. Pinter’s memoir Mac has a memorable account of a late-night drunken audience being brought to rapt and silent attention by McMaster’s performance as Othello. The actor-manager remarks: ‘But you see one thing the Irish peasantry really appreciate is style, grace and wit.’9 In 1968, Brian Friel wrote a play, Crystal and Fox, about the fit-up companies that travelled around Ireland for decades, offering a mix of music, melodrama and circus acts. The Fox Melarkey Show presents, not the Shakespearean classics that McMaster offered 15 years earlier, but the more downmarket fare of popular melodramas modelled on contemporary movies. John Osborne and Harold Pinter both had their apprenticeship in the theatre as actors in the English touring repertory system, and both seem to view the Irish fit-ups in rather a sentimental and nostalgic light; for Pinter, his two years with McMaster in Ireland was ‘a golden age for me and for others’.10 Fox Melarkey, faced with the day-to-day experience as actormanager of his troupe, takes a more cynical view of his audience, remarking at one point: ‘Belt it out. And plenty of tears. All the hoors want is a happy ending.’11 But as Frank McGuinness points out in relation to Crystal and Fox, ‘it is with a deeply knowing comic irony that Friel, the most experimental dramatist of his generation, turned to this world as metaphor of his art’.12 The same can be said of Osborne with The Entertainer. He is providing a conscious critique of the current state of British theatre through a self-conscious and ironic deployment of an earlier theatrical form, that of the music-hall. In his autobiography A Better Class of Person (1981), Osborne writes he was attracted to the form because it primarily appealed to ‘emotions like jealousy, crude patriotism, lost love, poverty, death’, but presented in ‘short scenes of melodramatic information, sentiment and broad humour’.13 If Look Back in Anger was hailed as a triumph of social and dramatic realism, The Entertainer is anti-naturalistic and self-conscious in acknowledging its own theatricality. Archie Rice alternates between his role as a stand-up comedian addressing an audience and a beleaguered and philandering son, husband and father. Likewise, the play’s setting alternates between the theatre where Archie is performing in the spotlight against a backcloth and the rented accommodation in the seaside resort where he lives with his wife Phoebe, father Billy and son Frank. There had been a strong measure of self-conscious theatricality in Brian Friel’s decision to have the role of his young protagonist in Philadelphia, Here I Come! played not by one but by two actors. The character of Gar Public is essentially no different from how the young son about to emigrate to the US in a more naturalistic drama would be represented; with the silence pervading between son and father offset by exchanges with the affectionate housekeeper and visitors to the house. But the figure of Private Gar opens up another realm of dramatic possibility in

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his interchanges with his alter ego, one in which he can not only act out his Walter Mitty fantasies but address the conflicted emotions aroused by his decision to leave home. In The Loves of Cass McGuire, the title character at one point addresses the audience directly and questions the title that her playwright has assigned her; a nod to Pirandello. In Crystal and Fox the setting is itself inherently theatrical, pitched from the start in the liminal zone connecting the onstage and offstage areas between which the performers move and in which they live. Fox combines a number of theatrical functions, both directing and producing his actors in the plays; and when they lose the main actors in the troupe he also takes on the leading male role in the melodrama. Fox’s primary onstage role is as a master of ceremonies who controls and directs the audiences in their responses. In this, he most closely resembles Archie Rice. The role of professional entertainer played by Fox and Archie requires that they keep up a happy mood, smile their smiles and tell their jokes, many of them innuendo-laden and having ‘the wife’ or ‘the mother-in-law’ as their butt. Both are involved in a stream of cross-talk with unruly members of the audience: VOICE: Is it faked? FOX: ’Course it’s faked! (Laughter) (13) In neither play do the boundaries between what happens on stage and what happens off between the characters remain water-tight; rather, they increasingly seep into each other. The bitter jokes Archie tells in a professional capacity about ‘the wife’ – ‘My wife – my wife. Old Charlie knows her, don’t you, Charlie?’ (24) – increasingly reflect on his estranged relations with his own wife, Phoebe. She has given up accompanying him on the road and now works in Woolworth’s while making frequent isolated trips to the local ‘flea-pit’ cinema. The fact that Archie has sexual liaisons with women younger than his daughter is an open secret between them – and in their personal lives, the gender of the sexual philanderer is the reverse of the onstage comic stereotype, the husband rather than ‘the wife’. In the domestic scenes, Phoebe drinks and talks a great deal about the life she might have had, while Archie looks on dispassionately. On stage, the punch line for a comic gag increasingly fails to compensate for the increasingly bitter accounts he delivers about ‘my wife – not only is she stupid, not only is she stupid, but she’s cold as well. Oh, yes, cold. She may look sweet, but she’s a very cold woman, my wife. Very cold. Cold and stupid. She’s what they call a moron glacee’ (59). Crystal and Fox contains a play-within-the-play, The Doctor’s Story, closely modelled on the contemporary film, The Nun’s Story. In both, the beautiful young nun finally succumbs to the blandishments of the handsome doctor and trades in her wimple so they can marry. At the start of Friel’s play,

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‘Dr Giroux’ is ‘backstage’ helping ‘Sister Petita Sancta’ ‘out of a nun’s habit and into a gaudy floral dress’ (11). The couple go back on stage for an elaborate scene of leavetaking between the nun and her Mother Superior, played by Fox’s wife Crystal, the company’s star performer. The two plays start to intertwine as it becomes apparent from the backstage bickering that Tanya and her husband El Cid are simultaneously planning on leaving the Fox Melarkey troupe to work for his rival, Dick Prospect. The comments made by Mother Superior about the ‘years of dedication to our little mission hospital here in Lakula in Eastern Zambia’ (15) also apply to the travelling theatre performers with an appositeness that the considerable irony cannot quite extinguish. Fox makes the parallel himself late in the play when, hitching a ride, he thanks the car that stops by saying: ‘May God reward you for your years of dedication to our little mission hospital here in Lakula in Eastern Tipperary’ (57). Nor is he above quoting mock-Scripture to his players: ‘Contentment lies in total obedience – St Paul’s epistle to the South Africans’ (24). In his period at the Guthrie Theatre, as discussed in Chapter 2, the apprentice playwright wrote of what he took from the experience as the ‘dedication’ of ‘a theoretical priesthood’.14 However travestied and ironized that metaphor is by the run-down fit-up company we behold, something of the dedication and visionary possibility Friel glimpsed in the theatrical life still persists in their endeavours. That combination of transcendence and squalor will be explored more fully in Faith Healer (1980), another play about a down-at-heel theatrical trio struggling to rise above their tawdry circumstances. In the even more reduced version of The Doctor’s Story that opens Act 2 of Crystal and Fox, the mismatch of performer and part is grotesquely apparent. Fox now plays the Mother Superior and Crystal Sister Petita Sancta. The line he directs at the departing nun – ‘Oh, my child, you look so young and so beautiful’ (40) – is echoed by Fox’s remembering his first encounter with his then-beautiful young wife and by his wish ‘to die and wake up in heaven with Crystal’ (36). But in the play’s present, Crystal is at least 20 years older and more bruised by her experiences. When she comes offstage, the automatic compliments with which her husband greets her – ‘Beautiful, my love. (He kisses her on the forehead) Very moving. Gets me here (heart) … every time’ (11) – reflects as much on the present state of their marriage as it does on their professional relationship. Archie Rice and Fox Melarkey are both 50 years of age, and are experiencing a professional and personal crisis. The theatrical forms in which they have traded for their entire careers are going under, not so much in competition with the movies, where the live element of the stage will always provide a strong counter-attraction, but in the face of the home entertainment that television can provide. Here the ten years between the two plays is telling: in the UK by 1957, the BBC was well established and the arrival of the commercial channel, ITV, in that same year was about to increase the pressure; in Ireland, RTE only began broadcasting in 1962 but

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by 1968 was a major cultural force in the lives of people in the Republic, often in conjunction with UTV and BBC. Fox’s response is to treat drama as an adjunct to TV news by taking his players to an area where a disaster has been reported – ‘a train crash or an explosion in a school’ (26) – and trading in the sentiment aroused by putting on a tragedy. The increased sensationalism that Archie’s music-hall drama has resorted to is the onstage presence of nude women, for which his monologues are now little more than a distraction and a delay. But the result is the same in each case: dwindling audiences. As Archie replies to his wife’s solicitous enquiry when he finally gets home: No it wasn’t all right at the theatre. Monday night there were sixty sad little drabs in, and tonight there were about two hundred sad little drabs. If we can open on Monday night at West Hartlepool, it will be by very reluctant agreement of about thirty angry people. (36) In the face of Archie’s growing despair at falling attendances Phoebe protests that she does not want to end her life being put in a box in West Hartlepool, or wherever her husband happens to be playing that night. Fox appears to endorse Crystal’s characteristic optimism, whenever their nightly attendance shows any slight increase, that the good times will soon return. But his disillusionment breaks out in the backstage jibes he directs at their audiences, or lack of them: ‘Bloody cowboys!’ (13). Rather than resist the inevitable tide of attrition, it becomes clear that Fox is accelerating the process by deliberately and persistently driving away the remaining members of the troupe. The husband-and-wife team are propelled even further into the arms of a rival company when Fox denies them the top curtain-call they have agreed. The man-and-dog team of the 60-year-old Pedro and Gringo is brutally terminated when the dog is fed a lethal dose of arsenic. When Pedro refuses point-blank to take over the role of the young doctor, Fox insists that Crystal’s octogenarian father play the role, making grotesquely explicit the gerontocracy of the fit-up and its players by the late 1960s. Something similar happens in The Entertainer. Late in Osborne’s play, it emerges that Archie, desperate to draw in more punters, is pressing his father Billy Rice – the only one to have some reputation as a performer – back into theatrical service. His daughter Jean warns prophetically that ‘you’re going to kill that old man just to save that no-good, washed-up, tatty show of yours’ (82); and in his next solo appearance Archie does indeed confirm to his audience that ‘Billy Rice will not appear tonight. Billy Rice will not appear again’ (83). The cause-and-effect is less clearly established in Crystal and Fox. After Fox’s insistence that Papa will play the part, the next we hear of the character is that he is in hospital, where he dies shortly afterwards. More of a back story is supplied in Friel’s script for the 1977 RTE TV dramatization of the play,

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where a couple of lines are added to confirm that it was the strain of the old man having to go on stage in a theatrical role that caused his physical breakdown and landed him in the hospital.15 The casting of the central roles of Archie and Fox was crucial to the raison d’être of each play. The 1957 premiere of The Entertainer at the Royal Court was notable for the fact that Laurence Olivier, the most famous English actor of his generation, played the role. This was not classical or Shakespearean theatre; this was the work of the younger, more experimental playwrights, and Olivier was risking a great deal in making the change. As Michael Billington puts it: ‘Olivier’s commitment to Osborne’s play was a decisive moment in post-war British theatre,’16 signalling a momentous shift away from the commercial, formulaic fare of the West End (‘Shaftesbury Avenue’, in Friel’s formulation) towards the radical style and content associated with the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. There is a decisive whiff of Archie Rice in a later Friel character, Teddy the cockney manager of faith healer Frank Hardy, and the connection is confirmed by Teddy’s references to Laurence Olivier as one of ‘the great artists’ – ‘there’s only one Sir Laurence – right?’17 The role of Fox in the original Gate Theatre production was taken by Cyril Cusack, probably Ireland’s most famous actor at the time in both theatre and film. Cusack up to that point (in the late 1960s) was more associated with such classic Abbey Theatre playwrights as Synge and O’Casey rather than with any of the younger writers in the contemporary field. When Friel writes the following elaborate stage direction for the actor playing Fox – his ‘eyes go flat and he hides behind a mask of bland simplicity and vagueness’ (19) – it is hard not to credit that the role was written with Cusack specifically in mind. Both characters, Archie Rice and Fox Melarkey, are professional performers with an extensive repertoire of theatrical moves, entertainers who can turn on the charm as required. They have been playing the role for so long that they have become emotionally disconnected, faking what they can no longer feel. It is a stretch for these established actors when they are asked to go beyond and behind their traditional charm to convey a world-weariness, an existential ennui, as their world closes in around them. This unmasking is directly articulated by Archie Rice in the climactic moment when he asks his daughter to look behind the professional façade and deep into his eyes: ‘you’ll get yourself a technique. You can smile, darn you, smile, and look the friendliest jolliest thing in the world, but […] look at my eyes. I’m dead behind those eyes’ (72). The deadness behind the eyes is apparent in the leering, iconic photo of Olivier on the cover of the Faber edition of The Entertainer. When Crystal and Fox was first produced in Dublin, in November 1968, Gus Smith’s review in The Irish Press pointed out that Fox ‘is reminiscent of Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer’ and further argued that Cyril Cusack, ‘as the cunning fox, does for this Friel work what Laurence Olivier did for The Entertainer – kept the drama alive’.18 In his otherwise extremely

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positive review of play and production, Alec Reid thought Cusack’s performance caught ‘every nuance of the part’ so far as portraying ‘the little, crooked, self-centred chancer’ but that the tragic dimension eluded him.19 Perhaps professionally piqued by this review, Cusack returned to the role on television nine years later and delivered one of the most complex and moving portrayals of his career. The ‘mask of bland simplicity and vagueness’ was turned towards the other characters; but in isolated and isolating closeups Cusack used his experience of film acting to deploy understatement and minimal facial and bodily gestures to suggest a tragic sub-text. This interior mining of the part fed directly into those rare occasions when Fox lets slip the mask of the professional entertainer and confesses: Once, maybe twice in your life, the fog lifts, and you get a glimpse, an intuition; and suddenly you know that this can’t be all there is to it – there has to be something better than this. (47) The two plays are catalyzed by the entrance of a missing family member, and it is that entrance that brings an explicitly political context to the drama – or rather brings its politics to the surface. In The Entertainer, Archie’s daughter Jean arrives unexpectedly, having come to a point of crisis in her relationship with her fiancé. Their increasingly discordant views have surfaced over Jean’s decision to attend a rally in Trafalgar Square opposing British involvement in Suez. Her grandfather Billy is appalled – ‘this is what comes of giving them [women] the vote’ (28) – and the news generates heated argument when the other family members hear about it. What stokes the debate is the fact that the brother we see in the company of his father is a conscientious objector while the other brother, Mick, who remains unseen throughout, is a member of the British troops in Egypt advancing into the Canal Zone. During the course of the play, the Rice family learns that Mick is first taken prisoner and then released; expected home as a hero, he returns in a coffin and the play concludes with his funeral. These scenes provide ironic contrast to the pro-Empire songs of the music-hall that Archie sings on stage to work up some enthusiasm in the audience: ‘Those bits of red still on the map/ We won’t give up without a scrap’ (33). The only authentic performer Archie has ever seen is an old American black woman who sang the blues; and the blues lament he sings for his dead son is in a very different key from his usual musical fare. But even this dirge is underscored by the love of England that suffused everything Osborne wrote: ‘But ain’t no use agrievin’/’Cos it’s Britain we believe in’ (74). In Crystal and Fox, we have the first of the returned prodigal sons that are to become such a feature of Friel’s plays. Gabriel appears unexpectedly halfway through the First Act, but the circumstances that have caused him to leave England and return to Ireland are so serious that Fox insists they keep

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the full details from Crystal. Like his father with his rickety wheel of fortune, Gabriel is a gambler and in his drifter’s life abroad has accumulated a heavy quantity of debts. Interrupted in the middle of an act of petty larceny, he has struck out repeatedly at the shop owner and fears he has killed her. This fear is confirmed when two British detectives arrive in Act 2 looking to extradite him. Even before the entrance of Gabriel, the travelling theatre has been approached by a local Garda who castigates them as itinerants and warns them to move on. Fox’s instincts are to appease the policeman; Crystal’s to oppose him. But these instincts are sharpened when the Garda and British detectives arrive in tandem to apprehend their son. Gabriel seeks to flee and, when apprehended, is dealt a blow ‘in the lower stomach’ and warned: ‘that’s only the beginning, Paddy’ (48–9). The prisoner is brought to Manchester for questioning in relation to the manslaughter, and his mother Crystal declares she is determined to follow. If Osborne’s Entertainer meditates on the breakup of the British Empire, Friel’s Crystal and Fox is prescient on what is about to happen in the North. In the altered political conditions of the ‘Troubles’ the 1977 TV dramatization of the play cut the dialogue of the two British detectives and restricted their activities to the arrest operation. The collusion between the Donegal Garda and the police from the British mainland remains in place, however, and gains added weight from developments in that decade regarding collusion between the security forces of both jurisdictions.20 But Gabriel is given no political justification for his manslaughter in either version; there is no suggestion that he is a member of the IRA or of any dissident political organization. While in prison in England, he has been assessed and diagnosed by a psychiatrist: ‘And do you know what he said, Fox? He said I was autistic – “unable to responds emotionally to people”. Funny word – autistic – isn’t it?’ (37). The reminiscences between the other players in the troupe establish the closeness that existed between father and son before a row blew up between Gabriel and his father. The emotional change in Fox, from natural ebullience and optimism to an ever more corrosive cynicism, is aligned with the moment of his son’s departure and disappearance. It soon becomes clear that Gabriel’s return, either way, is only temporary. And the process of attrition is complete when Fox casts off Crystal, by telling her that he was the one who handed their son over to the police, even though this is not true. It is the one thing her loyalty will not forgive. Fox is left alone at the end, at that most liminal of all settings: a crossroads, with a sign pointing in four directions, identified from Fox’s perspective as ‘Dublin – Galway – Cork – Derry’ (56). According to his own estimate, he is ‘at the hub of the country’ in this lonely road in the wilds of Donegal. At the time of the play’s first production, political events on the island were fast approaching crisis point. In Friel’s own development, the success in the US that had attended both Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Lovers posed the same dilemma he had diagnosed in John Osborne: a need to turn the direction

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of his theatre away from Broadway (rather than Shaftesbury Avenue) and to strike out in a chancier, riskier direction. The next decade would be a difficult and isolating one for the dramatist. The challenging and experimental plays he wrote in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s opened to a very different reception from the acclaim that greeted those earlier plays and which would subsequently attend the premieres of Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa; but he could not have written those later plays had he not changed the direction of his theatre in plays like Crystal and Fox. As Frank McGuinness has put it, in writing these ‘rabid, devious texts’, Friel was not ‘in the business of taming monsters here. Rather he unleashed them.’21 If the interaction between contemporary British and Irish theatre has been (in Nicholas Grene’s words) ‘denied or disparaged’ in most critical analysis,22 this was less the case in the 1960s and 1970s when the plays themselves were being worked on. When Friel delivered his 1975 play Volunteers to his agent and interested theatrical parties, there was a degree of recognition among them that his play would be compared to some degree with David Storey’s The Contractor, first staged at the Royal Court Theatre in 1969. The basis of comparison is the ‘work’ structure that drives the onstage activities of both plays.23 Volunteers is set in an archaeological site where a ‘dig’ is in progress. Much of the play’s action consists of its five workers engaging individually and collectively in ‘architectural business’24 as they excavate the remains of a Viking village, pushing on and off wheelbarrows, working in the cesspit, dusting off and retrieving the individual pieces they unearth, etc. In this collective activity no one worker predominates, and so the play, much more than any Friel has so far written, is an ensemble: many of these individual actions are performed simultaneously on the stage and there is a good deal of overlapping dialogue. The dramatic activity of David Storey’s The Contractor is likewise defined by its ‘work’ structure. The stage at the beginning is virtually empty, save for the three poles around which a marquee is to be constructed. The occasion is the wedding of a local North of England magnate’s daughter, for which occasion he brings in the workers he usually deploys elsewhere. In the course of Storey’s play, the audience will witness the marquee being constructed by the four workmen employed for the occasion. They will see the floor being laid, the muslin cut up, spread out, attached and hoisted, and so forth. Halfway through, the stage directions will specify that ‘the whole interior has slowly fallen into shape, [with] a gentle radiance coming through the drapes’.25 The wedding ceremony and reception occur offstage, between Acts Two and Three. The workers return the following morning to witness the devastation of what has been so carefully put in place the day before: The tent has suffered a great deal. […] Part of the dance floor itself has been removed, other parts uprooted and left in loose slabs; chairs have been upturned, tables left lying on their sides. (77)26

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There are therefore two dimensions to what the workers have to perform in the play’s final act: not only taking down the marquee but also cleaning up after the wedding guests. The ‘business’ at the end consists almost entirely of the four workmen removing objects from the stage in what amounts to a self-conscious striking of the theatrical set. The parallel is made clear when the father of the bride, now immured in his mansion on the hill, reaches his point of greatest identification with the working-class past he has risen above by remarking as the workers make their collective exit: ‘Nomads, […] that’s us … Tenting’ (99). The audience watching the production of The Contractor at the Royal Court under Lindsay Anderson’s meticulous, neorealist direction was all too aware of the technical expertise required of the actors in order successfully to work the various ropes and pulleys involved in erecting and taking down the marquee/set. There was a strong aesthetic dimension to the formal graciousness and symmetry of the physical arc inscribed on stage by the raising and lowering of the marquee, the achievement of that ‘gentle radiance’ at its highest point before the stage is emptied once again. Friel’s Volunteers, once the similarity of the play’s ‘work’ structure with The Contractor has been noted, provides more of a contrast than a comparison. Far from a point-by-point linear development requiring a great deal of detailed technical handiwork, Friel’s stage directions bestow a (for him) unprecedented degree of physical freedom on the director and actors, indicating that most of the architectural activity ‘will have to be worked into the script during rehearsals’. He goes on to elaborate that ‘the only business I have indicated and the only exit and entrance directions I have scripted are those which are absolutely necessary’ (10). Such ‘essential business’ would be the constant attention that Butt pays to the remains of the clay-and-wattle house that has been unearthed, and which is in danger of collapsing; or the ‘scraping’ to which Knox (who is mulish and slow) is generally relegated. In the main a series of actions would have to be developed in production consistent with a group of men involved in an architectural dig of this sort. Nor do we see the play’s central activity begun and completed in the course of the play’s action. We are told that the ‘dig’ has been going on for approximately six months and that there is at least two weeks’ more work to be done before it is completed. What we have in the play’s two acts, which covers two successive days, might be seen then as a coming in and out of an activity whose beginning and end stand outside the play – that there is no end product to be arrived at, but rather a process to be witnessed. And this is true of what several critics have observed of Volunteers’ own neo-Brechtian dynamics.27 In the play’s opening lines, the foreman discloses (though not to the workers) that ‘this is our last day’, even though the work is seen to be very much still in progress. ‘The boss’ has been told that the builders ‘won’t hold off any longer’ (12). The overall determining project is not the excavation and restoration of a Viking village but the brute capitalism of

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the big hotel, swimming pool and parking lot that will be constructed on the site. It was during preliminary excavations for this monument to the ’new Ireland’ that the remains of the Viking village were unearthed and an interim period granted for at least some of the artifacts to be examined and removed. (The play closely mirrors, in this respect, the Wood Quay controversy of the 1970s when Dublin Corporation’s decision to build new offices unearthed an important archaeological site, the most extant Viking village found to date; after a temporary stay of execution, when the site was occupied by protestors, the building went ahead.) Act 2 of Volunteers does see the winding up of the operation, in scenes similar to Act 3 of The Contractor, with the critique now directed at the moneyed interests for their wanton act of destruction of an important national heritage. Knox’s response is to stuff his pockets with ‘pieces of brooches, bones, bits of combs, trial pieces, scraps of leather, broken rings’ (78). The more serious-minded Butt tells him their monetary value is minimal; and we might expect that he will seek to save the broken vase retrieved by one of the men whose 593 pieces he has painstakingly reassembled. But as the workers ‘morosely’ quit the site for the last time, Butt is riled by the foreman’s elevation of the ‘exquisite’ beauty of this well-wrought urn at the expense of the labour of all of the men involved in the dig and, in a Marxist gesture rare in the work of Friel, ‘opens his hands and the jug falls on the ground and is smashed to pieces’(79). The play itself opts for this aesthetic. It is jagged and fragmented in its form, moving from one stylistic and linguistic register to another. In his memorable critique of the play in the TLS, Seamus Heaney wrote that ‘in Volunteers Friel has found a form that allows his gifts a freer expression. Behind the writing there is an unrelenting despair at what man has made of man, but its expression […] on the stage is by turns ironic, vicious, farcical, pathetic.’28 In both Volunteers and The Contractor, a work force of four or five men carry out their labours under the supervision and watchful eye of a foreman with whom they enjoy an uneasy, frequently needling relationship. Neither of the groups are signed-up members of a trade union. As becomes increasingly clear, the employers in both plays have rounded up a motley crew of men who would otherwise be unemployed. As Ewbank puts it, he will hire [a]nybody who’ll work. Miners who’ve coughed their lungs up, fitters who’ve lost their fingers, madmen who’ve run away from home. […] I take on those that nobody else’ll employ. (30–1) When the foreman fires one of the workers for insubordination, Ewbank enters and orders the man straight back to work. If clearly there is nowhere else for these men to go, likewise their employers have little room to be choosy about who they employ. In Volunteers, the money for the dig has run out some months before. Hence, the unusual background and status

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of the men working on the dig. They are prisoners who are bussed over every morning and returned every night under the close supervision of the prison officer, Wilson. The question of wages simply does not arise. For David Storey, there is a value to the work the men perform in The Contractor, regardless of their individual ability (or lack of it). The talents of the men in Brian Friel’s play vary widely. Butt demonstrates a knowledge and interest in the researches attendant on the dig that has a singular purity beyond the career motivations of the academics on the job. He is able to work out from an item he retrieves that the dating of the clay-and-wattle house is almost two centuries off. But that finding is unlikely to make its way into the scholarly journals, given Butt’s situation, and if it does, it will in all likelihood be under the name of the postgraduate student, the strident Marxist Desmond (or ‘Dessie the Red’, as the diggers dub him). Knox (or ‘Knoxie’) is an ironic far cry from the father of Calvinism, as the others ironically describe him at one point. Endlessly cadging cigarettes, Knox is unflinchingly described by the stage directions as ‘a snuffling, shuffling, grubby man of about sixty-five but [who] looks older’, which go on to align him with the street person he resembles: ‘not far removed from the kind of man one sees at night wrapped in newspapers and sleeping in the doorways of banks and cinemas’ (15). And yet Knox is granted an extraordinary moment to speak of his musical yearnings, of how he was taught the cello by an Italian called Vitelli in a home that boasted a maid and a car. Those music lessons ended when he was nine and we are left to guess at the precipitate social decline that saw Knoxie on the street. In Friel’s play Knox’s narrative provides a strong social contrast to and undercuts the prison officer Wilson’s hopes for his daughter’s music exam at the London Guild Hall School of Music. Among those Storey’s employer declares himself willing to employ are ‘madmen who’ve run away from home’. One of the most striking similarities between The Contractor and Volunteers is the presence of a ‘simple’ man in their midst, someone who has suffered some kind of severe mental breakdown. Storey is explicit in his specifications about Glendenning (‘Glennie’): he ‘is perhaps in his early twenties, a good-natured, stammering half-wit’ who wears overalls that are ‘considerably too large for him’ (12). Glennie’s stammer is so bad he has difficulty progressing beyond a much-repeated assertion of his first-person singular identity and achieving any verbal agency: ‘I … I … I … I … I … I’ (12, passim). One of the other workers has devised a means of accompanying Glennie with the ‘aye, yi, yi, yi’ refrain of the popular song, ‘Down Mexico Way’; originally intended to integrate and normalize Glennie’s social aberration, it has now become repeated to a point as meaningless as anything Glennie might say, an overfamiliar routine. Although generally benign, with a nodding and smiling persona, there is also a sense of threat surrounding this damaged individual, whether it is located in the large hammer he insists on wielding or in the bodily loss of control when a joke about his hogging of food misfires and he becomes ‘immobilized […] his

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head hanging down’ (51) and sobbing. In general, the other men move to protect him, to provide a purpose and a place in their society that would be denied him in the world of the upwardly mobile Ewbanks. Glennie’s equivalent in Volunteers is Smiler. About 35, ‘there is no trace of the man Smiler once was. We see only the imbecile with the perpetual grin.’ Where Glennie wears outsize overalls, the physical sign of Smiler’s status as clown/holy fool in the company is the incongruous ‘woollen ski-cap with the huge tassel’ he habitually wears (16). The most that Smiler can usually manage by way of response to a question or participation in the dialogue is his standard refrain: ‘That’s right – that’s right’ (16, passim).29 Unlike Storey’s Glennie, Friel’s Smiler has a significant back story, which not only explains but contextualizes his present condition. These workers on the archaeological dig are not just prisoners but, as Wilson explains to the foreman with some distaste, ‘“political prisoners” – huh! In my book they’re all bloody criminals’ (14). In both plays, the effect of the men’s status as workers, and in the latter case prisoners as well, is to neutralize and render opaque their bourgeois identities in ‘civilian’ life. The men in The Contractor surmise that one of their number, Bennett, has spent some time in prison; their constant innuendo suggests a sexual crime. And Ewbank reveals at the end that the foreman Kay was once had up for embezzlement, to which his wife responds: ‘They’ve been had up for a lot of things – the men that work for you’ (109). In his early notes for Volunteers, Friel writes: ‘If the idea of diggers as prisoners is used, a very detailed knowledge of each man’s crime will have to be worked out.’30 But as his development of the script confirmed that the workers were not only prisoners but political prisoners, the idea of explicitly presenting a detailed account of each man’s crime became untenable. For, as a later note remarks, since they were ‘detained under the Special Powers Act, no charge has ever been brought [and] hence no specific crime can be named. How can they know anything more than the briefest details of one another’s background’?31 The play will find an oblique way to suggest a background for the various prisoners and will do so through the medium of the skeleton that lies exposed in the pit, whom they dub Lief and around whom various hypothetical biographies can be spun. In the singular case of Smiler, however, his background story can be given in a straightforward and explicit fashion. For Smiler has not been imprisoned without trial in the Republic32; rather, he has protested on behalf of a friend and fellow worker who was interned. For his pains, he was arrested and brought to Dublin where they ‘beat the tar out of him for twelve consecutive hours – you know, just as a warning’ (56). Three years after the writing of Volunteers, as Diarmaid Ferriter records, ‘the first reports on suspected brutality by the Gardaí appeared […] and were condemned by Amnesty International’.33 Collusion between the Gardaí in the Republic and the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the North was asserted, as already discussed in relation to Crystal and Fox, a collusion that supplies a political context

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for the specifics of Smiler’s protest. In his civilian life, he was ‘a stonemason from the west of Donegal’ (55), a trade union official, who led all of his fellow workers on a protest march to Dublin over the incarceration of their fellow stonemason. As Keeney reports, the protestors ‘got about as far as the Derry border and there they whipped Smiler off to jail in Dublin’ (56) for his beating by the Gardaí. The border detail is not incidental; the inference is that the stonemasons were stopped at the border by the RUC as they tried to cut through Northern Ireland and handed back to the Gardaí since the affair was a Southern and not a Northern problem. The Smiler back story is one of the key elements in Volunteers indicating that, despite the non-specific stage directions of a setting in ‘the centre of a city’ in ‘Ireland’ (9), the play is set in the Republic of Ireland, not the North, a point that can elude non-Irish audiences and critics alike.34 In his analysis of the play, Scott Boltwood notes that the Dublin government under Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave had by 1974 ‘adopted a firm “law and order” approach’ by passing a series of repressive measures designed to quell subversion.35 In the course of both The Contractor and Volunteers, the two ‘simple’ characters go missing for much of the second half. Since they are so ill equipped to deal with the bigger world outside, concerns are expressed for their safety. Finally, both return from the disorienting and threatening outside to the protective camaraderie of their fellow workers. Glennie re-enters, smiling and eating a very large bun. Smiler returns at the end, stammering that once he was outside he didn’t know which way to go and so has returned because they will ‘tell me what to do’ (77). Smiler’s temporary escape has been invested by Keeney with a quest and a desire for freedom and release, as much from the prison-like structure of the site in which they are endlessly tunnelling as from the actual prison that awaits them at the end of the day. That nightly return to prison is rendered fatal by the revelation that their fellow political prisoners will punish the men by seeing they meet with an ‘accidental’ end. By collaborating on the dig the volunteers have placed themselves in a limbo or no man’s land between their fellow political prisoners and the authorities: ‘our fellow internees […] discussed again our defection in volunteering for this job […] [and] decided that the only fit punishment would be … capital’ (52). With Smiler’s return, even a symbolic escape is denied them. Foregrounded within the ensemble of each play is a male double act, two men who interact throughout. In their verbal banter, ironic commentary and performative skills they enact Friel’s constant self-reminder in his notes that despite the serious themes the comic element is crucial. What binds The Contractor more closely to Volunteers is the fact that in the former the male double act consists of two Irishmen: Fitzpatrick, ‘a hard, shrewd Irishman, independent’ (4) who takes the lead; and Marshall, ‘a thin, rather lightweight Irishman, pleasant, easy-going, with no great appetite for work’ (3), who back him up. In Lindsay Anderson’s Royal Court premiere production, the ‘hard,

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shrewd’ T. P. McKenna played Fitzpatrick and the ‘thin, rather lightweight’ Jim Norton played Marshall. The Irish references in Osborne’s Entertainer and the Irish characters so prominent in Storey’s play both serve as a reminder that there was a greater mutual interaction between the theatrical traditions of both countries, a greater presence of Irish contexts and Irish characters in English plays through the 1960s, which virtually ended with the developments in Northern Ireland at the end of the decade. The extreme violence that erupted rendered the Irish no longer funny36 and saw them quarantined within serious ‘Troubles’ plays set in the North. The casting of McKenna and Norton also reveals the extent to which the English stage in the 1960s opened up to a younger generation of Irish actors who could have a joint career in Dublin and London, bolstered by the development of movies and TV drama. T. P. McKenna was one of the actors seriously considered to play Keeney in Volunteers, though the part in the end went to Donal Donnelly, the original Gar Private.37 Fitzpatrick and Marshall echo each other’s words, sing alternating couplets of songs and in the case of Marshall frequently push the clinching line towards sexual innuendo. They contribute colour to the rather dour and uncommunicative cast of their fellow workers, but Storey never overlooks the political context of how men like these stand in for hundreds of their fellow countrymen: MARSHALL: An honest working-man. FITZPATRICK: That’s right. MARSHALL: Born and bred in Ireland! FITZPATRICK: Like every one before me. […] MARSHALL: Empire-builders! That’s us! (39–40) In Volunteers, the male double act is Keeney and Pyne. Keeney is the older man, ‘in his forties. Quick-witted, quick-tongued, and never for a second unaware’ (17). He consciously wears and deploys the mask of the joker, a death’s head jester putting on an ‘antic disposition’ and frequently asking the question: ‘Was Hamlet really mad?’ (22). Pyne is more than ten years younger and has deliberately attuned himself to Keeney’s ‘themes […]. But unlike KEENEY his public mask slips in times of crisis’ (17). Their effusive greetings upon entering extend to the skeleton, Leif, whom they frequently address and incorporate in their dialogue. By this and other means, including a cod history lesson delivered to an imaginary group of schoolchildren visiting the site, the play breaks out of the straitjacket of naturalism with which its painstaking recreation of an archaeological site and the documentary realism of the work the men perform might otherwise confine it. In this respect, the male double act of Keeney and Pyne carry forward the development of the two Gars in Philadelphia, Here I Come! but with the important distinction that here the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ no longer keep to the separate spheres

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of ‘public’ and ‘private’ but interact to a much greater degree. Everything spoken and acted in Volunteers is expressed in public, witnessed by all the other characters present. Memory is no longer private but historic, cultural, and played out not in a vein of private lyricism but in the popular media of jokes, ballads and (in particular) limericks. Keeny and Pyne are only just on stage when ‘one political limerick’ (17) is served up, treating of the sexual attraction between Charles Stuart Parnell and Catherine ‘Kitty’ O’Shea and the present-day consequences of their affair. Storey’s The Contractor also supplies a series of limericks as part of its constant mocking of authority; these are exclusively provided by the two Irish characters. A character in each play delivers a limerick in which the rhyme prepares the listener for the word ‘shite’ or its verbal variants: MARSHALL: There was a man Fitzpatrick … […] Who sat on an egg to hatch it: He sat and sat, BENNETT: And sh … at and sh … at. MARSHALL: But found he hadn’t cracked it. They laugh among themselves. (41) This occurs at the end of Act 1, just after the ‘Empire-builders’ reference, and has its point. But Friel holds off on his excremental limerick until the concluding lines of the play when all of the workers have departed and Keeney’s head suddenly reappears to deliver the following lines: KEENEY: On an archaeological site Five diggers examined their plight But a kangaroo court Gave the final report – […] They were only a parcel of … Good night, sweet prince. (88)38 This limerick is reinforced by the setting and the dramatic context. The archeological site is not only full of mud but has at its centre a cesspit into which one of the men is detailed. Keeney sidesteps the assignment and talks Smiler into taking it. Smiler’s disappearance into the cesspit for much of the action, where his work is unseen but can be imagined, makes his later escape from the site more difficult to determine. He makes his way into the bewildering outdoors via the cesspit, and in a sense it becomes all of the prisoners’ destination. Overlooked, written out of the historical record, these men were denied even the formal recognition of being explicitly charged with a named crime – as Keeney puts it, ‘to be strictly accurate,

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George, they interned us because of “attitudes that might be inimical to public security”’ (55). The workers have been no less ostracized by their fellow prisoners, who will now write them not only out of the public record but out of existence. And the last weeks of that existence have been spent carrying out work in the bowels of the earth, which will now be obliterated under the unrestricted ‘development’ of Dublin in the 1970s. This saw much of the city levelled to make way for ‘enormous glass and steel’ hotels ‘with a swimming pool in the basement and a restaurant on the roof’ (14). In laying out the skeleton of Leif and bestowing belated funeral rites on him, the men are anticipating their own end; and in Keeney’s final profane limerick devising their own mordant epitaph. The Irish male double act in The Contractor operates with a greater degree of social freedom than any of the English characters enjoy, confined as they are within their separate class divisions. Very late in the play, Fitzpatrick approaches their employer Ewbank to reassure him about his drifting son with sympathetic words – ‘don’t worry. One day he’ll settle down’ – and an unexpected vein of eloquence: FITZPATRICK: The world of the imagination…. EWBANK: Is that what it is, Fitzpatrick? FITZPATRICK: The ferment of ideas. EWBANK: If he’d ferment something out of it we shouldn’t be so bad. (95) This is one of the rare occasions in the play when Ewbank is not merely giving the workers their orders; his sympathetic exchanges are usually reserved for his foreman and members of his family. But Fitzpatrick and Marshall can never break free of the double act structure, in part because their Irishness sets them apart not just from their employer and foreman but from their fellow workers. The same class differences operate to some extent in the Friel play, with George and Wilson maintaining their distance from the workers and only Keeney daring to speak directly to them, as when he asks George to delay reporting Smiler’s disappearance. In Volunteers the double act structure becomes a more flexible instrument than in The Contractor (or in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, for that matter). Keeney in particular deploys a range of registers, ‘by turns ironic, vicious, farcical, pathetic’, as Heaney puts it.39 Keeney switches to a symbolic register in relation to Smiler and the skeleton, investing the former with his hopes for survival and the latter with the mantle of a tragic victim. Addressing Leif and the ‘nice wee hole’ in the top of his skeletal head, he considers the possibility that ‘maybe the poor hoor considered it an honour to die – maybe he volunteered’ (28). The final double act in Volunteers, the foundation on which it is built, is not that between Keeney and Pyne but between Keeney and Butt. Butt is central to the play’s conception. Interviewing Brian Friel in the early 1970s,

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the poet Eavan Boland wrote that ‘The Freedom of the City began as a play set in the eighteenth-century and was constructed around evictions. At that time it was titled John Butt’s Bothy.’40 I puzzled over this for some time, until the reoccurrence of the name ‘Butt’ led me to the conclusion that Boland had misattributed the play and that it was Volunteers that had emerged from John Butt’s Bothy rather than The Freedom of the City. This was confirmed by the evidence of Friel’s notes for the play in the archive.41 The dramatist originally considered a double time scale for Volunteers, with a nineteenthcentury John Butt being evicted from his holding on a number of political issues while his present-day equivalent participated in the site excavation. Gradually, however, the playwright ‘inclined towards a single concept – i.e. only the excavation story (no bothy, flashbacks, etc.)’.42 Butt retains his centrality in the present, however, something that is more apparent in production than in the text, where Butt’s silent, brooding presence is often obscured by the relentless verbal pyrotechnics of Keeney and Pyne. The first role in which Butt emerges is that of the man who uses a natural authority to organize his fellow workers more effectively than the brusque orders emanating from the ostensible foreman, George. Butt also takes a particular care of Smiler and turns on Keeney for tricking the simple man into replacing him in the cesspit: BUTT: Bastard! KEENEY: That’s right, Buttie; that’s right. BUTT: I’ll not forget that, Keeney. KEENEY: Don’t I know? That old Gaelic head’s stocked with a million grudges. (25) The association between Butt and the past they are excavating is developed in the multiple biographies assigned to the skeleton Leif across a span of centuries: a Viking slave, a blacksmith, a carpenter and a crofter who ‘was evicted because he had no title’ (72). Keeney describes the crofter as ‘a married man with a large family’, the one biographical detail we possess about the present-day John Butt. He in turn counters with the only direct biography of Keeney we are given: ‘Or he was a bank-clerk who had courage and who had brains and who was one of the best men in the movement.’ Butt draws the most direct responses from Keeney, in particular the latter’s confession of what lies behind and fuels his persona of the articulate joker. Keeney prefaces his account with ‘I’m going to let you in on a secret, Buttie’ before going on to describe himself as a ‘Friday night’ man: somebody who heads out on the town after a week’s work determined to spend the pay packet and combine hedonistic enjoyment with an urge ‘to smash something’ (56–7). But, as he later confesses to Butt, this manic outpouring of energy does not last: ‘All the wildness and power evaporate and all that’s left

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is a mouth’ (71). Keeney’s ‘inability to sustain a passion’ means he finally has to yield the ground to Butt as the natural leader. The play’s diagnosis of colonialism is acute: the powerlessness of the man in the nine-to-five job compensating for his entrapment and lack of agency with riotous consumption, random violence and compulsive spending. Patrick Burke and Stephen Watt have pointed up a contrast between the ‘sense of power and control and generosity and liberation’ (57) Keeney admits to feeling in the first surge of those Friday nights and the lack of those qualities suffered by the detainees.43 But that sense of power is revealed in the course of Keeney’s admissions to Butt as illusory, even delusional, and what is stressed finally is the impotence of the performance: ‘the Friday-night man goes limp’ (71). And while Keeney may praise Butt as the man with the purer and more consistent political motives, the final image he offers of them is of a male double act, now stripped of all comic overtones: ‘here we are, spancelled goats complementing each other, suffering the same consequences’ (71). The premiere of Volunteers at the Abbey Theatre in March 1975 was greeted with blank incomprehension by the Dublin critics (thus occasioning Heaney’s piece in the TLS). When questioned by Fachtna O’Kelly in The Irish Press later that month about the play’s reception, Friel noted the immediate effect on audience attendances but felt that ‘more important […] is the fact that a barrage of bad notices can very often submerge a play for three or four years. It often takes that long for a real opinion to emerge and it also means that foreign theatres will be slow to put on a work which has been poorly received by the critics in Ireland.’44 In the case of Volunteers, it would be four years before an edition of the play was published by Faber and Faber; in the case of his previous play, The Freedom of the City, the Faber edition was published to coincide with the play’s premiere. As far as productions outside Ireland were concerned, the UK premiere was not staged until Mick Gordon’s stunning production at London’s Gate Theatre in October 1998. It might have been reasonable to assume that Volunteers would have received a production in 1975 at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Freedom had been jointly premiered there (with the Abbey) in a production directed by Albert Finney, at that point a co-director of the Royal Court, and starring Stephen Rea as Skinner, his first appearance in a Friel play. For whatever reason, no production of Volunteers went forward at the Royal Court. Perhaps the resemblance to David Storey’s The Contractor had been noted and it was felt that the comparison would not work in favour of the Friel play and its distinctive qualities, especially if Lindsay Anderson were to direct. When Volunteers finally received its UK premiere 23 years later, the situation was different. Storey’s play was not as prominent as it had been; and Friel by then had established his own claims on the London stage. What made for the greatest difference, a transformative one, was the impact of Liz Cooke’s setting. Where the play on the Abbey stage placed the workers’ activities in a proscenium frame where it was difficult to discern the design in their

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comings and goings, the production in London’s tiny Gate Theatre removed all distance and sense of separation by plunging the audience into the midst (and mud) of the dig itself. When I arrived at the last minute for the last performance clutching the last ticket, I managed in my haste to overlook the sign next to the door which read: ‘You are now entering an archaeological dig, please tread carefully’ and promptly fell into the pit.45 As Susannah Clapp described it in her Observer review: Liz Cooke’s design dramatically projects the play’s concerns. She has turned the small area of the theatre into a loamy, coffin-shaped pit in which the men work; the skeleton lies in a deeper trough within this; above them, perched on a stone platform is the office […]. In this layered space, the audience, perched on stone benches around the action, provide a further tier.46 Mick Gordon’s direction and Liz Cooke’s environmental set projected Volunteers’ concerns most fully in relation to the various strata of Irish history that layer the pit – Viking, Norman and Georgian remains – and to the play’s central activity of ‘probing, digging, excavating into proximate and remote pasts’.47 The director Mick Gordon, from Northern Ireland, referred in his programme note to the timeliness of the current production in the late 1990s when ‘now, more than ever, the people at home in Northern Ireland are involved in […] the disentangling of personal histories from ideological ones’ to arrive at an informed sense of the present moment.48 This process was encapsulated at the moment in Gordon’s production when Patrick O’Kane as Keeney sat down beside me on the stone bench and, as I turned to look directly at him, he responded with one of his fiercest exchanges with Butt. This was the point of maximum contact, eyeball to eyeball, in what may accurately be described as Volunteer’s true premiere. It seems appropriate that, in the mutual interaction between Brian Friel’s plays and modern British drama that this chapter has sought to illuminate, it should have taken place in a London theatre, 25 years after its Dublin premiere.

5 The Politics of Space: Renegotiating Relationships in Friel’s Plays of the 1970s

As the Northern Ireland Troubles unfolded in the 1970s, the burden of expectation was great that the poets, playwrights and fiction writers would directly treat of the street violence and the partisan standoffs in their work. In particular, the theatre, with its social focus and its representational immediacy, was under pressure to deliver plays of a documentary verisimilitude, even if the conventions its narrative drew on were close to those of melodrama: love between a young couple from either side of the sectarian divide featured prominently.1 But Brian Friel from the outset resisted such pressure. His first play premiered during the Troubles, The Gentle Island, was staged at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in November 1971. In an interview with Aodhan Madden of The Sunday Press, Friel made it clear that he had no intention of becoming the new Sean O’Casey and situating his drama at the centre of the Northern conflict. Rather, ‘he says, what’s happening in our island provokes tensions in all of us, tensions which the writer will channel indirectly into art’.2 In relation to his new play, Friel notes that ‘we see most facets of Irish life, love, hate, loneliness, tensions in the life of the gentle island […]. It is a serious slice of island life, a metaphor for Ireland.’3 Friel may appear to have moved away from this position two years later when his play The Freedom of the City represented the killing in Derry of three Civil Rights marchers by the British Army, a scenario that had unmistakable echoes of the notorious real-life equivalent ‘Bloody Sunday’. Friel was later to describe Freedom as a ‘reckless’ and ‘ill-considered play because it was written out of the kind of anger at the Bloody Sunday events in Derry’.4 This negative remark suggests that there is a rawness about the dramatic writing, that it lacks the shaping artistry of the plays that characterize his best work; but this is far from being the case. In Friel’s later plays of the decade, however, there is a distancing from any further direct representation of the Troubles. Volunteers (1975) is set in Dublin, and its immediate locale is an archaeological dig rather than the streets of Belfast. Living Quarters (1977) identifies the extent to which the plays of the 1970s are increasingly meta-theatrical, concerned with the very medium in which the tensions of the country are being articulated. 105

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This process will culminate in Faith Healer (1979) where the set is overtly the stage or at most the bare boards of the village halls in which Frank Hardy’s faith healing performance takes place. And Aristocrats (1979) is immured in a Catholic Big House in Donegal where events in the North are scarcely, if ever, mentioned. Friel’s plays of the 1970s, then, do not represent the political tensions that erupted in that decade in either an overt, direct or didactic way. The approach is oblique, metaphorical, as Friel himself suggests in his comments on The Gentle Island. Allied to this an extraordinary transformation occurs in the dramaturgy of his plays during these years, which has to do with how space is staged. As Anne Ubersfeld has written: ‘the theatrical text, in order to exist, must have a locus, a spatial dimension in which the physical relationships between characters unfold’.5 At its most basic and pragmatic level, the text can indicate movement by a series of short stage directions to accompany the character’s speeches: ‘crosses the room’, etc. But the active construction of space on the stage is shaped ‘by physical movements […] determined or informed by a reading of textual structure’.6 In his last play of the preceding decade, 1969’s The Mundy Scheme, Brian Friel came up with an inspired idea for a political satire. The object of his critique is a Dublin government hard pressed to find ways to stave off bankruptcy, and the particular focus is the venal, mother-dominated Taoiseach, F. X. Ryan. Faced with vast tracts of empty or abandoned land in the west of Ireland, the area so beloved of émigrés and so associated with essential Irishness, the government’s scheme is to turn these barren acres to account by transforming them into one big graveyard: ‘Let’s make the west of Ireland the acknowledged … eternal resting place. […] We have everything: ideal situation, suitable climate, religious atmosphere,’7 and, he might have added, an abandoned countryside. The second act of the play shows the ever-more complex internal manoeuvres of the Cabinet as they seek to buy up cheap parcels of land whose value will soar when they are rezoned in the wake of the Mundy scheme. The play was a savage indictment of a Fianna Fail government seen as having betrayed its Republican ideals in pursuit of the American dollar. It was staged in June 1969, with the Republic on the eve of a general election and Catholic Civil Rights marchers in the North coming under brutal attack. But despite its brilliant premise and some coruscating dialogue, The Mundy Scheme is physically inert. It is as if the dialogue and idea are regarded as enough to carry the play, with no corresponding equivalent in its staging, no transformation of the stage space through the application of its central idea. Instead, there is a single, fixed set with the Georgian drawing-room of F. X. Ryan’s house acting as a temporary office while he is ill. From this fixed set come and go the various ministers of Ryan’s government whom he has to persuade to adopt the plan; but these short scenes are virtually interchangeable. In The Gentle Island, Friel is also concerned with the abandoned Irish countryside and the play contains a good deal of satire, from its ironic

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title on. Its opening quarter-of-an hour stages the progressive abandonment of the island by virtually its entire population. The sole remaining family, dominated by its one-armed patriarch, has its own intricate dynamic. The arrival of two gay lovers activates a disruption and realignment of the stage space and of how relationships on the island are traditionally ordered. Scott Boltwood has noted how in Friel’s increasing dramaturgic confidence in the early 1970s he moves from narrative action (the simple stage directions cited earlier) to ‘emblematic action, where the play’s themes are embodied through stylized and often overtly connotative movement’.8 Boltwood identifies the emergence of these emblematic scenes in The Gentle Island, describing them as ‘carefully scripted set pieces that embody a play’s ethos in a manner that often resists reductive characterization as merely spatial movement’.9 But the concept of ‘spatial movement’ is central to this dramaturgic breakthrough and cannot so lightly be dismissed. In an important article, ‘Fixed, Floating and Fluid Stages’, Stanley Vincent Longman has valuably characterized three different types of stage space. The first is the ‘fixed stage’, where the action of the play ‘occurs within a closed space which remains the same throughout’.10 This would define the kind of stage space utilized by Friel in his first three plays; The Enemy Within, for example, is set entirely within the confines of Columba’s cell on Iona and does not vary throughout. At the other extreme, Longman identifies ‘a constantly changing, fluid place’.11 In The Loves of Cass McGuire, with its constant movement between various time frames and the different locales of Harry McGuire’s home and Eden House, director Hilton Edwards was concerned that the audience would know precisely where and when each scene was set. There are also plays that mix the two types, as Philadelphia, Here I Come! does with its fixed settings of kitchen and bedroom and a third space to the front, which Friel designates as ‘fluid’,12 where the flashback sequences are enacted. Longman finally identifies a third form of stage space, which is central to the present discussion. He describes this as a ‘floating’ stage – a form of staging which ‘encapsulat[es] a generalized locale and several places within it and so produc[es] the feeling that the stage is a sort of island’.13 The metaphor of the island recurs in Longman’s definition of the ‘floating’ stage and has particular resonance when applied to The Gentle Island. In Translations, the son Manus is offered a teaching job on Inis Meadhon, one of the Aran Islands, and asks Maire: ‘How will you like living on an island?’14 Only productions outside Ireland fully register the irony of the line, since people in Ireland are already living on an island. As Friel’s earlier comment indicates, this ‘slice of island life is a metaphor for Ireland’, with the eponymous island Inniskeen as a microcosm of the larger geopolitical entity. The Enemy Within is set on the island of Iona off Scotland but with its ‘fixed’ stage makes no dramaturgic capital of the setting. Friel in The Gentle Island capitalizes on what Longman defines as a ‘peculiarity’ of the floating stage: ‘that it takes advantage of qualities derived from both the

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fixed and the fluid stages. It maintains the confines of the stage, translating them into dramatic terms, and at the same time it invites the audience’s imagination to collaborate in filling out the world of the play.’15 The setting of The Gentle Island presents an innovation in Friel’s staging that will be maintained throughout all the plays of the 1970s to be examined in this chapter: The Freedom of the City (1973), Living Quarters (1977) and Aristocrats (1979). Most of Friel’s earlier plays have had an interior setting – the home of S. B. O’Donnell, for example – or have fluctuated between several interior settings – as in the alternation between Harry McGuire’s home and Eden House in Cass. A rare exception is one half of the paired set of one-act plays, Lovers (1967), where the teenage couple study (or try to) for their upcoming summer exams on a hill outside the town. The fluid portions or aspects of Friel’s staging have provided an escape from the claustrophobic interiors, often into a more purely theatricalized space, which can in turn show up the limitations of the realistic setting. Crystal and Fox (1968) demonstrates impatience with interior space and the theatre it has fostered in the twentieth century. With The Mundy Scheme, the wild satire of the premise and the venality of the characters are stifled by the fixed setting of F. X. Ryan’s Georgian sitting room. In The Gentle Island, Friel comes up with a setting that is neither interior or exterior, but both at the same time: ‘About one-third of the stage area, the portion upstage right from the viewpoint of the audience, is occupied by the kitchen of MANUS SWEENEY’s cottage. The rest of the stage area is the street around the house. Against the gable wall are a currach, fishing nets, lobster-pots, farming equipment.’16 Friel’s stage up to this point always privileged the interior setting in its openings. It was not until the play was under way and a ‘norm’ had been established that he permitted the breaking out of that interior into the development of fluid spaces or a metatheatrical addressing of the audience. In The Gentle Island, by contrast, the interior and exterior are presented side by side, with neither absolutely prevailing, though the external occupies two-thirds of the space. The same will hold true for all of the plays examined in this chapter. In these works, Friel will probe ever more acutely into the shortcomings of family life and the inherent fragility of the concept of ‘home’. His settings will embody these concerns in their very design. A final noteworthy feature in this respect is that, as the stage directions for The Gentle Island make clear: ‘There are no walls separating the kitchen area from the street’ (11). In Philadelphia Here I Come! only the purely theatrical creation of Private Gar could walk through the walls separating the bedroom from the kitchen; all of the other characters, including Gar Public, had to observe the confines of realism and enter or leave through the bedroom door. Here, that distinction has been abolished. The theatrical and the realistic no longer occupy separate domains in his drama but are fused within the same stage space. The result is a greater freedom and daring in what Friel chooses to represent and how he does so.

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Nor is the interior the conventional rural cottage setting that the fishing equipment stacked outside might suggest or the theatrical tradition prescribe. For Manus Sweeney, the patriarch whose house it is, is described ‘sitting in an airplane seat in the kitchen, his back to the audience, staring resolutely into the fire’ (11). The bodily positioning strongly suggests a man who is turning his back on everything that is going on outside the cottage; but the detail of the airplane seat is surrealistic, even after it is later explained that he has retrieved it from a downed fighter plane during the Second World War. The other inhabitant, his daughter-in-law Sarah, is seen knitting, though occasional glances at the window indicate she is drawn between emulating Manus’s isolationism and having some awareness of what is going on outside. The elder of Manus’s two sons, Sarah’s husband Philly, is absent from the stage, something that will prove characteristic and crucial to the outcome of the play. The younger Joe, described as ‘in his twenties’ (11) but like Gar Public resembling a teenager in his immaturity, rushes onstage and gives the two inmates of the cottage a detailed description of the boats leaving the harbour in the mass emigration from the island that is in progress. The youngest member of a family coming into a peasant cottage in the west of Ireland and describing to his family the hullabaloo that is occurring in the harbour cannot fail to evoke Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, a seminal dramatic text in the Irish canon already explicitly invoked by Friel in the opening stage directions of The Loves of Cass McGuire. The resonances from that text will reverberate throughout the play. All I wish to note here is the enlargement of the peasant cottage setting. The political developments of Cathleen ni Houlihan – the landing of the French forces at Killala Bay in 1798 to initiate a political uprising – are kept offstage and only rendered through the young boy’s account (and, implicitly, the audience’s prior knowledge of the historical context). But in The Gentle Island, Joe’s repeated invocation for his father and his sister-in-law to ‘come here till you see’ (12) is resolutely refused by both. The diegesis of what is occurring offstage rapidly gives way to onstage mimesis as a succession of migrating couples traverse the stage. Each pauses in turn for a brief dialogue of farewell with Joe. What is vividly etched is a suite of mini-dramas, the particular conflicted emotions of each social nucleus as it is rent asunder. These are no statistics in a book nor recited third-person narratives; nothing distances the audience from direct confrontation with what is being suffered by the individuals of a disintegrating community, what Friel described in his notes as ‘the end of a kind of life that fashioned a people’.17 The play cannot do without this opening. And yet the play’s dramaturgy demands that eight of the extensive cast of fourteen are only on stage for a few minutes. Frank McGuinness, who directed The Gentle Island’s one revival at the Peacock in 1988, commented on how lucky he was to do so at a time when the National Theatre still had a permanent company of actors to draw on for the play and how it would now be virtually impossible to produce in an

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unsubsidized theatre.18 Friel wrote to the play’s first director, actor Vincent Dowling, to thank him for casting the opening scene ‘with the best people you can get because […] they have brio and vitality – and we see those qualities ebb away before us’.19 Joe Sweeney bids farewell to four distinct groups from within the tribe who traverse the stage on their way from their own cottages to the archetypal destinations of Irish emigrants to the UK: Scotland, especially for people from Northern Ireland; urban centres like Manchester; and the ‘Irish’ areas of greater London suburbs such as Kilburn. Two of the four have a particular connection to Joe: his peers, the two young men who give fair warning to the women of Glasgow that the men of Inishkeen are coming; and Anna, for whom Joe clearly has unrequited longings. Both reflect on the sexual maiming that the island has undergone. Like the ‘boys’ in Philadelphia, Bosco and Tom boast about their forthcoming sexual encounters in a manner that only signals their sexual innocence, that they are still virgins. As Friel noted to director Dowling, they also establish that ‘Sarah is “desirable”’,20 a focus of erotic interest. Bosco remarks: ‘It’s a buck like me Sarah should have got. Jaysus, I’d never rise out of the bed except to eat’ (12). The next to enter is a young woman and an old man. Anna’s primary concern is her aged father, who has ‘been drinking for days and is almost inarticulate’ (13), as she struggles to steer and prod him towards the waiting boats. Joe repeatedly promises that he will write to Anna, since clearly he has some feelings for her. But those feelings have scarcely been articulated, and so she has no claim to keep her from leaving. Joe’s own inadequacies, his diminished subjectivity as a man, are revealed by the detail that he will get Sarah to write the letter since she is ‘smarter with the pen than me’ and by Anna’s parting shot: ‘You hadn’t that much to say to me when I was here’ (14). Later in the play, Manus out of desperation at the turn of events insists on Joe writing to Anna offering her marriage, with the father not only proffering fistfuls of cash but having to write the letter for his bashful son. The third departing unit, the sounds of whose voices draw Sarah from the interior of the cottage, are her parents, Mary and Neil. The embittered Mary alternately berates her foolish, gentle husband for failing to kill the dog and the carry-on of the younger males at the dance the night before. The one exception she allows is her son-in-law Philly for his activity at the salmon fishing, which she takes to betoken sexual virility. But it also accounts for Philly’s frequent absences and indicates her concern that Sarah is showing none of the signs of pregnancy after four years of marriage. In terms of the economy of the gentle island, Sarah’s value as a married woman resides in having children. We are given no specific reason for her childlessness. What is clear is that her sexual desires cannot be and are not properly or fully realized through her marriage to Philly. Sarah speaks at one point of how she once visited another island, the Isle of Man, for a working summer and the pleasure she took out of dancing, not for the purposes of meeting a male to

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couple for life and procreate but (like the sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa) out of sheer self-fulfilment and desire: ‘In the eight weeks I was in Douglas I was at fifty-one dances. I wore out three pair of shoes. I never had a time like it’ (29). The final departing islanders make the briefest appearance, a father and his 10-year-old son. The latter stops to speak with Joe while the former ‘hesitates, then goes on’ (15) without saying a word. This stark tableau mirrors the father-and-son relationship in the Sweeney family. By the end of the scene, Manus can now proclaim himself the undisputed king of Inishkeen; but Joe is quick to riposte: ‘King of nothing’ (18). With the island almost completely depopulated, the burden is even greater on Sarah to bear a child and so begin the process of re-peopling. What The Gentle Island stages is a version of the Adam and Eve scenario in a contemporary landscape. As so often in Friel, the island is depicted enjoying a sunlit summer rather than a bleak mid-winter. It would be easy for an outsider to take it for Eden on a first viewing. This is the case with the two newcomers who supply the space and occupy the vacuum left by the departing islanders. Peter and Shane come from Dublin, tourists from the urban metropolis seeking to renovate themselves in the unspoiled west of Ireland. The older man is in no doubt about what he is experiencing on the gentle island. Peter describes it as ‘heavenly’ (25) and urges Shane to ‘look at the view’. The younger man is more sceptical. He proves true to his name (that of a famous Alan Ladd western from the 1950s) by persistently using the language of cowboy films to indicate that he and Peter are in ‘apache’ territory.21 As has already been discussed, Peter and Shane are a gay couple, the first explicitly to feature in an Irish play. Peter is anxious to make of their relationship a permanent one and seeks to do so by arguing for a lengthy stay on this depopulated Eden: a gay version of the play’s pervasive Adam and Eve scenario. But Shane is more restless within the relationship, drawn to Peter by feelings of gratitude for his mentorship, but anxious to move on. He is the one who reads the island, not as a place of plenitude and renewal, but one that has recently undergone devastation: What are the facts, Sergeant? A dozen furnished houses, all recently occupied. Crops in the fields. Some cattle. But no people. Now. There is no evidence of a hurried evacuation, so we can rule out plagues and fiery dragons. And yet the atmosphere reminds me of … Got it! Germany – […] 1940. (26) The play is saturated with references to the Second World War. Manus later explains, when welcoming the strangers to the island, that the chair in which he sits ‘came out of a German airplane that crashed into the side of this hill’. The dead German pilot was buried in the island’s cemetery ‘alongside the British sailors that were washed in’ (31). And Joe identifies

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the various objects filling their cottage as having been salvaged from other foreign vessels that came to grief off their coasts. When the strangers are driven off at the end of the play, they leave behind their tent and, as Philly notes, ‘a wee cooker below’ (76) that might come in useful. Manus defends the island practice of such necrophiliac salvaging by declaring that, since there was a war on at the time, travel was forbidden and work hard to find. When Peter asks if the one-armed patriarch lost his limb in the war, Manus’s terse ‘no’ glosses over the fact that Ireland was neutral in that conflict and hence not responsible for the objects that were washed up on its shores. As Philly’s closing remarks reveal, old island habits die hard. There are two long sequences that dominate the remainder of The Gentle Island. The first is a dark, Strindbergian dance of desire initiated by Shane; the second is the scene where Manus and Sarah await the return of the young man so they can shoot him (described in Friel’s notes as ‘the ritual’,22 the first time he uses that term in relation to his dramaturgy). Both are emblematic scenes, in Boltwood’s formulation, but, contrary to what he claims, spatial arrangement is at the centre of their dramatic power. In particular, the extended sequence of the first of these shows how relationships are reconfigured between the characters precisely in terms of how their bodies operate spatially. At the centre of the scene is Shane singing ‘Oh, Susannah’ and trying to draw the other characters into his dance. But from its very beginning there is a choreography of movement among and between the characters that makes of the whole scene a dance of changing moods and desires. It starts with a lengthy exchange between Sarah and Shane in which she draws out details of his background. Even at the end of Shane’s account of his relations with Peter, his former teacher, whom he discusses in terms of gratitude, Sarah in her sexual naivety has not registered that they are a couple, let alone the implications of paedophilia latent in the account. She may not want to, and instead tells a narrative that finishes by describing the protagonist as ‘this wee fat, bald man, with a checked shirt and an ugly, sweaty face’ (37) whom both laughingly identify as Peter. Her stressing of Peter’s lack of physical attractiveness is part of the pattern in the scene by which Sarah’s attraction to Shane comes to the surface and climaxes with her direct statement of desire: ‘I want to lie with you, engineer’ (39). Shane absolutely refuses her, and just as she asks the reason why, Peter enters. Sarah exits to leave the two men together and free to argue about how temporary their stay on the island, and ultimately their relationship, may be. When Peter admits he is ‘jealous of Sarah, of Philly, of everyone’ (42), each of the characters named enters as if on cue, along with Joe. Shane from the start of the scene has been working on the gramophone, trying to repair it and so re-establish the island’s link to the rest of the world and to a larger political and cultural context (the same conceit is developed through the visiting Gerry Evans and the radio in Dancing at Lughnasa). Once the characters are gathered, Shane declares the gramophone repaired and in order (ironically

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and in overt mockery of Peter) to celebrate ‘a memorable holiday I once had on a heavenly island one divine summer’ (43), plays ‘Oh, Susannah’, which he accompanies with a full song-and-dance routine. Shane approaches each of the characters and attempts to have them join him in a pas-de-deux. First, he ‘dances across to PETER, [and] holds out his hands in invitation’ (44). But the invitation is refused. Joe does likewise, insisting ‘you’re doing great by yourself’. Shane goes one transgressive step further when he comes up to Philly, not only holding out his hands in a ritual gesture of invitation but physically grasping him by the hand. The response is immediate and electric: Philly ‘releases his hand roughly’. Sarah is next, with Shane catching her at the waist and swinging her around. Given the context of his earlier rejection of her sexual advances, about which only the audience is aware, it is hardly surprising that Sarah’s response should be to ‘slap his face viciously’ (45), an action that provokes ‘howls of laughter’ from Joe and Philly in a collective atmosphere that is growing ever more frenzied and Dionysian. Sarah then retreats into her bedroom. When Shane makes as if to follow her, he is tripped up by Philly and shoved by both brothers until finally Philly punches him, while urging him to ‘dance, you bastard! Dance! Dance!’ (45). Peter can stand no more and snaps off the gramophone. Shane prepares to exit, but before he does there is a loaded exchange with Philly where the latter invites him to come out to the lobster pots that evening. This reads, especially when the two younger men bait Peter to his face, as a mirrorreversal of the earlier scene with Sarah. The current of erotic attraction is now between the two young men, the lithe young islander/fisherman in his thighboots and the equally young outsider. It may well be reciprocated this time around. The play’s final scenes are set in motion by the speech from Sarah to Manus that Philly, her husband and the patriarch’s eldest and favourite son, the male future of the island, is down in the boathouse in the dark ‘with that Dublin tramp, Shane. That they’re stripped naked. That he’s doing for the tramp what he couldn’t do for me’ (61). Her response to Manus is to urge him to kill them both. In the event, Manus and Sarah play out a version of Macbeth and his wife contemplating the murder of King Duncan, when Sarah responds to Manus’s unmanly hesitations by seizing the gun and pulling the trigger. A severely wounded Philly is brought away from the island and transported to a Dublin hospital, where he may or may not survive. The Gentle Island is a play that is both direct and frank in a great many of its verbal and physical exchanges. But it ultimately remains shrouded in ambiguity. This is particularly the case with whether what Sarah recounts actually occurred or whether she has fabricated a sexually incriminating narrative as an act of revenge. While there is circumstantial evidence to back up her claim, it is not conclusive. If the play deliberately leaves things uncertain, Manus Sweeney is unequivocal in his response: ‘It’s them – them queers! I should have killed the two of them when I had them! What we

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had wasn’t much but what there was was decent and wholesome! And they blighted us!’ (72). Manus delivers his judgment in reaction to his youngest son tearing up the letter proposing marriage to Anna and going into his bedroom to pack his emigrant bags. But the play has already made manifest how the visiting gay couple introduce nothing that is not already native to the gentle island, that they are merely a catalyst for the internal tensions that run throughout the place.23 With The Freedom of the City given a simultaneous staging in Dublin at the Abbey Theatre and in London at the Royal Court Theatre in February 1973, Brian Friel directly engaged for the first time in direct representation of the continuing conflict in Northern Ireland. Many of the images of the play, especially in its opening scenes, had become familiar from nightly broadcasts on television news around the world: Civil Rights marchers addressing large crowds, British Army soldiers bearing rifles, ‘shooting – rubber bullets and CS gas’.24 Northern Ireland was the most media-transmitted conflict in Europe up to that point and these images provoke instant recognition. But they do not dominate the play, being used rather as a point of reference, and they do not eventuate in a documentary drama as they might have done (and as many of the theatre critics appeared to expect). Of the many traumatic events of the previous five years in the North (and the many more that were to follow), what immediately became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ marked some kind of defining and awful moment for the Catholic community: the shooting dead by British Army soldiers of thirteen civilians, marchers in a banned Civil Rights march in Derry on 30 January 1972. The Freedom of the City takes its bearings from that incident, since Friel’s play also hinges on marchers who are killed by the army. And the speed with which the play was written, rehearsed and staged, barely a year later, suggests an immediacy in the playwright’s response. He lived in Derry, and had been on the march. But other details are not congruent. If the place remains the same, the stage directions obstinately assert that the play is set two or three years earlier, in 1970. Only three marchers are involved, rather than thirteen, and the key narrative element differs. Rather than being shot down in the street altercation, Lily, Michael and Skinner (blinded by tear gas and scrambling to find shelter) take refuge in the most unlikely and uncongenial of settings: the Guildhall, the city mayor’s parlour, and a site associated at the time with a Unionist-dominated polity.25 If the play’s details are somewhat at variance with the events of Bloody Sunday, they are so in part because the play had a lengthier gestation period than might first have appeared. As Brian Friel reported in an article by poet Eavan Boland published the same week as the premiere: ‘It’s not about Bloody Sunday. In fact the play began long before Bloody Sunday happened.’26 The manuscripts in the Friel Archive bear this out. The first notes (for a play whose provisional titles are ‘Civil Rights’ and ‘The Mayor’s Parlour’) date from 29 April to 15 September 197027 and reveal that the central narrative incident of three Civil Rights marchers taking over

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and transforming the Guildhall was already in place. There is no indication of what their ultimate fate might be, but the dramatic and political logic suggest that a price will be exacted for such an act of transgression and trespass (as it is in The Freedom of the City). There the play rested until the catalyst of Bloody Sunday, with the dates of 2 March to 16 May 1972 covering the rest of the primary drafting. The key element in the play’s composition is less Bloody Sunday itself than the Widgery Tribunal that immediately resulted. The full formal Latinate title of the published findings describes it as: ‘Report of the Tribunal Appointed to inquire into the events on Sunday, 30th January 1972, which led to loss of life in connection with the procession in Londonderry on that day By The Rt. Hon Lord Widgery, OBE, TD’.28 In his opening paragraph, Lord Widgery describes how he was invited ‘by her Majesty’s Government to conduct a Tribunal of Inquiry into these events’ on the 31 January 1972, the very day after the event to be investigated. A preliminary hearing was conducted on 14 February; no further dates are given relating to the Inquiry in the document. Lord Widgery delivered his judgement on 10 April 1972, less than two months later, and it was published on 18 April. The perceived inadequacies of the Widgery Tribunal, particularly as articulated by the relatives of the dead marchers immediately upon publication and for years afterwards, eventually led British Prime Minister Tony Blair to commission the Saville Inquiry in the late 1990s, a series of detailed interviews with all interested parties, which proved a much weightier tome than the Widgery Report and which was finally published on 11 June 2010.29 Friel was writing The Freedom of the City during the weeks the Widgery Tribunal was holding its investigation and he completed it barely a month after the Inquiry was published. There is a strong element of intertextuality between the two. But the crucial dramaturgic consequence of his decision to make Widgery and his Tribunal so central to the play is that it does away with linear chronology. The Freedom of the City is framed by a tribunal inquiring into the deaths of three Civil Rights marchers when they emerged from the Guildhall (the ‘Bloody Sunday’ dimension of the play) in the course of which the unnamed English judge follows Widgery in summoning and asking questions of a range of concerned parties: the Brigadier General in charge of the British Army; the forensics expert offering evidence to help establish whether those killed were bearing arms; the Catholic priest who gave them the last rites, etc. But the play also keeps faith with its originary dramatic situation. Two Catholic men and a woman flee the Burntollet civil rights march of 4 January 1969 when they were stoned by followers of the Reverend Ian Paisley and arrive into the mayor’s parlour where they proceed to make themselves at home by helping themselves to cigars, drinks and the donning of ceremonial robes. The bringing together of these two disparate events in Friel’s completed play means that the play moves between two different time periods.

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In consequence, events alternate between direct representation of the three marchers in the Derry Guildhall and the unfolding of the tribunal of inquiry some weeks later. What has intervened in between is the death of the three protagonists. Neither for the first or last time in his dramaturgy Brian Friel will present an audience with dramatic characters vibrantly alive on stage, which a subsequent meta-narrative reveals have died in the interim. This occurs in Dancing at Lughnasa, when a monologue by Michael in Act 2 reveals that two of his aunts subsequently emigrated to England and died destitute. Prior to Freedom, Friel had tried out the device in one of the two plays comprising Lovers. There, a pair of anonymous narrators objectively recount an inquiry into the disappearance (and, as it turns out, drowning) of the two young lovers whose animated exchanges earlier that day comprise the core of the dramatic narrative. In The Freedom of the City Friel’s decision to proceed with the two different time scales necessitated something more than mere flashback, if the tribunal were not to provide the present and determining perspective. To address the dramaturgic and political complexities of his approach to his subject, Friel embarked upon his most elaborate ‘spatializing practices’ to date. The term is Michel de Certeau’s,30 who links space to narrative, to the telling of stories. In this case, the story tells of what happened on the key date when three Civil Rights marchers were killed. Friel’s dramatic investigation is composed of various accounts of what occurred on the day but also what is made of the event by various interested parties on both sides of the political divide – not only the judicial proceedings, but the discourses produced by a republican balladeer, a Catholic priest, a TV reporter from Dublin, an American sociologist. Against all the coercive rhetoric of these various speech acts stands the living witness of the three people in the Guildhall, now brought back into dramatic life by the playwright and presenting their own embodied account of their witness directly to us, the audience. The shortcoming of such a reading of the play is that to a serious degree it skews and simplifies the play’s dramaturgic qualities, primarily by reducing all the figures other than the marchers to a purely verbal or rhetorical presence. What it overlooks is the key dramatic element of space, an element that is restored by de Certeau’s arguments. They assert the totality of the stage frame in arguing that ‘space is composed of intersections of mobile elements’ and is ‘in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it’.31 The fact that the set is dominated by ‘the mayor’s parlour [which] takes up almost the entire stage’ (104) gives an illusion of solidity and fixity of place that the play works to undermine. It does so in two ways. Physical movement on and off the stage usually signifies a shift of locale and may also indicate a temporal shift. During the two and a half hours’ traffic of the stage, it is traversed by reporters and photographers, soldiers and civilians, judges and forensic experts, and others. In Conall Morrison’s 1999 production at the Abbey, the street fighting was represented not just by offstage

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noises of a street protest being dispersed by the army’s rubber bullets and CS gas but by onstage representation. The other means by which the fixity of place and time are broken up is by the elaborate deployment of lighting. The play begins in darkness, with a ‘cold blue’ light illuminating the apron. In that space lie three ‘grotesquely’ distorted bodies – the corpses of Skinner, Lily and Michael (107). The rest of the scene gradually comes into place as other people – a photographer and a priest – run on stage and interact with the corpses – by photographing them, by administering the last rites. The play will remain haunted by the image of those three grotesquely positioned bodies. None of its frequent changes of place and rhetorical argument will dispel that image but will rather suggest the further manipulation of their corporeal remains into even more distorted postures. As the priest whispers into Micheal’s ear in the ‘cold blue’ light at the front of the stage, the darkness of the rest is pierced by a spotlight, which ‘picks out’ the figure of the Judge, high in the battlements (107). A policeman enters at the same level and proceeds to read to the Judge a description of each of the dead people. As he does so, his accounts are accompanied by the entrance down front of three British Army soldiers who remove each of the named bodies in turn. The framing device of the Judge on the battlements will remain in place throughout. For long periods of time (up to a third of the play) he is absent, but he always returns along with the spotlight, which confirms his presence to speak directly to the audience or solicit evidence. The play closes by bringing what it has represented full circle. If it began with the marchers already dead, it comes to a ritualistic close with the two men and woman walking to the front of the stage with their hands over their heads and looking straight out at the audience. As the Judge concludes his findings, ‘that the three deceased were armed when they emerged from the Guildhall’ (168), the rest of the stage is black except for the apron. The three marchers are by now illuminated, not by the cold blue light of their post mortem state, but by ‘a battery of spotlights beaming on the[ir] faces’ (168–9). This visual trope of obliteration, of erasure by the judicial verdict, is accompanied by the sound of gunfire. But the three do not drop to the ground. Their hands still above their heads, they continue to stare out at the audience, their final court of appeal. In a section entitled ‘Marking Out Boundaries’, de Certeau foregrounds the ‘role of a mobile and magisterial tribunal’ in delimiting boundaries, adding that the role is made explicit by ‘juridical discourse’.32 The Judge’s discourse in Freedom, closely modelled on Widgery’s own report, is elaborate in discriminating between what the tribunal will and will not seek to establish: ‘it is none of our function to make moral judgements’ (110) (cf. Widgery: ‘The Tribunal was not concerned with making moral judgements’). Both Judges agree that they are engaged in ‘a fact-finding exercise’ to arrive at an ‘objective’ view of what occurred (109). When the policeman is giving his account of Lily Doherty as a ‘cleaning woman […] [who] lived with her family in a condemned property’, the Judge interrupts to point out that they are not

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‘conducting a social survey’ (108). The account of Lily that has been cut short by the Judge will be taken up when she tells her own story on the stage of the Guildhall. De Certeau’s link between storytelling and space is relevant here, as part of the necessary ‘differentiation which makes possible the isolation and interplay of distinct places’.33 Lily’s own account of how she cleans houses for a living, to support her alcoholic husband and eleven children, focuses on her mother-in-law who ‘still does twenty houses a week’ (130). The professional classes for whom she works, the dentists, solicitors and doctors, call the old woman by the ‘pet name [of] Auntie Dodie’, which leads to Lily’s withering judgement: ‘them class of people’s a very poor judge of character’. As de Certeau notes, such a story as Lily tells ‘plays a decisive role’ in terms of ‘distributive power and performative force’.34 Its effect is to create an interplay between the distinct spaces of the tribunal and the mayor’s parlour. Lily’s account of the conditions in which she lives provides a standing rebuke to the vulgar ostentation and gilded trappings of the setting in which she finds herself. But again this is a mere static and rhetorical opposition. What provides the play’s central dramaturgic dynamic is how Skinner, Lily and Michael (or rather the first two) work to transform the space. De Certeau closes his chapter on ‘Spatial Stories’ by speaking about ‘narrativity in its most delinquent form’, particularly if it wishes (as Friel’s play does) to privilege ‘the tour over the state’.35 What most marks this delinquency is an emphasis on the body, for it is ‘the opacity of the body in movement, gesticulating, walking, taking its pleasure [that] organizes a here in relation to an abroad, a familiarity in relation to a foreignness’.36 What is at the heart of Friel’s play, as it is of so much political mobilization in Northern Ireland, is that its three central characters were marchers, that they sought to establish a foundational space by walking. The Judge is quick to point out that the day’s march had been banned, and so by the very act of taking part the three dead people had already participated in a calculated act of defiance, even before they transgressed further by marching into the Guildhall. Rather, to quote from Beckett, they come in ‘on [their] hands and knees’.37 Michael enters and, before he can get to the centre of the stage, collapses to the ground. Lily gropes her way on, temporarily blinded by the CS gas. Skinner is physically the most active and least debilitated, as he drags the other two out of the line of fire ‘with quick, lithe efficiency’ (113); but his body has been drenched by the direct hit of a water cannon. When they recover themselves in the parlour, recognition slowly dawns as to where they are. As Skinner describes and defines it, ‘the Guildhall […] the Mayor’s Parlour […] The holy of holies itself!’ (116). As the three of them recover bodily possession and begin to walk about the mayor’s parlour, those movements – ‘gesticulating, walking, taking [their] pleasure’ – begins the process of ‘organizing a here […], a familiarity in relation to a foreignness’. Michael is the first to move but he does so ‘silently, deferentially’ (119) since he is the one most in awe and thrall to the symbols of authority. Lily is initially stock still and declares ‘we shouldn’t

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be here’ (119) but as she begins to move, she asserts her own personality and takes her pleasure. Declaring that as ratepayer she has a right to request a drink, she sits decisively in one of the chairs and, as the stage direction puts it, ‘tak[es] possession’ (121). Skinner has been moving lithely and speedily around the entire space, conducting his own inspection, and when he comes to realize where they are, his response is expressed with wild, anarchic laughter and an outburst of physical mime: ‘he races right round the room, pounds on the door with his fists, runs downstage and does a somersault across the table’ (115). Even more than Lily, Skinner is taking possession and transforming the space from the foreign into the familiar, a temporary home for this man of no fixed abode and no known antecedents. Skinner’s protean personality facilitates the next stage of the transformation of the stage space. Encouraged by him, the other two (even the reluctant Michael) begin to avail of what is on offer: drinks, cigars, etc. This making free with the contents of the Mayor’s parlour will subsequently be cited to show their lack of respect for authority. But it is the increasingly performative nature of Skinner’s behaviour that most characterizes his ‘act of defiance’. Where Michael handles the room’s ceremonial objects with respect, Skinner on taking hold of the ceremonial sword engages in mock sword-fights (against, among others, ‘the British army’) and as a parting gesture sticks it into the portrait of Sir Joshua Hetherington, a dignitary and mirror-image of the Judge presiding on the battlements. When Michael tries to stop him, Skinner retorts: ‘Allow me my gesture’ (163). The metatheatricality is facilitated by the dressing-room next to the Mayor’s parlour, which provides all three of them with ceremonial robes and initiates the performance of carnivalesque misrule and mockery. Lily’s full given name, as we know from the policeman’s report, is Elizabeth and this consonance enables her to deliberately echo Queen Elizabeth II as a visiting grandee: ‘My husband and I.’ When Skinner emerges from the dressing-room clad in his robes, he does so with two apposite quotations from King Lear: ‘You’re much deceived; in nothing am I changed/But in my garments’ (4.6.9–10); and ‘Through tattered clothes small vices do appear;/Robes and furred gowns hide all’ (4.6.161–2). Stephen Watt discusses these two quotations from King Lear and adds a third, ‘the strong lance of justice breaks’, to argue that, ‘when the powerful control judicial inquiry, justice cannot be rendered’.38 The furthest deprivation of rights occurs when the lives of the three marchers are taken from them. Accordingly, the play’s furthest break with realism occurs early in Act 2 when the three protestors at the moment of their death articulate an objective assessment of their lives. Lily is pierced not only by the bullets but by the recognition that [l]ife had eluded me because never once in my forty-three years had an experience, an event, even a small unimportant happening been isolated, and assessed, and articulated. (150)

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But the final point must be to reassert that the activities in the Guildhall do not stand in opposition to the Judge in his Tribunal or to the play’s other commentators. Rather, as de Certeau emphasizes when he is discussing ‘the active role of the spectator in the theatre’, what the audience of The Freedom of the City is witnessing is ‘the simultaneous functioning of two spatial networks in a dialectical relationship’.39 One example will have to suffice to demonstrate that relationship. It bears on the question of whether the Provisional IRA were present and involved in the events of Bloody Sunday. By 1972, they had emerged as a key force in nationalist protests. Has Friel not fudged this issue and the representation of same by moving the timing of the play back to 1970? The Judge is in no doubt that what they have been dealing with are ‘terrorists’ and presses the term on Skinner, the most likely candidate for IRA membership of the three: JUDGE: And was he [Skinner] known to you personally, Constable B? POLICEMAN: Yes, my lord. JUDGE: As a terrorist? POLICEMAN: He had been in trouble many times, my lord. Petty larceny, disorderly behaviour – that sort of thing. (109) The behaviour we witness of Skinner in the Guildhall does much to bear out the policeman’s description of petty larceny and disorderly behaviour but little to convict him of being a ‘terrorist’. Michael, however, in his account of the development of the Civil Rights movement in Northern Ireland, introduces a key mediating term when he seeks to account for the increasing disrepute the movement has earned in the eyes of others (presumably non-Catholic and hence Unionist): ‘the hooligan element’ (127). Michael uses the term ‘hooligan’ three times, to describe unruly elements that have increasingly infiltrated respectable Civil Rights marches, ‘out throwing stones and burning shops’ (138), and comes to associate the term with Skinner. This process climaxes at the end of Act 1 with outright identification: ‘some bloody hooligan! Someone like you, Skinner! For it’s bastards like you, bloody vandals, that’s keeping us all on our bloody knees!’ (147). In the Widgery Report, the ‘hooligan element’ and the IRA are associated throughout. The account of the Bloody Sunday march is prefaced by the following: ‘The hooligan gangs in Londonderry constituted a special threat to security. Their tactics were to engineer daily breaches of law and order in the face of the security forces, during which the lives of the soldiers were at risk from attendant snipers and nail bombers.’ Are the hooligans members of the Provisional IRA or merely a front behind which they can operate? Is Friel’s Skinner a ‘hooligan’ or a ‘terrorist’? The ambiguity is generated between the discourses of the Judge on the battlements and Michael on the inside. Skinner does not make any reply, flippant or otherwise, to Michael’s

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accusation, since the act breaks off at that point. It is returned to the audience to arbitrate, as in the conclusion. These are key Brechtian moments.40 As de Certeau puts it, ‘the simultaneous presence [on the stage] of two different networks can bring conflicts to the fore, just as it can cast light on the theory of theatre’.41 The spatial complexity of The Freedom of the City argues that, far from being a raw, unmediated transcription of or direct emotional response to Bloody Sunday, it is Friel’s most subtly articulated dramatic performance to date. In The Freedom of the City and his next play, 1975’s Volunteers, Friel closely engaged with key political developments in the Ireland of the early 1970s (Bloody Sunday, internment). The two plays I wish to consider together in the closing section of this chapter – 1977’s Living Quarters and 1979’s Aristocrats – show at one level a complex repositioning. There is a distancing in terms of a direct representation of the politics of Ireland north and south. This is primarily achieved through a more self-conscious deployment of the language of world culture – such as the music of Chopin in Aristocrats – and in particular an engagement with a number of classic playwrights from the world repertoire. Living Quarters is explicitly acknowledged on its title page as being ‘after Hippolytus’, and in dramatizing an Irish version of Phaedra it also brings Racine to mind. The play has eight characters in search of an author-director in ways that recall Pirandello as well. None of this is new in Friel. As has already been examined, the music of Wagner provided an important emotional and structural resource in The Loves of Cass McGuire, and Pirandello was also crucial to its self-conscious theatricality. What is new is the increased dramatic and emotional sophistication with which these materials are handled. This may in part derive from the presence of Chekhov, who is going to feature so prominently in Friel’s career from this point on. Friel was working at the time on a translation of Three Sisters, which was to be staged in 1981 by Field Day. The presence of ‘three sisters’ at the centre of both Living Quarters and Aristocrats is deliberate; and crucial to the dramatic construction of both plays is the idea of the ensemble that was so central to Chekhov’s innovative dramaturgy. But if these plays see a more European Friel emerging, they are no less a return to origins, a going home. For they forsake the cities of the recent plays – the Dublin of The Mundy Scheme and Volunteers, the Derry of The Freedom of the City – and mark a return to Donegal and Ballybeg. They also mark a return to the family, an emphasis that is expanded and complicated (especially in terms of gender) and becomes the obsessive focus of its characters. The addition of three strongly characterized women to the families of the Butlers in Living Quarters and the O’Donnells in Aristocrats does more than displace the hitherto single focus on dysfunctional father–son relationships. It provides new ground for Friel to explore as he deliberately counters the almost exclusive male emphasis of the earlier plays of the 1970s. Volunteers was (of dramatic necessity) an all-male ensemble.

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Sarah in Gentle Island and Lily in Freedom are both strong and central characters; but their isolation (especially in the face of the number of males by whom they are surrounded) pushes them inexorably towards archetype: the revengeful, jealous woman and the O’Caseyan earth mother. The complex characterization of women that Friel undertakes is best understood in terms of the two plays’ relation to each other. For all of the apparent difference between them and the earlier works of the 1970s, the strongest line of continuity is provided by their continuing exploration and interrogation of space. This chapter has already queried the documentary/realist status of Freedom of the City and seen it as theatrically self-conscious and markedly constructed. A comment made by Friel during the writing of Aristocrats applies all the way through the decade: ‘I suppose what I’m really trying to avoid is the threadbare device of realism.’42 The avoidance of realism is managed most through the self-conscious exploration of the stage and the negotiation of the space between the characters. This dramaturgic and political concern, which I have examined as informing The Gentle Island and The Freedom of the City (and which holds no less for Volunteers), now moves to the foreground of Friel’s drama in ways that have profound implications for the kind of play he is writing. This concern is signalled most immediately and centrally by the similar settings of both Living Quarters and Aristocrats. For the requirements of design are particularly radical and challenging. Where Philadelphia split the central character into two, these plays (with no single character dominating) divide their stage space in two, wishing to present simultaneously an interior and an exterior space. The living room of the Butler household in the first play is fronted by a garden running the length of the stage. At the back of the living room are three doors, one leading to the kitchen, one to the hallway (and hence the front door) and one of which we are told that it is ‘used [only] once’ in the play.43 The three Butler sisters occupy different and contrasting positions to the ‘living quarters’ of the play. Helen, the eldest sister, divorced and living in London, makes her first and most subsequent entrances through the garden; when she enters, she is carrying ‘a bunch of May flowers’ (182). Since she is something of an interloper, and bears both the shame and erotic allure of being divorced, she comes in the back way. But as the least conventional and most radical of the sisters, her nature locates her more frequently in the garden than in the stifling confines of the Butler household, carrying as it still does the musk of her dead mother from years before. Miriam, married with a large brood of children and still living in Ballybeg, always enters the household through the front door. Tina, the youngest, is still living at home and so is one of two characters who makes use of the stairway at the side of the hall. So far, so Ibsen, where characters come through the front door or through the garden; when Judge Brack takes this liberty in Hedda Gabler he finds himself at the receiving end of Hedda’s pistols. But there is one significant step beyond Ibsen and his (however

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heightened and symbolic) realism. The (missing) fourth wall is not aligned with the stage frame and the audience’s perspective. Rather, as Richard Allen Cave has noted in considering the visual dimension of Friel’s plays, ‘the realistic portrayal of a central room […] is rendered strange because one or more of the outer walls has been removed’.44 Cave identifies this distinctive design demand in Friel’s dramaturgy as beginning in 1971 with The Gentle Island (the first play considered in this chapter) and running through Living Quarters up to Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990. The setting of Aristocrats also features this combination of interior and exterior with the missing wall. Ballybeg Hall has its study upstage right; but two-thirds to three-quarters (depending) is the outside garden. Since the wall is missing, the audience can see directly into the interior and characters can step straight from one setting into the other. As Cave puts it, ‘far from being divided spaces, interior and exterior are fluid and interconnected’.45 Given these demands, it seems appropriate that Tom Cairns combined the roles of director and designer in his 2005 production of Aristocrats at London’s National Theatre. He used the Lyttleton’s revolving stage to brilliant effect to adjust the relationship between the inside and the outside in each act. In the first, the study was the most foregrounded and exposed, revealing Tom Hoffnung at his cataloguing activities and suggesting how enclosed within the claustrophobia of the house and its past the O’Donnell family still remained. In Act 2, with Claire outside the house and away from the piano, a wall now screened off most of the inside and the emphasis was thrown on the exterior – thus increasing the logic by which even the father struggles to emerge from the house’s Gothic interior at the act’s close. In Act 3 the settings were at their most evenly balanced between outside and inside, but with the actors all placed very much to the fore as they faced into the future. The size of the garden space on the Lyttleton stage seemed equal to Friel’s demands, for the first time since the play’s Abbey premiere – with the private space of the gazebo to which Alice retreats very far downstage indeed. The exposed interiors and the various groupings around the garden conveyed well the challenge of all of Friel’s plays: to enter the public space of a theatre without sacrificing the integrity of these private individuals and the spaces they imaginatively inhabit. The absence of the wall in the case of Living Quarters is readily accountable for within the self-consciously theatricalized nature of the play’s framing. The central incident, derived from Hippolytus, is the return of the aging Commandant Frank Butler from the heroic rescue of nine of his men on a peacekeeping mission with the Irish Army in the Middle East. In his absence, Frank’s young trophy wife Anna has had an affair with his estranged son, Ben. The tragedy of the Butler family is not, however, being realized in the dramatic present. Not for the first or the last time there is a Frielian narrator who recounts the lives of the people we are about to witness. This narrator is a Pirandellian creation, a figure known as ‘Sir’ who

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appears to combine the roles of playwright and director. He summons up the cast of the play – Frank and Anna, the three sisters, brother Ben, Miriam’s husband Charlie, and a priest who is a longtime family friend – and gives them their allotted roles as they prepare to play out the tragic scenario once more. Father Tom protests that on this occasion at least he does not wish to be portrayed as a drunken buffoon; but that is precisely what occurs as the drama unfolds. When Frank turns in the moment of crisis to his oldest friend and spiritual adviser for aid, Father Tom is too out of it with drink to respond. The progress and outcome of the drama therefore seem set, and Sir is extremely authoritarian in the way he gives orders and deals with tardy actors. Everywhere he goes he carries with him the ‘ledger’ (175) in which everything is written down, insisting that its authority be absolutely adhered to. The ledger may effectively be described as the script of the playwithin-the play. In a staged reading at the 2008 MacGill Summer School in Glenties the actor Philip O’Sullivan as Sir brandished a copy of what was recognizably the Faber paperback original of Living Quarters.46 Many of Sir’s comments echo Friel’s oft-repeated sentiments (examined in Chapter 2) that his plays are musical scores from whose notes neither the director nor the actors should deviate. But the situation is more complicated than that, as any practitioner in the field of live theatre has to concede. Sir contradicts himself on more than one occasion about the absoluteness of the text and its unyielding nature. Having pointed to the ledger and reminded them that ‘it’s all here – every single syllable of it’, he then states that they are also free ‘to speak your thoughts as well’ (179). When Frank explicitly says he is claiming this privilege to protest at what has been done to him, the question arises as to whether this is the only, the so far unique occasion on which these lines have been spoken: FRANK: You did say we could speak our thoughts. That was established at the outset, wasn’t it? Well, I wish to protest against my treatment. I wish to say that I consider I have been treated unfairly. (240) As Sir himself admits, the characters themselves seek to subvert the predetermined lines of the script: ‘no sooner do they conceive me with my authority and my knowledge than they begin flirting with the idea of circumventing me, of foxing me, of outwitting me’ (178). The character who most refuses and challenges Sir’s authority is Anna. The Butler family are happy to re-enact the family rituals with which they are all so familiar, to revisit Eden before the Fall. Helen is the one member of the family who expresses dissatisfaction with the representation, protesting directly to Sir that it omits the uneasiness that should accompany it. But it is Anna who most reacts against and protests at the refusal and inability of the family to admit or to talk about what occurred during their

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father’s absence: her affair with Ben. Anna’s protest is represented by Friel not only verbally but spatially. While the Butlers go out to the garden to have a photograph taken by Father Tom, Anna comes downstairs in her dressing-gown, looks around the empty living-room and calls (in vain) for Frank. This could of course be occurring simultaneously within the diegetic frame. But Sir, as if sensing Anna’s rebellious mood, intervenes to remind her of the script’s requirements: having called Frank twice, he reminds her, the ledger indicates that ‘she goes back to her room and cries’ (201). Friel is here playing with the notions of onstage and offstage space. The Butler family is ‘on’ in the garden while Anna and Sir watch from ‘the wings’. But all of this action, ‘offstage’ as well as ‘onstage’, is represented within the stage frame. Anna refuses to follow the script, rushes out to the garden and discloses all of the details of her affair with Ben. As Anne Ubersfeld has pointed out, ‘theatre-within-the-theatre’ reconfigures the relationship between the spectator and the stage because it bears directly on ‘how the spectator might become implicated in performance and even have an effect upon it’.47 In this process, ‘the other part of the stage and the people upon it’ – in this instance, Anna and Sir – may now also be considered its audience. After Anna has made her confession, she stares at the ‘characters’ and realizes they do not and have not heard her; until she exits, they stand with ‘frozen smiles’ (203). But we the audience have, not only because we get to hear Anna’s anguished declaration to the Butlers that she had an affair ‘out of loneliness, out of despair, out of hate’ (202) but no less because we witness her questioning and revisiting of what she has just said as she exits with Sir. He may assert that ‘nothing’s changed’, that Anna has only ‘shuffled the pages a bit’ (203) – but the spatial relationships enacted in and by the scene itself tell a different story. At the close of Living Quarters Anna and Sir are left alone on stage – after the run-through of the play-within-the-play has been completed with Frank’s exit through the unused door and the sound of a single gunshot. Anna has returned to ask what remains about her in the ledger. The few facts Sir recounts about her current life in America prompt her to ask, ‘That’s all?’ (246). Nowhere is the inadequacy of the ledger more manifest than in these closing moments, challenged and questioned as it is by the living presence of the character Anna and in particular of the actress playing her. We may say that Brian Friel has scripted it all – the play without as well as the play within. But the whole of Living Quarters and the theatrical collaboration required to stage it exists to challenge the absoluteness of that statement. The complex spatial question of onstage and offstage is no less important to Aristocrats, especially its first act. The three sisters here are more dispersed than the Butlers, but no less present in their different ways. Judith, the eldest, runs Ballybeg Hall, having the care both of her ailing father and a sister who suffers from manic depression. For much of Act 1, she remains offstage; but her voice is also broadcast over the baby alarm as she copes not

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only with her father’s physical needs but with his non-recognition and his accusations. Her voice is as disembodied as his as ironically she has to deal with his incontinence, the breakdown and decay of the patriarchal body. Judge O’Donnell may be physically absent for virtually the entire play; but his continuing psychological dominance is represented through his voice as technologically communicated by the baby alarm, abruptly and without warning. Judith’s physical entrance at the end of the act (the stage directions noting that ‘her appearance is of little interest to her’)48 is timed to coincide with the Judge’s interpellation of his adult son as a wayward schoolboy and Casimir’s breakdown. Judith rushes quickly from the house through the invisible wall to the garden and proceeds to ‘rock him in her arms as if he were a baby’. The image of thwarted maternity has a political context. For what Judge O’Donnell has described as Judith’s ‘great betrayal’ (257) of the family has consisted of her going over the border to engage on the Catholic nationalist side in the Battle of the Bogside and in having a child through an affair with a Dutch reporter. When he was considering this possibility in the writing of the play, Friel described it in a note as ‘the ONE event that obviously gave her life cohesion – and which finally unbalanced it permanently’.49 That political and sexual act cannot be acknowledged, and so Judith has put her child up for adoption. The youngest sister, Claire, is also offstage for much of the first act. In part, this is a practical necessity unless the actress playing the part is also a proficient performer of Chopin. And it is also an appropriate placing for a young woman who wants to avoid the fact of her forthcoming marriage to a much older man and who seeks to retreat into the fantasy zone of pure music (as discussed in Chapter 3). But Claire’s presence registers strongly through her offstage piano playing to which both the characters and we become an audience. She also maintains an offstage/onstage dialogue with her brother throughout the act, as they play their childhood game of correctly identifying the piece being played. When Claire is onstage in Act 2, Casimir continues to transmit her piano-playing on a tape-recorder, so she and music remain associated throughout, but again in a disembodied way, since we never actually get to see her play. The disembodied, technologically conveyed voice is a motif throughout Aristocrats since the fourth, missing sister, the nun in Africa, is only represented by her voice: her Christmas message is replayed at the height of summer, and this fully grown woman is described as speaking in ‘a child’s voice’ (303). When the father (drawn by her voice) staggers onstage and screams her name, it fuses for a moment with Anna’s voice on the tape-recorder when the machine is inadvertently turned up rather than switched off: ‘the tape’s scream and FATHER’s roar overlap for a few seconds’ (304). This acoustic dissonance, a fusion of scream and roar, is the most extreme and non-naturalistic but also the most primal rendering of family relations in the O’Donnell household.

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Alice is the sister most continuously onstage throughout the three acts. She stalks the limits of the garden, from the gazebo to the broken sun dial, freed up from the physical restraint inhibiting all her siblings by her copious drinking and also freed up vocally to tell some home truths regarding the O’Donnell family. This point was graphically conveyed by the actress Elisabeth Dermot Walsh who played Alice under Ben Barnes’s direction in the 2003 production of Aristocrats at the Abbey. Walsh’s bodily language was notably confrontational, not only with Tom Hoffnung whose questions she answers but with regard to the set itself. Where Casimir gets on his hands and knees to lovingly re-enact a croquet game on the grass, which he also identifies as a tennis court, Walsh’s Alice physically rolled on it at one point, as if determined to impress herself on the family narrative and to prevent the past from triumphing. Anna McMullan notes how ‘Friel’s drama frequently features unruly bodies which flout the corporeal regime of their particular community, social environment and historical moment.’50 McMullan singles out as an example how in this play Alice ‘resists the decorum of the home in her speech and in her drunkenness’.51 Alice’s approach to the past is to appropriate it for the present and the future. The walking embodiment of the past in the play is the Beckettian figure of Uncle George, who enters and (rapidly) exits throughout just as arbitrarily as the father’s voice booms out of the baby-alarm; but George does so without uttering a word. When Judith finally convinces the remaining O’Donnells after the father’s death that she cannot afford to keep Ballybeg Hall going and that it will have to be broken up, Alice’s proposal is that she and Eamon bring Uncle George back to live with them in London. As Willie wittily remarks, ‘he’ll fair keep London in chat’ (323); but the real ‘chat’ or dialogue is that which Alice has maintained with her family and its traditions by bodily taking on the support of its last survivor, not because she has to but because she wants to. In writing of ‘The Stage and the Off-stage’ in her section on ‘Spatial Paradigms’, Anne Ubersfeld notes ‘how an off-stage character enters the stage space (with the status of an exile) and how that intrusion sows disorder and disorganization among the order of the tragedy’s space, independently of the character’s qualities or virtues’.52 The key term here for any study of Friel’s drama and of these two plays in particular is that of ‘exile’. In the consideration so far all of the characters in relation to the onstage and offstage dynamic of Living Quarters and Aristocrats, this important distinction has not been sufficiently foregrounded, with the exception of Anna in the first play. But it is the distinction of those characters within the Butler and the O’Donnell families who are exilic with which I choose to conclude this consideration of space. Helen has left her Donegal home for a life in London, but it has involved a denial of love for the man she married and divorced. Ben may be only living a few miles away in his caravan; but that is only the most temporary of living quarters, a place to which he returns

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briefly after his frequent wanderings off to Scotland; and he is no less in exile among his sand dunes, prohibited both internally and externally from entering the Butler household. The most transgressive scenes spatially are those between brother Ben and sister Helen, played out under cover of darkness. The theme of quasi-incest that runs through Living Quarters is refracted not just through Ben’s relationship with his young stepmother (though clearly this plays its part), but through his scenes with his eldest sister, underlined by the near-physical identity between Helen and her dead mother. He and she once more enact their forbidden teenage ritual of lighting and ‘passing the cigarette from one to the other and it hot with sucking’ (213). In the garden, Ben achieves a greater degree of physical and verbal expressiveness than in the house, where he is often afflicted with a disabling stammer; Helen in turn can finally accuse her brother of taking the mother’s side in opposing her choice of husband. The closest family relationship is that between Ben and Helen: they share confidences and a greater degree of emotional and physical intimacy than anything we see represented between Ben and Anna. Their entry into the Butler household causes its foundations to shake.53 In Aristocrats, one might readily assume from Casimir’s self-presentation that he is in permanent residence, the ‘man’ of Ballybeg Hall. But that impression is immediately contradicted by his failure to recognize Willie Diver, not only a childhood companion but someone who is an almost inescapable feature in the present as the handy man who works for Judith. For Casimir is an exile, living in Hamburg and only back in Ballybeg for a couple of days. That exilic status is enacted by the elaborate pantomime of the phone calls to Helga in Hamburg that take virtually the entire play to get through and which interrupt whatever elaborate fantasy Casimir is engaged in. But Eamon shrewdly suggests Casimir’s life in exile may well be the fantasy, this performative engagement with his family the reality. The two sisters who live at home, Judith and Claire, both manage strategies of escape: the first to retrieve, acknowledge and raise her hitherto denied son; the latter through the only alternative she can envisage, of marriage to Jerry McLaughlin. It is two of the exiles, Alice and her husband, who are most connected with Ballybeg Hall, Alice with the reality, Eamon with the mythology by which he has been ‘pigmented’ (318). All three of the O’Donnell exiles – Casimir, Alice and Eamon – are hardly if ever off stage; they traverse it repeatedly, desperately trying to find ways to preserve Ballybeg Hall’s legacy as something other than mere delusion. In the final moments of Aristocrats, the exiles delay departing while all of the characters sing a song associated with their absent mother. By the end of this magnificent play, Brian Friel had achieved what he hoped to in the two years dedicated to writing it: ‘a collage of emotions and scenes and possibilities’.54 And he did so not by pursuing a chronological plot or a naturalist narrative but by exploring what he described as the ‘possibility’ of ‘formally enacting different scenes [through]

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actors grouping and re-grouping’.55 In a paragraph significantly headed ‘Transformations’, Anne Ubersfeld writes that through ‘the re-ordering of dramatic groupings into other configurations […] a whole possible geometry of dramatic spaces can be created’.56 In his plays of the 1970s, this is precisely what Brian Friel has achieved.

6 Friel’s Translations: An Inquiry into the Disappearance of Lieutenant George Yolland

In their 1996 study, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins include a brief discussion of Brian Friel’s 1980 play, Translations. They focus on the act of translation itself to show the dynamics of power operative throughout the play. But their dramatic analysis is confined to Act 1 and the burden of the argument centres on the go-between Owen’s ‘overtly skewed rendition of Captain Lancey’s speech to the Irish villagers’.1 There is no mention of how the play develops subsequently. Captain Lancey is here invoked, as the head of the imperial mission, but not the dramatically more crucial Lieutenant George Yolland. In their general introduction, however, Gilbert and Tompkins make two important points relevant to my argument. The first is to defend the inclusion of Ireland in their consideration of postcolonial drama: ‘Ireland, Britain’s oldest colony, is often considered inappropriate to the postcolonial grouping, partly because it lies just off Europe. Yet Ireland’s centuries-old political and economic oppression at the hands of the British – and its resistance to such control – fits well within the postcolonial paradigm.’2 The second is to stress ‘the connections between form and content which a politicised approach to theatre always recognises’3 and necessarily involves. In this regard, what is so marked a feature of Friel’s Translations is its progressive abandonment of plot. Almost none of the expectations raised in the first two acts is realized; one of the principal characters (Lieutenant Yolland) disappears without warning and in the third act things do not so much come to a head as increasingly fall apart. The play concludes with three figures isolated on stage: the hedge schoolmaster Hugh O’Donnell, trying and failing to recite the opening lines of his beloved Aeneid; the aged scholar Jimmy Jack, passed out drunk having declared that he intends to wed Pallas Athene; and the young woman Maire Chatach discussing the fate and figure of her lover George Yolland, the missing Lieutenant, who has not turned up alive or dead. Friel’s haunting ending, with its several foci of interest, is a disconcerting one for an audience to assimilate and bears out the contention by Gilbert and Tompkins of the extent to which 130

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postcolonial plays ‘refuse closure’.4 Further, the absence of the expected or satisfactory conclusion ‘does not represent a failure’ per se but is rather appropriate to the conditions being represented and to the postcolonial project. Particularly puzzling to an audience is the sudden disappearance of Lieutenant George Yolland between the second and third acts and the apparent unwillingness of the playwright to tell us what has befallen him. The issues raised by the necessary teasing out of this conundrum bring us close to the political heart of the play. In 2007 a production of Translations ran on Broadway at the Manhattan Theater Club directed by Garry Hynes of Galway’s Druid Theatre Company. This production was premiered in October 2006 at the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, New Jersey, in tandem with a major symposium on Irish theatre conducted at Princeton University. In the second half of her article in The Irish Times of Thursday, 4 January 2007, entitled ‘The Language Barrier’, Belinda McKeon gave a detailed account of the symposium that accompanied the opening of Friel’s play. Present on the panel were director Hynes and Emily Mann, artistic director of the McCarter. There were primarily two issues that the American audience wanted addressed. The first was their difficulty with the accents of the Irish cast where, as one man said, ‘I understood about one word in ten.’5 Reviews of the production suggested that Hynes had directed her players to speak Friel’s lines in a much more heavily accented style than is usual, even in Irish productions. Hynes has directed more plays by Friel’s contemporary Tom Murphy, where their shared west of Ireland background has encouraged her towards a strongly accented delivery of the lines. But this approach is consistent with the way in which Murphy writes, drawing heavily on local idiom, admixing words in Irish without preparation or translation, having his characters speak in fragments that are at times scarcely articulate. Friel, by contrast, writes in a virtually dialect-free idiom, his characters (like Oscar Wilde’s) speaking in complete sentences. The words from the Irish language that appear in Translations are restricted to the place names – Baile Beag, Ceann Balor, Lis Maol, Machaire Buidhe, etc. – and are carefully signposted as such in advance. This difference of linguistic approach between the two contemporary Irish playwrights has in part led to Brian Friel achieving a theatrical success outside Ireland that has been denied to Murphy. Some see this as intentional. Nicholas Grene in The Politics of Irish Drama writes that the two ‘dramatists’ contrasting styles of representing the Ireland of their time […] may have contributed to the much more rapid and assured reception of Friel’s Irish drama outside Ireland’.6 To account for the obstacles that any non-Irish audience faces in approaching a Tom Murphy play, Grene particularly foregrounds the fact that ‘Murphy chooses for his characters an opaque and unfluent language, full of ellipses and quirks of phrasing, a climate of linguistic inadequacy’.7 It is ironic, then, that it is a Friel play that should have encountered the charge of opacity in this production. Is Hynes directing Translations as if it were a Murphy text, against the grain of

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its inherent transparency? Or, as at least some of the remarks from the symposium suggest, has she foregrounded the fact that Friel’s dramatic texts are also verbally oblique and that they too inhabit ‘a climate of linguistic inadequacy’, that they are not therefore as absolutely pitched for worldwide consumption as such critics as Nicholas Grene have argued? It is, however, the second question most persistently raised by that symposium audience after they had seen Brian Friel’s Translations that I wish to address in this chapter. McKeon describes how, when Garry Hynes asked ‘Any questions?’, a hand shot up. ‘What happened to Yolland?’ a woman asked sharply. Hynes hesitated; the ambiguity surrounding the disappearance of Yolland, the British soldier who falls in love with the Irish-speaking Maire, is vital to the desperate power and poignancy of Friel’s ending, epitomising as it does both the futility and the inevitability of human silence. […] [A]s Hynes looked as though she might not answer the question, as though she thought it understood that there could be no answer to such a question, a small chorus of voices reiterated the woman’s demand to know of the whereabouts of Yolland. Eventually, a distinctly uncomfortable looking Hynes confided that Yolland was most likely at the bottom of the lake. The questioners took up again: who put him there? What was with the mute girl? Wasn’t this all something to do with Cromwell? While subtler, more thought-provoking questions were forthcoming from some quarters of the audience, they were in the minority: most people seemed to want to know simply what had happened in the play they had just seen.8 It is not clear that the presence of the playwright on this occasion would have helped, since he has always proven notoriously reluctant, and in the main downright unwilling, to answer questions concerning his plays. It has been several decades since Brian Friel last put himself in a public forum directly to address his own work. As it happens, the play was Translations and the occasion a discussion at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, in 1983 between Friel and J. H. Andrews, the historian who published the scholarly monograph A Paper Landscape on the work of the Ordnance Survey on mapmaking in Ireland during the nineteenth century. Andrews’s volume is one of a number of scholarly works acknowledged by Friel as having contributed to the writing of Translations.9 Andrews is the first but by no means the last to broach the issue of historical accuracy in the play. He points out that the English soldiers would not have come equipped with the bayonets that are deployed after Yolland’s disappearance: ‘Before soldiers went on Survey duty they had to hand in their bayonets. Confronted with crime or civil disturbance, what Captain Lancey would really have done was withdraw and leave everything to the local constabulary.’10 Friel in his reply nowhere

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adverts to Andrews’s certainty of how the British Army would ‘really’ have behaved in the Donegal of pre-Partition Ulster in the nineteenth century, especially in relation to the local police. He owns up to the charge of ‘using a few misplaced bayonets’ but clearly regards it as minor, one of ‘the tiny bruises inflicted on history in the play’.11 He promotes ‘the imperatives of fiction’ alongside those of cartography and historiography and robustly concludes: ‘You don’t go to Macbeth for history.’12 In a rare subsequent interview, with Laurence Finnegan in 1986, when pressed on the play, he spoke a couple of reluctant sentences and then concluded: ‘I don’t really have much to say about it.’13 Conspicuously absent from the Princeton symposium, as reported by McKeon and at least in relation to the panel discussion on Hynes’s production of Translations, were any theatre critics or academics, who might have managed to say something on this topic without the squeamishness or reluctance evidenced by the play’s director. A difficulty on the part of an academic in addressing the topic might well have come down to the question of time, especially on a shared panel. For the pointed question of who put Lieutenant George Yolland at the bottom of the lake does not admit of a simple, singular or direct answer. In the first critical instance, I want to turn to the text to see what evidence it might offer by way of a reply. Much of the mood of the first two acts of Translations might be described as upbeat: the return of the Prodigal Son Owen to Ballybeg has moved even his hyperarticulate father Hugh to stammering joy (‘I – I’m – I’m – pay no attention to’);14 a great deal of buffoonish ‘jouking about’ goes on in the classroom; and there is, most unusually for Friel, a love affair between a young man and a young woman and, even more unusually, a love-scene between them where there is a direct correlation between linguistic insufficiency and emotional fullness. But even in the first two acts there are disturbing and serious undercurrents. George Yolland and Owen O’Donnell may suggest they are in ‘Eden’ in Act 2 Scene 1 (422); but George is overlooking a difference in nationality and a difference between his actual status – an officer in the British Army – and the status he claims for himself – that of an individual, a private citizen on a cultural holiday. Owen is Irish and a citizen, but one who is in the pay of the army and whose return to his home place has been determined as much by that economic and political imperative as it has by any personal sentiment about a private homecoming. George Yolland may feel he is encountering a culture at ease with itself, one with good relations to its own past: ‘I had moved into a consciousness that wasn’t striving nor agitated, but at its ease and with its own conviction and assurance’ (416). But Friel and the play know differently. I have argued elsewhere that ‘there is always in Friel’s small communities a sense of some lost or missing dimension, a context which would give meaning to the isolated and frequently despairing lives of his characters’.15 It is tempting, in the case of Translations, to interpret that ‘lost or missing dimension’

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as the Irish language itself, whose erosion we witness in the course of the three acts. But whatever the official policy first of the Irish Free State and then of the Republic in promoting Irish and giving it status as ‘the first official language’ the facts remain otherwise. Friel has observed that all four of his grandparents were native Irish speakers, and yet by the time of his generation the language had virtually disappeared and been almost entirely replaced by English.16 Whatever ‘tiny bruises’ he might inflict on history, there is no wishing away or reversing the historically unassailable fact of the decline of Irish. And as the play demonstrates, that decline proceeded from internal causes as well as a determined colonial policy to make the country English-speaking (in the implementation of which the translated place names and the new national school system were to be two major strategies). Hugh may remark snobbishly that English seems to him best restricted to the realm of commerce. But the view actively and successfully promoted by Daniel O’Connell,17 that social progress for the Irish required the acquisition of English, is forcefully and bravely articulated in the schoolmaster’s face by Maire. And even Hugh finally acquiesces in the historic shift when he agrees to teach Maire English. But there is an equal snobbery within the society George enters towards what might be termed ‘native Irish culture’. Yolland may claim he loves to hear Hugh and Jimmy Jack swapping stories of Cuchulain; but we hear very little of this in the course of the play, especially from Hugh. On the one occasion Jimmy Jack mentions the mythical Irish heroine Grania, he has to repeat it before Manus recognizes the allusion.18 The first two acts of Translations are filled with sunlight – everyone repeatedly remarks on how warm the weather is. This is also characteristic of other Friel plays, especially the August 1936 of Dancing at Lughnasa, to the extent that Frank McGuinness has said that Friel writes as if Ireland is set in the Mediterranean.19 But the emotional, political and climactic weather take a turn for the worse in Act 3 of Translations. As the stage directions for the act assert, ‘it is raining’ (430) and the weather should be visibly evident from the high number of characters who come and go from the hedge school in the course of the act. This is particularly the case in relation to Maire Chatach, Maire of the Curly Hair, as the directions are careful to specify. Where Bridget and Doalty come in with sacks over their heads to protect them from the rain, when Maire enters, she ‘is bare-headed and wet from the rain; her hair in disarray’ (436). I have only ever seen one production of Translations that took Friel’s directions seriously with regard to the weather of Act 3, a production at the Birmingham Shakespeare Festival, Alabama, in January 1987 directed by Will York. Kate Ingram, the actor playing Maire, had red curly hair, as specified, and just before she came on in Act 3 someone backstage had clearly upended a bucket of cold water over her head. She entered drenched and shivering and, as her head swayed, the movement dislodged beads of water from her curly locks. No better image of the dislocation and distress caused by Yolland’s disappearance could be imagined.

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The earlier stages of that romance, between the visiting English soldier in his distinctive red coat and the beautiful young Irish woman, have a strong antecedent in Dion Boucicault’s late nineteenth-century political melodrama, The Shaughraun (1874). In the opening scene of the latter, Captain Molineux, a young English officer, arrives with ‘a detachment of our regiment at Ballyragget’20 to apprehend a Fenian rebel who is rumoured to be returning to Ireland from Australia. He encounters the beautiful Claire Ffolliott and is immediately enraptured. Their opening exchange hinges on the miscommunication occasioned by Irish and English place names: ‘Is this place called Swillabeg?’ ‘No; it is called Shoolabeg.’ ‘Beg pardon; your Irish names are so unpronounceable. You see, I’m an Englishman’ (260). Later in the scene, Claire comes back mischievously with ‘What’s your name again – Mulligrubs?’ ‘No; Molineux.’ ‘I ax your pardon. You see I’m Irish and the English names are so unpronounceable’ (260). In detailing the political imperatives that find him in Ballyragget, Molineux tries to make light of the affair – ‘there is no foundation for the scare’ (261) – and hence of his involvement. Naturally, the returning Fenian rebel turns out to be Claire’s brother, and Molineux is confronted throughout with a conflict of motives, between duty and desire. The political villain in Boucicault’s melodrama is neither the English officer nor the returned Fenian, who even his opponent recognizes is a ‘gentleman’. His villains instead are the local police agent and the squireen, the resolutely lower middle-class and upwardly mobile characters. The political resolution fuses with and is absorbed by the romantic: Robert Ffolliott is pardoned by Queen Victoria and is free to marry his beloved; simultaneously, Claire’s way is cleared to accept Molineux’s proposal. Boucicault’s melodramas in the late nineteenth century went from being hugely popular to falling out of favour, not only because Ibsen and the Irish Literary Theatre arrived to transform theatrical modes of expression,21 but because the increasing political independence of Ireland from England made the utopian metaphor of marriage increasingly untenable. George Yolland’s romantic feelings towards Ireland could have been fashioned by Boucicault and are certainly true to the historic and cultural period: he is ‘in love’ with Ireland and continually expresses a wish to live there. But Friel’s play and an intervening century of historical change will not have it so. Hence, the radical dislocation of plot in Act 3, as the expected trajectory of the romance between the English soldier and the Irish woman is cut across by other imperatives. The disappearance of Yolland in Act 3 is difficult for an audience to accept because we have increasingly invested in him as the leading man. George may display some foolish traits – his nervousness in public speaking at one level is not impressive but following the dry, confident pomposity of Lancey’s pronouncements can only seem admirable by comparison. And he clearly grows in confidence throughout the second act’s two scenes – though that is in part fuelled by the poitín (illicit whiskey) he has imbibed on both occasions. The love-scene would appear to confirm the centrality

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of its two characters to the play, but the disappearance of the one and the unmooring of the other disappoint those generic expectations. And even if he resembles Synge’s Christy Mahon in not getting the girl in the end, George Yolland does not have the compensations that attend Christy’s transformation into the walking playboy of the western world. Instead, there is the dramatic ignominy of the removal of his body from the stage, along with the attendant mysteries prompted by its disappearance. This development highlights the shifting and unstable emphasis Translations displays throughout in relation to a central male character, a hero, if you will. In the course of the play, different men step into the dramatic limelight and hold centre stage for a time: Jimmy Jack with his recitations of Homer; Manus, with his centrality to the school room scenes, at least so long as his father is absent; Owen, who occupies the dramatic centre when he stages his homecoming. Manus’s claims to our attentions are bolstered by the romantic emphasis on his relations with two young women, the Maire he pursues and the Sarah who focuses on him. Patrick Burke has pointed out that Owen’s is the largest role,22 but Owen is also curiously nebulous as a character and is defined mainly by his relations. Finally there is Hugh, whom the weight of academic interpretation certainly views as the central character, the intellectual as hero. But three factors complicate this in the perception of an audience: Hugh is offstage for much of the play; his actions consist primarily of what he says, as he articulates a multi-layered response to the historic shifts occurring around him; and he is consciously playing, at least part of the time, the role of the Stage Irishman. Friel’s stage directions confirm a note of parody in how Hugh presents himself, which is only heightened by his frequent intake of strong alcohol. This has the effect of causing him to move between the central males already discussed and a clearly secondary character like Doalty, whose role-playing and parodic turns are broader and more farcical, but who also reveals a cunning political intelligence behind the mask. The abrupt removal of a central character from the stage as a precipitant of the plot is a device Friel had adopted as early as 1962 in his second play, The Enemy Within. As discussed in Chapter 1, Friel’s depiction of the lives of sixth-century Irish monks on the island of Iona focuses on St Columba and his struggle to reconcile his strong individualism with the communal self-sacrifice of the spiritual life. But Columba’s important relationship with a young novice named Oswald was held over until this chapter, because of its relevance to Translations. Oswald arrives from England, clearly from an aristocratic background and equally clearly a hero-worshipper of Columba. Confronted with the image held up to him by the young novice, Columba strikes out against it, and in so doing against the idealistic young Englishman. Columba spends much of Act 3 searching for Oswald, who has gone missing and cannot be found. In the closing moments of the play, the bedraggled young novice re-enters, saying he has returned because he was

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hungry. In the joy with which Columba greets him, there is an alleviation of guilt. When the young English man is welcomed ‘home’ by the older Irish man,23 there is a strong sense of an allegorical rapprochement in AngloIrish relations. For much of the third act, the supposition is that Oswald is dead. As his notes to the play reveal, Friel considered this possibility. At one point, the third act was to be set a full year later, and there is a note to the effect that Oswald has died: ‘Establish that Oswald is dead (drowned, lost faith???).’24 The same possibilities are sounded throughout Act 3 of Translations, principally by Owen: ‘he’s a bloody romantic – maybe he’s gone out to one of the islands and he’ll suddenly reappear tomorrow morning. Or maybe the search party’ll find him this evening lying drunk somewhere in the sandhills’ (432). For much of that play’s third act, the audience is left to assume that Maire may have disappeared along with Yolland and that therefore the couple has eloped, which is romantically satisfying if still dramatically downbeat. Maire’s belated appearance, in the condition I described earlier, returns her to the cast of the play, even if she is no longer fully present. But has she ever been, in terms of a play set in County Donegal’s Ballybeg? In the opening classroom scene, Maire is described studying the map of America on an atlas, and in the third act she draws a map on the floor with her finger, claiming she is emulating what Yolland himself did on the strand the night before. But the degree of communication she claims they achieved about the precise geography of Yolland’s home place in England seems highly unlikely: ‘And Winfarthing’s near a big town called Norwich. And Norwich is in a county called Norfolk. And Norfolk is in the east of England’ (437). The map she says Yolland inscribed on the strand is as much a projection of her desires for an alternative to the here of Ballybeg as are her frequent invocations of New York and Brooklyn. Maire, like Gar in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, is not just an emigrant preparing to leave Ireland but someone who has already projected themselves into a utopian version of the foreign place to which they have determined to go. There is always the dramatic possibility that Yolland, like Oswald, may reappear in the final moments of the play. Maire certainly holds to that hope. As she says to Hugh: ‘When he comes back, this is where he’ll come to. He told me this is where he was happiest’ (446). In relation to assessing this topic, there is nothing in the playwright’s few published comments on the play to assist us. But in the Friel Papers in the National Library the files relating to Translations are among the most extensive. Here are the notes from the various books he consulted – Andrews on the Ordnance Survey, George Steiner on translation – and outlines and drafts of the various scripts written across a year or more. The earliest outline of the play shows how much it changed as he worked on it. A complication is the number and kind of name changes. Originally, Yolland and Owen were Larcom and Colby.25 When he thought of dramatically foregrounding two British officers rather than one, Friel devised the names Yolland and Lancey, but attached the first

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to the senior commanding officer and Lancey to the young romantic. Either way, in the original plan, Owen and Yolland come to Ballybeg on the mapmaking expedition. By Act 2 Lieutenant George Yolland is ‘going native’ and in a changing places scenario his position is being taken by the young teacher. By Act 3, the process is complete. Yolland is now ‘fully native’ and, Friel adds, ‘alcoholic almost’,26 which aligns him with Hugh. And Manus has gone off with the map-making expedition, which has completed its work in the area. But Friel adds one other detail in relation to Yolland: the possibility that he has drowned. This is retained all the way through the early draft, to be sounded by Owen as a potential cause of George’s disappearance, the ‘drunk’ possibility: ‘You’ve seen him drinking that poteen – doesn’t know how to handle it.’ At another stage in the drafting process, Friel raises the possibility: ‘Is the hedge schoolmaster killed? By some of his pupils?’27 No reason is directly assigned for this extreme development, but in other notes Friel clarifies that he sees characters like Hugh as caught between the dichotomous opposites of the British Army on the one hand and the guerrilla-like tactics of some of Hugh’s pupils, notably the Donnelly twins, on the other. This note introduces the possibility of a killing rather than just a disappearance of a central male authority figure, and when the possibility of that fate is transferred from the schoolmaster to the British soldier, Friel writes: ‘Perhaps if the Lieutenant is killed by the twins, he [Manus] takes his place.’28 This would seem to confirm that the Donnelly twins are responsible for the death of Yolland. But there is a double provenance to that ‘perhaps’, one of Friel’s favourite words: perhaps Yolland will be killed (still an ‘if’) and, if he is, perhaps it will be by the Donnelly twins. And on this question the archive has nothing more to offer – the manuscript material on Act 3 is the virtually finished version we have in the published and produced text, whereas there are several versions of the first two acts. When Oswald disappears in The Enemy Within, the drama centres on whether he will be found at all on this remote Scottish island, and whether he will be found dead or alive. There may even be a suggestion of suicide for this highly strung youth whose idealism has suffered a severe rebuff from the man he idolizes. There is no suggestion of foul play, however, for all that the other monks may be jealous of the attentions Columba lavishes on his latest acolyte. This is not the case in Translations. When Owen translates Captain Lancey’s speeches to the Ballybeg ‘natives’ Owen strives to keep at bay the colonial nature of the map-making enterprise all too evident in the British officer’s statements: ‘This enormous task has been embarked on so that the military authorities will be equipped with up-to-date and accurate information on every corner of this part of the Empire’ (406). And he always plays down the public role betokened by George’s uniform, as does Yolland himself, to stress the personal interest his friend takes in what is for him a study of immense cultural value. But though these implications are kept at bay, they are never entirely banished. The audience remains aware of the

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extent to which the activities of Lieutenant George Yolland in Ballybeg are never allowed to remain private but are kept under perpetual surveillance. There is an act of reciprocal watching between George and Maire, whose house is directly above the army encampment. But again that personal interest is never entirely detached from the larger groups to which they are affiliated, the British Army and the Ballybeg community. When the English soldier and the Irish woman seek to detach themselves from the group by running away to stage their intimate love-scene, their first lines both bear upon whether they have been seen leaving the dance: Maire’s ‘Manus’ll wonder where I’ve got to’ is immediately followed by George’s query, ‘I wonder did anyone notice us leave’ (426). Friel’s stage directions describe them entering as if they were being either hunted or chased, although there is nobody immediately in their wake. All of this discussion of being watched works to implicate the audience, who become conscious of their own role as onlookers of the following intimate scene between the two lovers. Private and public boundaries are perpetually being crossed in Friel’s drama, as witness the lovers pressing the public place names of the surrounding area into private use, detaching them from their geopolitical function to make of them personal discourse. The audience’s uneasy sense that they are implicated, as voyeurs but also in Seamus Heaney’s phrase as ‘artful voyeurs’29 of a scene with political consequences, is clarified and heightened by the appearance in the background of Sarah. She completes a circle of watchers with the audience, mirroring back our own role in the drama. Her mouth works but to no immediate avail, since all that issues forth is silence. But Manus has taught her well, and it is a deeply ironic tribute to his pedagogic artistry that what she manages to articulate is not her own name, Sarah Johnny Sally from Bun na hAbhann, but his: ‘Manus … Manus!’ (430). The one plot element we carry through into Act 3 of the play is that Sarah will have graphically conveyed to Manus, through some combination of speech and mime but in a language of her own that he is uniquely equipped to interpret, what she has witnessed. With what consequence? The opening of the next act indicates that it is the following day, that Yolland has disappeared and that Manus is acting suspiciously, hurriedly packing his bag to leave Ballybeg. What he attempts to pack is a ‘flimsy, overloaded bag’ (431) whose contents he struggles to hold together with some rope; it bursts asunder. The shabby cardboard suitcase tied together with a piece of string was for much of the twentieth century an ironic emblem of the Irish emigrant. The Irishman’s home was not, as Joyce had Leopold Bloom opine in Ulysses, a coffin but the next best thing, a suitcase. Manus, not Maire, will be the first of the play’s cast to leave Ballybeg, a representative of the many that would historically follow. His brother, who has made his way to the Dublin metropolis and bettered himself, offers Manus as replacement the opulent travelling bag with which he had arrived. As Manus tells Owen how to look after their father Hugh, we have the remnant of the ‘changing

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places’ scenario so central to Friel’s original conception of the play. But why is Manus determined to leave? He does not say. The idea that it will look suspicious is voiced by Owen. Throughout this exchange he makes clear that his questions are putting the point of view not from his own but from Lancey’s perspective. Never more than in this opening of Act 3 does Owen serve as the mouthpiece of the British Army officer who employs him: ‘Clear out now and Lancey’ll think you’re involved somehow’ (432). The implication this act suggests in the mind of the audience is that Yolland has been murdered and that Manus is the primary suspect. From the point of view of the military or of the police, his hasty departure can only be viewed as suspicious. Manus does confess the murderous motive of jealousy to Owen in the first account we receive of what happened the night before: ‘I had a stone in my hand when I went out looking for him – I was going to fell him. The lame scholar turned violent’ (432). Manus was disarmed by the sight of the two lovers in one another’s arms, and we may want to take that as his ultimate statement on the matter: at that point he ceded what he regarded as his prior claims to Maire’s love on the grounds that she had clearly transferred her allegiances to George Yolland. But Owen presses the inquiry with another question, which significantly Manus chooses not to answer: ‘And you didn’t see him again?’ (432). The implication is clear: Manus might well have chosen not to kill Yolland with Maire present but rather to have waited until the two had separated and George could then be got rid of. With the removal of his rival, Manus could then renew his claims. Or even if he acquiesced in Maire’s change of heart, he could punish her for her infidelity and then leave the neighbourhood in which there was no married future for him with the woman he loved. Where Maire wants to emigrate out of Ireland, to the US or to England, Manus is embarked on an ‘inner exile’, away from the encroaching, Anglicizing colonizer and towards the extreme western remoteness of the Gaelic Erris peninsula, where his mother’s people are from. The course that Manus now intends to pursue underlines the political nature of this love triangle. It is as much a cultural as a personal retreat from the forces of Anglicization and modernization that have come to Ballybeg. Sarah is clearly an allegorical figure – she was originally called Unity in the early drafts – but Maire is no less, certainly as viewed through the idealizing perspective of Yolland’s tongue-tied admiration.30 Manus’s response to Owen’s further questioning is to say ‘“Sorry?”’(432). This is a sardonic repetition of what George has said to him uncomprehendingly, but also marks a refusal to answer or to discuss the matter any further. ‘What have I to say to Lancey?’ applies just as much to the line of questioning his brother is pursuing as it does to any later interrogation by the British Captain. Manus has been the most hostile to the British presence in the O’Donnell household, the most ready to describe the map-making as ‘a bloody military operation’ (408). In Act 2 Scene 1 he proves the most reluctant to talk directly to George Yolland in the English

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language he, his father and his brother are all well able to speak. By removing himself from that household and going on the run, he will be removed from the protection his relation to Owen has up to this afforded him and is in a sense offering himself up as a political hostage. Manus is not the only Ballybeg native who will come under suspicion in any inquiry into Yolland’s disappearance. Earlier in Act 2, Yolland indicates to Owen that Lancey wants the Donnelly twins ‘for questioning’ (413). In Translations the Donnelly twins rather occupy the role of Beckett’s Godot or Brendan Behan’s quare fellow, repeatedly mentioned in the text but never putting in an appearance; rather, they remain offstage presences throughout. That presence usually carries a sinister connotation. When Manus notices their absence from the hedge school classroom, he questions Doalty about them and ‘suddenly the atmosphere is silent and alert’ (393). Bridget apropos of nothing logical then announces the fact that, according to her brother Seamus, ‘two of the soldiers’ horses were found last night at the foot of the cliffs at Machaire Buidhe’; but in Friel’s technique of juxtaposition casual sequence implies causal consequence. We are encouraged to impute the removal of the soldiers’ horses to the activities of the Donnelly twins and surmise that they are operating as guerrilla insurgents. This surmise is strengthened when we hear that Lancey wants them for questioning. And when the British Army Captain makes his threats in Act 3 and exits, the following exchange occurs between Doalty and an Owen whose loyalties are undergoing profound transformation: DOALTY: If we’d all stick together. If we knew how to defend ourselves. OWEN: Against a trained army. DOALTY: The Donnelly twins know how. OWEN: If they could be found. DOALTY: If they could be found. (He goes to the door.) Give me a shout after you’ve finished with Lancey. I might know something then. (He leaves.) (442) For a long time, I wondered why Friel did not bring the Donnelly twins directly onstage. Had he done so, as Sean O’Casey did with the IRA men who arrive in Juno and the Paycock (1926) and take away Johnny Boyle to kill him, the outcome would have been clearer. That audience in Princeton would have had their answer. But in O’Casey’s play the personal and political motivations behind Johnny’s betrayal of his boyhood friend and fellow Republican activist Robbie Tancred remain not a whit less obscure or an iota more clarified by the active physical removal of his body from the Boyle household and the stage in full view of the audience. Putting the Donnelly twins onstage runs a representational risk – that in melodramatic terms they cannot but be viewed as the villains. Friel is quite happy to run this risk in Act 3 with Captain Lancey and by extension all of the redcoats. All pretence

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of the politesse that attended the sappers’ arrival is gone; Captain Lancey’s tone and physical behaviour are threatening, and such is the level of intimidation he practises that Sarah once more loses her powers of speech, this time (it is implied) permanently. Is Friel deliberately occluding the onstage presence of the proto-IRA insurgents, the Donnelly twins, to avoid a confrontation with the contemporary resonances of their politics? The question becomes more interesting in the light of his treatment of the same issue in his late play, The Home Place (2005). There, the equivalents of the Donnelly twins are Con Doherty and Johnny McLoone, two minor characters, Catholic residents of Ballybeg rather than Anglo-Irish Protestants like Christopher Gore and his son, David. For the most part Doherty and McLoone remain in the background but emerge from the bushes surrounding the Big House and intervene directly in order to break up Richard Gore’s head-measuring experiment on the local natives. When Richard protests at their intervention, Johnny McLoone steps forward ‘and produces a cudgel from under his jacket’.31 The image is very close to that of the simian Irishman in Punch, and one can understand why Friel might have refrained earlier.32 I will return to this issue – of how events in Northern Ireland contemporary with the writing of Friel’s plays may throw their shadow and have their influence on those plays – at the close of this chapter. For now, with regard to the Donnelly twins in Translations, I would say that invisibility is appropriate as a means of representing a guerrilla army’s operations. The British Army’s presence in Ballybeg is all too palpable and visible. And as we are told in Act 3 their number has been increased by 50 in the previous hour. When a British soldier in O’Casey’s Plough protests at the unfairness of being shot at by a sniper, Fluther Good is moved to expostulate at the level and kind of response the Irish could manage in the face of an invading imperial army: ‘D’ye want us to come out in our skins an’ throw stones?’33 What made the Elizabethan wars in Ireland so protracted and bloody was precisely that the English army presence was countered by guerrilla activity rather than direct armed opposition in the field. The vast disproportion in numbers on the English side was countered by the hit-and-run tactics, or rather the hit-and-disappear modus operandi of the natives. When the Irish went out in full sight, as it were, they inevitably fell. This occurred most bloodily in the 1798 rebellion, where muskets were countered by pikes, an event strategically recalled by Hugh O’Donnell in the closing moments of the play: ‘The road to Sligo. A spring morning. 1798. Going into battle. Do you remember, James? Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders’ (445). In his monologue, Hugh refers to the fact that he had ‘recently married my goddess, Caitlin Dubh Nic Reactainn, may she rest in peace’ (445). This is the only reference to the dead wife/mother in the play and one of the very few to a Celtic (rather than a Greek) goddess. Her name ‘Caitlin Dubh’ translates as ‘Dark Cathleen’, a fusion of ‘Dark Rosaleen’ and ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’. In historic terms, we are back to

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1798 and the French-supported uprising against the English; in dramatic terms, the reference is to Yeats’s and Gregory’s play. Hugh’s monologue revises and reverses the myth of Cathleen ni Houlihan as thoroughly as The Loves of Cass McGuire did. He remembers Jimmy Jack and himself not as two old men on the brink of the grave, but as restored through memory to two ‘young gallants’; and goes on to describe it as ‘heroic’ to leave his young wife and their infant son. But the two gallants went no further than Glenties and Phelan’s pub where they got ‘homesick for Athens’ and walked the 23 miles back home. Had they persisted, there is no question but they would have been killed – the retribution for 1798 was particularly bloody, with public hangings of those who survived the battlefields to dissuade future rebellions. Where Yeats’s and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan called for young men to leave their wives and infant children to go out and die for Ireland, Friel’s goddess has called her young man back from bloody sacrifice to embrace her living flesh. But there has been a retreat by the two young men, also, into the protection of classical literature. In the political upheaval that develops in the play, with the British presence once more a hostile one, Hugh’s response is finally to agree to teach Maire Cathach the English she has all along sought from him, to wield not a pike but the English language the colonizer has imposed. The difficulty remains to convey Irish experience in this new medium or, as the play puts it, ‘to interpret between privacies’, but as Hugh also recognizes ‘it’s all we have’ (446). But if the overt confrontation with the British has gone underground in the intervening 35 years, it issues in the course of Translations not only in Hugh’s cultural engagement, but in the now covert activities of the Donnelly twins. The line of contact between the O’Donnell household and the Donnelly twins is always through Bridget and Doalty. They are the ones responsible for the insurgent mystique that attaches to the sounding of that double name throughout the play. Perhaps the Donnelly twins are absent from the school because the fishing on which their livelihood depends is at its height and they have these more pressing economic matters to attend to. Perhaps the business with the two soldiers’ horses is little more than a prank, on a par with Doalty’s mischievous moving of the theodolite, to indicate a presence rather than to foment an uprising. But are Doalty’s antics all that innocent? At one point George thanks him for coming up with a scythe and cutting ‘a pathway round my tent and from the tent down to the road – so that my feet won’t get wet with the dew’ (415). But that benign motive for Doalty’s act is supplied by Yolland himself, and others suggest themselves. Perhaps George Yolland is being singled out for the attention of the insurgent Donnelly twins. Or perhaps they are being looked to as ‘the shadow of gunmen’, to invoke another O’Casey title, innocent bystanders robed in the cloak of insurgents to meet the inner psychic and political needs of the community. In addition to his general status as a British soldier in Ballybeg, George Yolland may be being set up for particular punishment because he is

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attempting to cross over strictly defined boundaries – between Irish and English, military and civilian, colonizer and native. This is certainly the strong suggestion unwittingly planted by Jimmy Jack when towards the end of Act 3 he follows Maire’s declaration that she will wait in the classroom for George’s return with the following statement on tribal loyalties and their infringement: ‘Do you know the Greek word endogamein? It means to marry within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry outside the tribe. And you don’t cross those borders casually – both sides get very angry’ (446). The immediate application of these remarks is to the ‘marriage’ Jimmy Jack is proposing to Pallas Athene. But the inference the audience supplies is to the liaison between Maire Chatach and George Yolland, whose clandestine meeting has been observed and reported back to the native community. The British soldier may therefore have been killed by one or more Ballybeg inhabitants as punishment for an act of sexual and political transgression with a native woman. This remains a distinct possibility. But if so, it will predictably bring an awful consequence in its wake on the entire community, as we see from what is threatened in Act 3: the shooting of all livestock, a series of evictions and the levelling of every house in the parish. The Seamus Heaney poem ‘Punishment’ treats of these matters, paralleling ancient barbaric rites in Jutland with the shaving of Catholic women’s heads and their tarring and feathering for consorting with members of the British Army on service in Northern Ireland: I can see her drowned body in the bog, […] her shaved head like a stubble of black corn […] I am the artful voyeur […] I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge.34 With the disappearance of both lovers overnight, we may suspect that Maire, too, has been killed, that she has suffered the fate of the Viking woman, the adulteress, in Heaney’s poem and been scapegoated by the community for her act of sexual betrayal. There is for much of the third act the strong possibility that there are two, not one, drowned bodies in the bog. (Heaney’s lines uncannily echo the fate we presume to have befallen Yolland.) But Maire

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Cathach turns up safe and physically unharmed in Act 3. Her opening declaration that she is ‘going off my head’ (436) suggests she has suffered some kind of trauma. But the emphasis placed by the stage directions on the fact that she is bareheaded means the audience can immediately determine whether she has had her head shaven – the traditional punishment of the woman who sexually transgresses – and confirm that she has not. The actress Kate Ingram, as discussed earlier, made something of the fact that her rain-bedewed curly hair was still intact; and if the swaying of the hair (it is ‘in disarray’) testifies to Maire Chatach’s distress, it also testifies to the fact that she has not been specifically scapegoated by the community. I have another, more radical suspect to name for the murder of Yolland in what I take to be an act of sexual transgression. The love triangle between Maire, Manus and Yolland is very much on the surface of the play, as is that originally in place between Sarah, Manus and Maire. In each case a circuit of desire is established, which the two examples confirm as a pattern. Manus overlooks Sarah’s romantic interest, in the same way that Maire repeatedly cold-shoulders his. The latter’s behaviour is such that one is forced to ask on what grounds Manus expects Maire will become his bride. Her concerns relating to marriage are economic and, when Manus refuses to put in for the position as national school teacher so as not to go against his father, she spurns him. But she seems no more interested in him as a prospective husband when he is offered the teaching position on Inish Meadhon. Maire’s interests, romantic and economic, are directed elsewhere, away from Ballybeg and indeed Ireland, first towards the United States, then in the direction of England. As these instances attest, romantic and libidinal desire are very much separated from the act and fact of marriage in the play. There is, I would suggest, another romantic triangle operating in it, more subliminally and sub-textually, but with no less disturbing and catastrophic complications. That is the friendship between Owen and Yolland, and the extent to which it is threatened by George’s attraction to Maire. In suggesting a bond of homoerotic attraction between the two young men, I am responding to the degree to which this element runs through Friel’s drama from the start. It has already been intimated in my remarks about the relationship between the virile St Columba and the young English novice Oswald in the homosocial world of Iona in The Enemy Within. The gay sub-text of such a relationship becomes more explicit on a number of key occasions in Friel’s writing career, never more so than in his 1971 play, The Gentle Island, which was discussed in Chapter 2 as the most explicit outcome of Friel’s work in the 1960s with Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir. What emerges clearly when one directly compares the virtually unknown Gentle Island with the acclaimed contemporary classic Translations are the strong structural and thematic affinities they share. In both plays, an isolated rural community set in its traditional ways is disrupted by the arrival of male outsiders. In both the male outsiders are initially welcomed by the

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principal family of the place, headed by a patriarch named Manus; and in both the mood alters tragically with an act of sexual transgression leading to an outburst of violence. In Translations, the disruptive outsiders are English soldiers; in The Gentle Island, they are two gay men from Dublin. A clear current of mutual attraction develops between the younger of the two men and the married son of the household, with the violent outcome that has already been discussed. In the end, Manus Sweeney’s self-righteous outburst denouncing ‘them queers!’35 is all he has to cling to – his illusion about the one son’s marriage dispelled, and the other son quitting the island to follow the rest of the island’s emigrated population to Britain. The two outsiders, initially welcomed but then subjected to increasing hostility culminating in an act of violence, have served to expose and lay bare the inner shortcomings of this depleted island community, its inner compromises and wellkept secrets. Accordingly, they must be scapegoated as ‘responsible’ for the tragedy that has unfolded, punished by an act of violence that specifically targets their sexual orientation. In the light cast by The Gentle Island, the disruptive outsiders who arrive into the settled community of Ballybeg in the course of Translations can be seen in gendered terms as masculine – at one level, the British Army metonymically represented by Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland; at another the two male friends, Owen and George, or perhaps I should say, Roland (as Owen now calls himself) and George. As in The Gentle Island, the outsiders come from Dublin, the place deep within the Anglicized Pale to which Owen has long since emigrated. We learn a certain amount about Owen’s life in Dublin – that he is wealthy, that he can afford to run a big house with servants. But absolutely nothing is said about his emotional or sexual life, about whether he is married or not. The question is explicitly raised in the play, when George asks Owen after he meets Manus: ‘Why doesn’t he marry?’ ‘Can’t afford to, I suppose’ (412). Certainly, there is no evidence that Owen is married, and the economic reason clearly does not operate for him as it does for his brother, since Owen can readily afford to. The second act is a diptych, all the more so if one balances and parallels the love scene between George and Maire in its second half with the long intimate interlude in its first between the two young men. Physically, George Yolland here presents a strong contrast to the way he appeared in the previous act, where he was stiff, formal and in uniform. At the start of Act 2, with the summer heat even more pronounced, he is represented lying on the ground, in his shirt sleeves, and drinking steadily from the poteen. The key moment occurs when Owen builds to telling Yolland that his name is not the Anglicized Roland (hence lessening the close mirroring between the two men’s names) but the Gaelic original, Owen (more properly, Eoghain). As an Anglo-Irish compromise or hybrid Owen and Yolland suggest rebaptizing him ‘Oland’. In this brief moment of linguistic union that temporarily overcomes all that divides them, the two men simultaneously undergo a form

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of bodily release or liberation, laughing heartily and ‘roll[ing] about’ on the floor. Yolland proclaims: ‘A thousand baptisms! Welcome to Eden!’ (422). If this is an Edenic scene, and commentators have been quick to develop this point, it should be noted that there are only two figures on stage to embody Adam and Eve, and both are male. Manus enters on this scene of Dionysiac excess and when he is offered some of the drink, backs off by saying: ‘Not if that’s what it does to you.’ The one younger Irish person unaccounted for on the night of the dance is Owen. He does not seem to have attended, and nothing is said on the score of his whereabouts. At the beginning of Act 3, Owen adopts the role of inquisitor modelled on Lancey, but says nothing on his own behalf or of his own whereabouts the night before. Perhaps there is a self-interested motive behind Owen’s evident eagerness to advance all of the non-sanguinary possibilities occasioning the fact of George’s disappearance: he had drunk too much, he slipped and fell. Everything he proposes is designed to direct interpretation away from the possibility that George Yolland has been murdered. In The Gentle Island, Philly’s brother questions Sarah’s accusation by saying: ‘it’s black dark in the boathouse. How could you see in the dark?’36 The lighting for the love-scene between George and Maire requires that most of the scene be blacked out, in order to lose the classroom setting, and that it be played ‘down front’ (426). Sarah is described as ‘entering’ (430) but in most of the productions I have seen, she emerges from the dark and may have been there for some time. Perhaps someone else has been watching all along and has been stirred to the same violent jealousy as his brother Manus later admits to.37 The possibility of a gay sub-text to Translations is only beginning to emerge in productions of the play. The nationalist political readings have dominated since the play’s premiere. But over 26 years on, the matter of sexual politics is firmly on the agenda. The question of the disappearance of George Yolland is one that has exercised not just audiences and readers of the play but its stage interpreters too. The response of director Garry Hynes cited at the start of the chapter surmised that Yolland was at the bottom of a lake. The Princeton’s audiences subsequent question – ‘who put him there?’ – is one addressed by Sean Holmes, the director of the National Theatre production of Translations that toured the UK in 2005. His was the most sensitive, thoughtful and probing interpretation of the play I had seen since the original in 1980. In response to my enquiries, Holmes replied: I always thought the two brothers, the Donnelly twins, killed Yolland and then dumped his body at sea. I think it’s what we felt [i.e. the actors and other creative personnel involved in the 2005 production] and the moment in Act 3 between Owen and Doalty is where it seems to be implied. There’s a strong feeling he will never be found – I mean this more as a theatrical feeling than [one] based on hard evidence.

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The absence of Yolland, the hole he leaves in Act 3, is so strong that it is as if he has been erased – as the soldiers are erasing a culture. It leaves Maire in terrible pain – almost as if Yolland was a beautiful dream from which she has awoken into a nightmare; there is nothing of him left.38 When confronted with the various other suspects and lines of argument I have brought forward in this analysis, Holmes further responded: The genius of the play – of Act 3 especially – is that all of these possibilities are open. Personally I don’t think Manus murdered Yolland. The complexity of feeling when he describes just shouting ‘You’re a bastard, Yolland’ (432) in Irish and his inability to resort to violence rings true to me. But again there is no evidence that I’m right. It is all about what is spoken. The play changes in Act 3. It becomes a Greek drama with everyone bringing in reports from the outside. So everything is slanted and open to interpretation because we haven’t witnessed what actually happened. In that perhaps centuries of Anglo-Irish relations are encapsulated! Everything is a story, a possibility.39 Bearing in mind Sean Holmes’s closing remark about Anglo-Irish relations, I have a final suggestion to make: that George Yolland has not been murdered. Or rather that there is no evidence he has been murdered, since no body is produced in the course of the play to substantiate the claim. The physical disappearance of a British Army officer while on duty in the occupied territory of Ireland is enough to create the supposition in everyone’s mind that he has been murdered. The onus of responsibility is shifted to the native community, who must produce the body in order to be cleared both of guilt and punishment. No trial is held, no body is produced, no witnesses are called. J. H. Andrews may well be right: ‘Confronted with crime or civil disturbance, what Captain Lancey would really have done was withdraw and leave everything to the local constabulary.’40 And how would they have proceeded? The distance of 150 years opens up a speculative gap of possibility in the recreation of historic scenarios as drama. And the decade or so prior to the writing of Translations in the late 1970s offered more pressing possible scenarios to fill that gap of speculation. The British Army had become a marked feature on the streets of Belfast and Derry during the 1970s. As Henry Patterson puts it in Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, the army’s presence ‘had grown from the preTroubles garrison of 2,000 to 7,500 by September 1969’.41 The first British soldier was not shot until February 1971, but over the course of that summer ‘bombings tipped the scale in favour of internment’,42 or to give it its full designation ‘internment without trial’. The new prime minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, determined on a ‘get-tough’ policy and against even the advice of Ian Paisley introduced internment on 9 August 1971.

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Hundreds of male civilians were summarily apprehended by the British Army and placed in prison. They were subject to no charge, submitted to no trial; they were taken in on the basis of suspicion and what the intelligence lists suggested. The policy of internment proved disastrous. For one thing, it did not succeed in its objective, since the conflict only became more bloody and intense: ‘In 1971 prior to internment there had been thirty-four deaths; within two days of its introduction seventeen people had died, and by the end of the year 140 more.’43 Internment operated indiscriminately, locking up those who had done nothing with those who had, and not caring to distinguish between them, since there was no evidential basis on which one could. Further, the operation of internment was carried out exclusively on a sectarian basis, since ‘not one loyalist was interned, adding to the outrage of the Catholic community’.44 Finally, the net effect of this policy was to provide ‘a major boost’ to recruitment for the newly formed Provisional IRA and its dedication to the armed struggle.45 A great deal of this is reflected in the developments of Translations: the escalation of troop numbers we hear about in Act 3 and the much more aggressive deployment of that army presence; the outrage caused to the Catholic community by the threatened evictions and clearances; and the development of a proto-IRA through the politicization of Owen, his exchanges with Doalty on the score of mounting some sort of organized resistance and the promised consolidation with the hitherto shunned and isolated Donnelly twins. It is worth remarking in this context that the evidence against the Donnelly twins is highly circumstantial. In the exchange between Owen and Doalty cited by Sean Holmes as ‘implying’ the twins killed Yolland, they are never mentioned directly in connection with his disappearance. Rather, their names are invoked in connection with what has followed in the wake of that event. The suspicion that Yolland has been killed by the natives is sufficient in and of itself to bring about the subsequent escalation of British Army activity. The Donnelly twins are to be sought out by Doalty because they can give advice on how the Catholics of Ballybeg might best ‘defend’ themselves ‘against a trained army’ (442). The development of events in Act 3 turns on the radicalization of Owen, not only his (re)turning to the native skin he thought he had shed in becoming Roland but his willingness to join forces, to consolidate with the guerrilla insurgents, who in turn would become more numerous, more active within the Catholic community. Henry Patterson points out how the introduction of internment had precisely the opposite effect from what was intended. Far from damaging the Provisional IRA, the introduction of ‘internment had provided a major boost to Provisional recruitment’.46 Internment proved so disastrous a policy that it was soon abandoned. But the damage had been done. The violence of reprisal and counter-reprisal had now developed its own momentum, as was graphically demonstrated in Derry on 30 January 1972 when members of the Parachute regiment of the British Army opened fire on Civil Rights marchers in Derry and killed

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13 civilians. The events of what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ were at the centre of Friel’s 1973 play, The Freedom of the City, as discussed in the previous chapter. But the erosion of Civil Rights established by the introduction of internment was not to end with its abolition. Rather, it was to be extended to mainland Britain when Westminster responded to the bombings in Birmingham with the Prevention of Terrorism Act, ‘which allowed for detention for up to seven days, and provided for the exclusion from the rest of the UK of “undesirables” from the North’.47 Friel has subsequently said of his Bloody Sunday play that it was written too immediately after the event, too much in the heat of the moment: ‘the experience of Bloody Sunday wasn’t adequately distilled in me. I wrote it out of some kind of heat and some kind of immediate passion that I would want to have quieted a bit before I did it.’48 Friel’s drama after The Freedom of the City shows a greater distancing from how the Troubles would be represented in his plays, both historically and dramaturgically, a greater ‘distillation’, but the pressing issues of Northern Ireland are never absent as a context. Translations is indeed a history play; but the history it is representing continued to unfold as it was being written in the late 1970s and staged at Derry’s Guild Hall in September 1980. The relation between the past and present that the play involves is best understood in the light of what Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek argues in his 2000 study, The Fragile Absolute: When we say that the present redeems the past itself, that the past itself contained signs which pointed towards the present, we are not making a historicist-relativist statement about how […] we always interpret the past from our present horizon of understanding; how in defining past epochs we always – consciously or not – imply our present point of view. What we are claiming is something much more radical: what the proper historical stance […] ‘relativizes’ is not the past (always distorted by our present point of view) but, paradoxically, the present itself – our present can be conceived only as the outcome (not of what actually happened in the past, but also) of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past. In other words, it is not only […] that we always perceive our past within the horizon of our present preoccupations, that in dealing with the past we are in effect dealing with the ghosts of the past whose resuscitation enables us to confront our present dilemmas. It is also that we, the ‘actual’ present historical agents, have to conceive of ourselves as the materialization of the ghosts of past generations, as the stage in which these past generations retroactively resolve their deadlocks.49 Friel’s interest in writing a history play does not subscribe to a linear, one-way trajectory of history that proceeds from the past to the present. Rather, the dynamic (as Z˘iz˘ek suggests) is to establish a two-way process in which ‘our

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present can be conceived only as the outcome […] of the crushed potentials for the future that were contained in the past’. This was to be no less the case in the next two original plays Friel was to write, 1988’s Making History where the subject becomes metatextually explicit, and 1990’s Dancing at Lughnasa, where the ‘crushed potentials’ of ‘those five brave Glenties women’50 of Ireland in the 1930s were vividly realized through the responses of audiences worldwide. Translations is the most subtle of the three on this score, the most pervaded by the spirit Z˘iz˘ek describes. Translations premiered in the Guildhall in Derry on 23 September 1980, the inaugural production of the Field Day Theatre Company co-founded by Friel and actor Stephen Rea. The Guildhall was chosen for the premiere of this and each subsequent annual Field Day production in part because Derry at the time lacked a theatre (it has a fine one now). Like the arrival of the three Civil Rights marchers in that space in The Freedom of the City, the staging of Translations was a symbolic appropriation of a discriminatory civic space, for theatrically subversive and liberationist ends. The audience that gathered in the Guildhall in 1980 for the play’s premiere and the inauguration of the Field Day project represented the complete political spectrum of Northern Ireland – from Sinn Fein and the SDLP on the Catholic side through various shades of Unionism on the other.51 Entering from the war zone of their divided communities and frisked on the way in by the British Army, they were entering and sharing the same space and anticipating by several decades what was to be put in place by the Good Friday Agreement and the power-sharing Executive. The audience was not being invited to witness a piece of fossilized history, one that foregrounded the resentments of one section of the population. Rather, they were being invited to enter a continuum and a process that was still ongoing and in which they were actively engaged, to face up to the obligation enjoined on the entire community to resolve their deadlocks. As in much of Friel’s profoundest drama, the appeal is from characters on the theatrical stage who are either dead within the fiction of the play or are speaking to us from the historical past. Their past-ness becomes present through the medium of theatre; and we in turn are moved from our present-ness to envisage the future, to provide a resolution for these unsatisfied ghosts whose dilemmas continue to haunt us.

7 Memory and History

In the 24 original plays of Brian Friel, memory is a central preoccupation and its staging an ongoing and evolving dramaturgic issue. At the core of the breakthrough Philadelphia, Here I Come! is lodged Gar O’Donnell’s precarious and ultimately doomed attempt to share a childhood memory with his father, of ‘an afternoon in May – oh, fifteen years ago’1 when the two of them were fishing on a lake in a blue boat. The young man’s reminiscence is activated by the memory that the boat was blue and culminates in his father commencing to sing. What is conspicuous by its absence from the memory is language and its articulation: ‘maybe we had been chatting – I don’t remember – it doesn’t matter – but between us at that moment there was this great happiness, […] although nothing was being said’ (83). In his final work, Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur invokes Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia to discuss memories that present themselves as a ‘simple presence to mind, which I shall later call simple evocation’.2 They do so in a purely pictorial way, and ‘memory, in this particular sense, is directly characterized as affection (pathos), which distinguishes it precisely from recollection’ (15). Such is the pathos that suffuses the scene where Gar attempts to match up the picture of the blue boat he has in his mind with a complementary one he hopes may be lodged in his father’s. But the details fail to match up: S. B. O’Donnell recalls a brown boat and claims he never sang ‘All Around My Hat’. Gar’s private memory remains just that, a subjective image of the past. In ‘Self-Portrait’, Friel discusses an autobiographical memory of a particular day from his childhood to which this incident is indebted: a scene where his nine-year-old self walks home from a day’s fishing with his father. But Friel goes on to outline the factual discrepancies which indicate that, as he puts it, ‘the fact is a fiction’: ‘There is no lake along that muddy road. […] Have I imagined the scene then? Or is it a composite of two or three different episodes? The point is – I don’t think it matters. What matters is that […] for some reason this vivid memory is there in the storehouse of the mind.’3 Ricoeur early in his study posits an apparent polar contrast between the 152

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‘facts’ of what he reluctantly describes as ‘positivism’ and the ‘imagination’ associated with memory, similar to the absolute distinction Friel is formulating here. Ricoeur argues that ‘we need to be alert for one confusion, that between confirmed facts and past events’ and to guard against ‘the illusion of believing that what we call a fact coincides with what really happened, or with the living memory of eyewitnesses’ (178). If Gar O’Donnell’s evocation of the blue boat functions exclusively as a private memory, one which has no resonance in the public domain, then Casimir O’Donnell’s memories in Aristocrats are at the opposite end of the spectrum in that they exclusively have to do with public figures. The people he recalls are not primarily members of his family but cultural and historical celebrities who are related to the family through visits to the O’Donnell Big House in remote Donegal. Many of them predecease Casimir’s own lifespan and are evoked through objects in the drawing room with which their bodies came in contact. But W. B. Yeats is imaged directly through a face-to-face encounter with Casimir, in particular the poet’s ‘cold, cold eyes’, which he remembers ‘vividly’.4 Yeats’s life is a matter of public record, however, and Tom Hoffnung is able to point out a chronological discrepancy that completely undermines the truth-claim of Casimir’s memory: that the poet died in 1939, three months before Casimir was born. However positively we treat the term, we have no choice but to describe his memory of the poet Yeats as fiction rather than fact, while inclining to agree with Eamon that there are ‘certain truths […] that are beyond Tom’s kind of scrutiny’ (309–10). Two of the plays so far briefly touched on under the category of memory, 1964’s Philadelphia, Here I Come! and 1979’s Aristocrats, operate at opposite ends of a private/public spectrum. The memories represented in the two plays can also be considered under the transvalued categories of fact and fiction, something strongly suggested by Friel himself in his prose commentaries and within the plays themselves. In the three plays I wish to consider in this chapter – 1979’s Faith Healer, 1988’s Making History and 1990’s Dancing at Lughnasa – memory is central to their construction. But it is not memory primarily as evocation, as in Friel’s early Philadelphia, or as cultural citation, as in Casimir’s family reminiscences. Rather, they dramatize memory in relation to history, the fruitful conjunction afforded by the title of Ricouer’s book and its central concern. When considering ‘facts’, Ricoeur is quick to point out that they do not have an isolated or independent existence, as so many of the attestations on behalf of their authority would suggest: It is an illusion to believe that […] facts could through the virtue of their literal representation be dissociated from their representation in the form of events in a history; events, history, plot, all go together on the plane of figuration. (257)

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Facts, he argues, do not have an independent existence outside a narrative and, accordingly, every figuration is a narrative configuration or reconfiguration. Ricouer’s argument moves beyond the simple pathos or evocation of the past in Philadelphia, Here I Come! when the emphasis shifts from memory to reminiscence in Aristotle’s De memoria et reminiscentia. The double title is necessary to ‘distinguish simple presence to mind […] from recollection as a search’ (17). This latter activity requires an elaborate and active recollection, an open-ended process, rather than the simple presence to mind of preformed and unchanging images (like a blue boat). Memory as an active process of recollection draws Faith Healer into the same zone of consideration as the two other overtly historical and historicized plays. Making History dramatizes the life of Hugh O’Neill, the sixteenth-century Earl of Tyrone; the drama is split between the making of Irish history in the Elizabethan wars by the actions of the O’Neill and the making of history by Archbishop Peter Lombard as he writes up his historical narrative of the period. Dancing at Lughnasa is Friel’s most autobiographical play, based as it is on childhood memories of his mother and four aunts, but unlike Gar O’Donnell the play’s narrator Michael casts his mind back to a precisely historicized ‘summer of 1936’.5 ‘Recollection as a search’ is central to the construction of meaning and identity in all three. Faith Healer is the most challenging and complex of Friel’s works, one whose brilliance resides in its dazzling theatricality. As we have received it, Faith Healer is made up of four successive monologues, the first and last by the faith healer of the title, Frank Hardy, the second by his wife Grace, and the third by his cockney manager, Teddy. The three characters whose lives are so interwoven in the history they have shared between them never get to share the stage space; each stands alone and delivers their monologue directly to the audience. This adds a particular resonance to the curtain call for Faith Healer, where the three get to join hands only after the play has ended. As Bert O. States has remarked, there is a certain phenomenological sense in which the actor taking the curtain call ‘remains in character – or, to put it a better way, the character remains in the actor, like a ghost’.6 The four monologues contain much to intrigue on their own terms, considered singly as one individual’s perspective on a conflicted history intertwined between three people: Frank Hardy’s radically disjointed view of his ‘gift’ of curing people from their physical ailments, oscillating between whether he is a magician or a con man; his wife Grace’s dependence on him joined to a lacerating self-awareness of the price she has had to pay for her lifelong devotion; and the down-at-heel, comic cockney stage manager, with his hyperbolic claims on behalf of his client and the fruitless investment he has in both the man and the woman. But these individual testimonies are immensely complicated and enriched by their juxtaposition in the final form of the play. For each of the monologues in turn calls seriously into question a great deal of what we have already heard. Those questions

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accumulate around what, precisely, occurred when they stopped off in Kinlochbervie ‘about as far north as you can go in Scotland’7 (and the same phrase is repeated by all three) and what exactly precipitated the fatal turn of events when the trio brought Frank back to Ireland, to (where else?) ‘a village called Ballybeg, not far from Donegal town’ (and again the geographic detail is repeated twice) (338, 351, 367). Where we might look for the fourth and final monologue to resolve these questions, it opens with Frank’s teasing question after he has spoken the place name ‘Kinlochbervie’ three times: ‘But I’ve told you all that, haven’t I?’ (370). And what follows in his detailed description of his encounter with the man in the wheelchair he is seeking to cure only extends and deepens the radiant mystery at the heart of the play rather than resolving it into banality. Nowhere in all of the manuscripts of Friel’s plays contained in the National Library’s Archive is there a greater transformation or a greater degree of structural modification and development between the firsts drafts and the final script of the play as produced than with Faith Healer. And the shocking aspect of this metamorphosis is that far from springing full-blown from the head of Brian Friel in something akin to its final, formal perfection the manuscripts of Faith Healer would appear to reveal the arbitrary, the contingent and the downright messy operating in relation to this most fastidious of craftsmen. By November of 1975, Friel had drafted a play entitled The Faith Healer, a single monologue, spoken by Frank Hardy, scarcely long enough (at 14 pages) to make a one-act play. The next development that suggested itself was not a second monologue but a second one-act play thematically related to the first but dissimilar in character and plot – that is, analogous to his 1967 play, Lovers, with its ‘Winners’ and ‘Losers’. This second short play was entitled The Game and centred on a long-married couple seeking to spice up their jaded marital relations by playing a game in which they try to outfox one another with a succession of lies in which the other person is encouraged to believe. The most frequent stratagem is for the husband to maintain that the game has now ended for the day and that what he next says to his wife should be believed; the other person is right to suspect the truth of this claim. The ploy makes it difficult to determine at what point the game is suspended, with the inference that it continues in a less overt way to permeate the daily relationship between the couple and their spoken exchanges. Friel’s The Game is reminiscent of Harold Pinter’s The Lovers, in which a married couple juice up their jaded sexual relationship by assuming roles and enacting fantasies of submission and domination. The play is less explicitly sexual than Pinter’s, but when his wife is stung into retaliating she does so by claiming an extra-marital affair. And one of Friel’s notes reveals the extent to which ‘the game is a sex-act, with him always the loser to her castrating ploys’.8 The thematic link to The Faith Healer is twofold. The husband Noel upon occasion brings in various posters he has designed for the commercial Hollywood fare playing at cinemas around

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Omagh, an outward and visible sign of what has become of his original aspiration to be an artist. One of the few props in Faith Healer is the poster proclaiming ‘The Fantastic Francis Hardy/Faith Healer/One Night Only’ (331). The poster is large but far from pristine; the stage directions indicate that it ‘is soiled and abused’. Frank later points to and identifies himself with it as ‘the man on the tatty banner’ (332). The other link between the two plays is the deeply interdependent, deeply conflicted relationship between husband and wife. This perception may well have contributed to Friel’s decision to add a second monologue, centred on Grace, entitled Faith Healer’s Wife. Grace’s monologue necessarily concentrates more on the relationship with Frank than his does on his relationship with her. He is central to her being; the faith healing is central to his, and when he is concentrating on it she is erased, as she comes to recognize: ‘And then, for him, I didn’t exist. Many, many, many times I didn’t exist for him’ (344). The play (as it existed in September 1976) was given the collective title of Bannermen. The thematic link (and symmetrical balance) between The Faith Healer and The Game had now been disrupted by the addition of a third dramatic text. And the complementary relationship that was created between the two ‘Faith Healer’ monologues of Frank and Grace created a strong gravitational pull that left The Game (always the weaker text) stranded and exposed. This was suggested mildly by the few close associates to whom Friel showed the play. But it took the actor Niall Tóibín to point out that if a third piece was required to fill out the evening it should be a third ‘Faith Healer’ monologue rather than the increasingly anomalous Game. Where was the missing monologue from the third member of the trio, the stage manager? Friel responded positively to the suggestion, dropped The Game and rapidly drafted the comic tour-de-force that is Teddy’s monologue. As well as being a fine serious actor, Tóibín is a razor-sharp satirist who has done a good deal of standup comedy; and in his stage and film portrayals frequently portrays a fast-talking hustler. His contribution is indelibly imprinted in Teddy. Tóibín never got to play the part but was, however, cast as Archbishop Lombard in the Field Day premiere of Making History. Friel had been in contact with his old friend, producer Oscar Lewenstein, throughout; and when the latter read the three Faith Healer monologues he astutely pointed out that it would be difficult to secure a big-name actor for the part of Frank Hardy if he did not make a return after the first monologue; and so Friel agreed to supply a fourth and final monologue (having held over material from and somewhat shortened the first three) in which Frank would return to the stage and deliver the play’s last words: ‘At long last I was renouncing chance’ (376). The line accrues considerable irony in the light of our knowledge of the play’s gestation and the role chance had played in it. When Michael Colgan, the director of the Gate Theatre, staged a revival of Faith Healer there in early 2006 with Ralph Fiennes in the lead, the film actor’s star power ensured the entire six-week run was sold out in

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advance, attracting an audience that in the main had no prior knowledge of the play and scant experience of the theatre. Ingrid Craigie had the difficult task as Grace of stepping into the space just vacated by Fiennes and establishing her own authority. Given her immense stage skill she succeeded in doing so. But when the play’s intermission came after her monologue a good many of the punters had to be reassured during it that Ralph Fiennes would indeed stage a return in the play’s second half. On the complicated evolution that has just been outlined, Nicholas Grene has commented: ‘The decision to go for the monologue format was a hesitant one. It took [Friel] a long time, one substantial wrong turn, and two crucial practical prompts from theatrical colleagues to yield the four-part play.’9 But there are two factors in the play’s gestation that need to be stressed and which argue against the notion of haphazardness. One is the fact that Friel had been working intensively on Faith Healer for a full six months before writing the first 14-page monologue. Furthermore, his notes reveal that the plot and characterization were fundamentally in place from the start. The three characters, Frank Hardy faith healer, wife Grace and a character called the Manager (not yet named as Teddy), are all present in the first scene written, and so is their basic characterization and mode of speech. On 29 May 1975, Friel drafts a speech by Teddy in which the stage manager’s entire later monologue is latent, the first lines of which read: ‘Listen to me, my darlings; he was the biggest thing I ever had. And I managed some fantastic properties in my day.’10 The one alteration is that ‘my darlings’ is crossed out in manuscript and replaced with what would become Teddy’s defining mode of address and term of endearment: ‘dear heart’. The plot matches up in its outlines with the more elaborated and detailed scenario of the finished play: the faith-healing trio after a particularly bad six months on the road have decided to return to Ireland and to Ballybeg, where Frank has matched himself against a crippled man from ‘the back of the mountain’.11 (At this early stage, Friel is considering making him a blood relative of Frank’s.) That the outcome is fatal is revealed by the central aspect of the opening scene: it takes place after Frank’s funeral. Grace and Teddy are tidying up and talking about him. But Frank is also present on stage, talking about Grace in the third person. The faith healer is dead before the play begins, as in the final version, living on to investigate the details of his life; to paraphrase Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, to have lived is not enough for him; he has to talk about it,12 to begin an active search for meaning in his history. Even at this early stage, Friel is considering for Frank Hardy the possibility of ‘an Eamonn Kelly type narration, something between a seanchaí and Job’.13 The reference to Kelly, who played S. B. O’Donnell in the original production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in Dublin and New York, is not to the actor’s participation in stage plays but to his renowned theatrical one-man shows where he occupied a three-cornered stool and directly addressed the

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audience with a beguiling mix of folklore, social observation and humour in a rich Kerry dialect. Friel’s comment astutely rebuts the frequent misjudgement that his extensive use of narration and monologues in the plays is some sort of carry-over or displacement from his early apprenticeship in writing short stories. The development of Faith Healer serves as a strong cultural reminder that Irish drama arguably had its origins as much in the communal art of the seanchaí, the act of oral storytelling, as in a more formal written script performed on a proscenium stage in an urban centre. With the characters, their speech and story largely in place from the beginning, the key question or decision for Friel hinges on that of form. How will the story of the faith healer be told? The decision to bring a dead character on stage and have him or her speak indicates a break with naturalism and is something Friel had been experimenting with since Lovers and The Freedom of the City, as we have seen. The mixed mode – of naturalism and anti-naturalism – which Friel tries out in the opening scene of Faith Healer is something he is going to retain and develop in Dancing at Lughnasa, where the narrator Michael is present on stage in a scene from the past that restores his dead mother and four aunts to dramatic life. Michael has a double presence: as the adult who narrates and the child who experiences. But Frank, Grace and Teddy occupy the same temporal plane and so the experience is of a different order. In his drafting of the play, Friel for some time considers pursuing a largely ‘naturalistic situation’ where the action is interrupted, ‘frozen’, by brief stylized scenes from the past. The key decision is made in May 1975, ‘that the play will not found itself in any kind of naturalism or realism’, and is allied to the question: could the faith healer ‘be his own narrator’?14 All of these formal decisions regarding the play hinge on the relation of the past to the present. With the crucial decision to make not just Frank but ultimately all three of the characters their own narrators, Friel has found his solution. At a stroke, any question of directly presenting or representing the scenes from the past, when Frank Hardy was still alive, is removed. The play can now directly enter a profound engagement with the issues of memory and history, since the audience is not presented with a direct representation of what occurred in the three characters’ shared past. All we have to rely on are the three characters’ separate accounts of what occurred, or to more precisely employ a term that is central to Ricoeur’s linkage of memory and history, their testimony. The monologues are delivered in an almost bare space, one that mirrors back the fact that it is set in a theatre and that the faith healing is itself a metaphor for the playwright’s art. But it contains a few tell-tale props: the poster already described and three rows of chairs. These are signs of the extent to which the faith-healing performance described by all three characters is being re-enacted before us. This in turn makes the audience itself a crucial participant in the faith-healing ritual, extending the drama from the confines of the stage to embrace the entire auditorium. Other

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props necessary to the night’s performance are missing but are distributed throughout the course of the play. When Teddy finally appears in Part Three he is accompanied by his ‘amplifying system’ (336), a record-player and the recorded sound of Jerome Kern’s ‘The Way You Look Tonight’; and in Part Two Grace is there at her table. We come looking for the ‘miracle’ of theatre even though experience tells us, and Frank confirms, that ‘nine times out of ten nothing at all happened’ (334). His opening monologue raises its audience’s hopes and at the same time shows why they should not do so, why they are foolish to be so wooed, an act of calculated theatrical defiance. The audience in the theatre, therefore, stands in for those who come to a deconsecrated Welsh chapel or a Scottish kirk seeking a miracle; the play is a rehearsal of the very process it describes. But in the larger overarching play that is Brian Friel’s Faith Healer the audience also has a crucial role to play in relation to the interwoven, damaged lives of its three protagonists. They are telling their life histories to us, and each of their monologues is shaped rhetorically and emotionally by this directed appeal. At one point in Teddy’s monologue, when he asserts that ‘you must handle them [artists] on the basis of a relationship that is strictly business only’ (357), he urges ‘believe me’. This is the appeal that underwrites all four of the monologues and their three speakers: believe in me, in who I say I am and what I am, based on my version of events. Ricoeur has described how self-designation inevitably ‘gets inscribed in an exchange that sets up a dialogical situation. […] The dialogical structure immediately makes clear the dimension of trust involved: the witness asks to be believed’ (165). Having earlier pointed out that ‘it is always before someone that the witness testifies to the reality of some scene of which he was part’, he goes on to stress the crucial role played by the person or people who receive and accept the testimony in what is described as ‘an echo response’: ‘then the testimony is not just certified, it is accredited’ (164–5). The problem arises when there is more than one piece of testimony, introducing, as Ricoeur points out, ‘the possibility of suspicion’ (164). In Faith Healer, the provisional acceptance we would have granted Frank Hardy’s testimony in the opening monologue is progressively undermined by what we hear in the next two. Frank declares that Grace was his mistress; in her turn she asserts she was his wife. In particular there is a radical disjunction between the first and second accounts of the Kinlochbervie incident. Frank has used it as the point of departure for a return to Ireland and the death of his mother, as merely a place where ‘we were enjoying a few days’ rest’ (337). But when Grace says ‘Kinlochbervie’s where the baby’s buried’ (344), any audience I’ve been part of responds with a palpable start, a gasp. They realize that Frank has by no means told us everything as the outlines of another story, that of Grace and her stillborn baby, emerge. What Teddy says of Kinlochbervie appears to confirm Grace’s narrative about the fact of her pregnancy, agonized delivery and the ‘tiny little thing’ (363) they buried

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there. But Teddy’s story contradicts Grace’s narrative, which gives pride of place to Frank, by insisting that Frank disappeared and left Teddy to step into the roles of midwife and chief mourner. In his final appearance, Frank may intone repeatedly the place name of ‘Kinlochbervie’ at the start but he adds nothing more to his earlier account and instead goes on to claim that ‘I would have liked to have had a child. But she was barren’ (372). In his discussion of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Ricoeur laments its silence on ‘the theme of “natality” which underlies the categories of the via activa: labor, work, action’ (357). The theme of natality binds the four narrative accounts of Kinlochbervie in Faith Healer, despite their factual discrepancies: Frank insisting that he returned to Ireland for the death of his mother (whereas Grace claims it was ‘his father’s death’); Grace and Teddy seeking to inscribe the ‘infant child of Francis Hardy, Faith Healer, and his wife, Grace Hardy, both citizens of Ireland’ (364) into their shared history. If Ricoeur wishes to insert the theme of natality into the discourse, he goes on to stress that the ‘relation to death […] is implied in the very act of doing history’ (365). But even though he feels this to be the case Ricoeur’s reading of the texts of history can only lead him to conclude that ‘death is that which history misses’ (366). Death is implied in the shared history of Faith Healer from the first monologue on. All of the narratives converge on the homecoming to Ireland. Where the accounts of what happened in Kinlochbervie fundamentally contradict one another, those recounting what happened that fatal night in Ballybeg supply three differing but complementary perspectives. Some differences remain: did Frank go out of his way to test his faith-healing powers on the wedding guests or was he drawn in inadvertently? The likely outcome of Frank’s encounter with the incurable McGarvey is that, as he himself predicts towards the close of his first monologue: ‘nothing was going to happen. Nothing at all’ (340). That the events turned homicidal is confirmed in Grace’s monologue by her doctor’s question: ‘“And what was your late husband’s occupation, Mrs. Hardy?”’(346). Grace’s is the quietest, the most private, of the three characters’ monologues. But it too is shaped by and directed towards an audience, since the immediate dramatic context is her recovery from a nervous breakdown. The interaction is that between psychiatrist and patient, with Grace doing the talking while we, the audience, are the silent, judging witness to her entreaties: ‘But I am getting stronger, I am becoming more controlled – I’m sure I am’ (341). Grace confirms that the speaker of the first monologue is dead, and as she mourns Frank and seeks to conjure up his physical presence once more, she reveals how, in Ricoeur’s words, ‘the very path of mourning […] transforms the physical absence of the lost object into an inner presence’ (366). Teddy in his turn describes how he was asked to visit the morgue and identify Grace’s body after her suicide: ‘And there she was. Gracie all right. Looking very beautiful’ (369). And Teddy? Frank in his final monologue is too concerned with narrating his own end to pay

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much heed to Teddy’s; on that last night, the faith healer has cured his faithful manager of his heart-sickness and dismissed him from service. But Teddy has no real life other than as a theatrical creation. As Frank says when introducing him to the audience, ‘I never knew much about his background except that he had been born into showbusiness’ (334). And when Teddy gestures at the poster and says, ‘A lifetime in the business and that’s the only memento I’ve kept’ (365), we realize that he has no ‘life’ outside the business of the play and so in his ‘retirement’ must keep playing the story of his life with Frank and Grace over and over again, like his worn-out recording of Fred Astaire singing ‘The Way You Look Tonight’. In the fourth monologue, Frank recounts how he approaches the moment of his own death, and in the heightened terms of the play’s closing lines imagines ‘that the whole corporeal world […] somehow they had shed their physical reality and had become mere imaginings, and that in all existence there was only myself and the wedding guests […], that even we had ceased to be physical and existed only in spirit, only in the need we had for each other’ (376). In confronting the question ‘Who am I?’, Ricouer focuses on the ‘fragility of identity’. A major source of its fragility lies in ‘its difficult relation to time, […] a primary difficulty that precisely justifies the recourse to memory as the temporal component of identity’ (81). The form Friel chose for Faith Healer gave that recourse to memory unparalleled range. In place of the ‘inflexible rigidity of a character’, which a more conventional dramaturgy would have enforced, the fluidity of the form allowed its people ‘the slippage, the drift, […] the flexibility, proper to self-constancy’. The second cause of the fragility of identity arises from ‘the confrontation with others, felt to be a threat. It is a fact that the other, because other, comes to be perceived as a danger for one’s own identity.’ In facing and facing down the people who come to him for a cure, Frank is confronting the other to confirm his own sense of self but is also risking potential self-dissolution. In his final meeting with McGarvey and his friends, Frank is re-encountering that dilemma but now pitched in a more openly confrontational mode. That final, fatal encounter with the other now opens on to the third and final cause Ricouer identifies in relation to the fragility of identity: ‘the heritage of founding violence’ (82). The play’s ending has to be seen in the light of the years of tabloid coverage of Northern Irish events against which it was first written and produced. The wedding guests are verbally described by Teddy and the barman as ‘savage bloody men’ (374). A clear relation is set up between the group with whom we have shared the intimate experience of the play and the group by whom Frank is going to be killed. The final scene expresses the need to look in the face and to acknowledge what Seamus Heaney has called ‘the exact/and tribal, intimate revenge’.15 The denouement requires of the faith healer and the audience that we imagine the people who commit such acts into some kind of presence by making them real. And within the ‘fiction’ of the play, Frank does not ‘know’ this

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group as he ‘knew’ his wife and manager. The final act he is required to perform calls for him to draw, not parasitically on the energies of the two people who sacrificed their lives and needs to him, but – in the ultimate self-immolation – on himself, now construed as other. In 1980, with Translations, as the last chapter explored, Friel inaugurated the Field Day Theatre Company with Stephen Rea and committed to premiering a play annually at the Guildhall in Derry, at least in the company’s early years. Two of the three original plays Friel offered to the company were history plays, Translations and Making History (1988). The other, The Communication Cord, was set in and engaged with the present, and will be considered in that context in the next chapter. The two history plays are not just categorized as such because they are set in the historical past, 1833 and the end of the sixteenth/beginning of the seventeenth century respectively. They also engage with history in a double sense, enacting what Ricouer describes as a ‘twofold relation to history’ in ‘making history and the making of history’ (228). When it first appeared in 1980, Translations was almost universally acclaimed. But increasingly the play came to be questioned and criticized, chiefly on the grounds of historical accuracy. This debate about its accuracy emerges in the 1983 discussion between Friel and the historian J. H. Andrews, which was examined in the previous chapter. There, Andrews expresses a general admiration for the play while making a few minor criticisms. By the time of his 1992 article for The Irish Review, Andrews’s judgement on the historical inaccuracies is more severe. It had been joined by Sean Connolly’s critique in Theatre Ireland in 1987, enlarged as a book chapter in 1993 to take account of Making History.16 Connolly not only details the hostile reaction in certain quarters to Friel’s freedom with aspects of historical fact but notes how the playwright’s polemical programme note in 1988 is frank about having done so: ‘I have tried to be objective and faithful – after my artistic fashion – to the empirical method. But where there was tension between historical “fact” and the imperative of fiction, I’m glad to say I kept faith with the narrative.’17 Making History’s relationship to Translations has been sufficiently explored, by Connolly and others. I wish in my own analysis to follow Ricoeur in his specific linkage of memory and history and to relate Making History to plays before and after the ten-year engagement with Field Day in Friel’s writing career. Field Day managed to premiere a high number of impressive and important plays in its more than a decade of theatrical activity – Thomas Kilroy’s 1986 Double Cross and Stewart Parker’s 1987 Pentecost, to name but two other than Friel’s own contribution, which also included his version of Three Sisters in 1981. And through both its annual premieres in Derry and its numerous pamphlets, it provided a strong intellectual debate at a time of political stagnation. But Friel’s immersion in the running of the company took quite a toll on his own creative energies. After The Communication Cord in 1982, he experienced a six-year writing block in the writing of original

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plays, and this from a dramatist who had produced at least one new work every two years for the previous twenty. Friel kept his hand in by writing a dramatized version of Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons for England’s National Theatre in 1987. But he found his way back to original playwriting through a memory, as he was to do a couple of years later with Dancing at Lughnasa. At the age of 23 he had read and been greatly impressed by the Irish short story writer Sean O’Faolain’s biography of the Earl of Tyrone, The Great O’Neill, arguing that Hugh O’Neill was not only one of the greatest of Irish leaders but also the first to open up Ireland to an awareness of participation in Europe. O’Faolain concluded his Preface by asserting that ‘if anyone wished to make a study of the manner in which historical myths are created, he might well take O’Neill as an example’.18 He finished by throwing down the gauntlet to anyone who might fancy themselves ‘a talented dramatist’ that they ‘might write an informative, entertaining, ironical play on the theme of the living man watching his translation into a star in the face of all the facts that had reduced him to poverty, exile and defeat’. Of the three history plays considered in this chapter, the only one that has to do with a publicly recognized figure is Making History. There is a considerable bibliography of historical studies about Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, in which the O’Faolain book takes its place. And there had been by 1988 other dramatic treatments, most notably Thomas Kilroy’s The O’Neill in 1968. What this enables Friel to do is to place the historiographical process squarely on stage. A key presence throughout is Archbishop Peter Lombard, friend of the O’Neill and as a Catholic cleric of a Machiavellian disposition, someone anxious to promote an alliance between Ireland and Spain. But the key contribution of Peter Lombard to Friel’s play, which emerges in the first of the four scenes, is that he intends writing a history about Hugh O’Neill. When informed of this by his secretary, Harry Hoveden, Hugh responds (without giving a reason): ‘I don’t think I like this idea at all.’19 Later in the scene, Lombard reassures O’Neill that ‘nothing will be put down on paper for years and years’ because ‘history has to be made – before it’s remade’ (258). This statement is in line with what Ricoeur writes about the ‘twofold relation’ involved in the phrase ‘making history’ and establishes the deep reciprocal relation between the two men across the course of the play and O’Neill’s lifetime. In the fourth and final scene, an aging, almost blind and heavily drinking O’Neill is in the last days of his Rome exile, after the comprehensive defeat at Kinsale and the withdrawal from Ireland subsequently heroicized as ‘the Flight of the Earls’ (a phrase for which Lombard takes credit). Centre stage in O’Neill’s Rome apartment is ‘Lombard’s desk; littered with papers; and in the centre is a large book – the history’ (317–18). Now that O’Neill’s active involvement in his country’s history is effectively at an end, Lombard’s role has come to the fore. But as he reads extracts from Lombard’s history, O’Neill recognizes that he has one last ‘battle’ (356) to fight, not on the battlefield but in the study. This battle is best understood in terms of the

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activity that Ricoeur discerns as central to the process of making history: the translation of oral testimony, of the memory of the living, into the archive, the written record of the historian. It is not a question of fact versus fiction. For, as Martine Pelletier has pointed out, ‘Friel’s Lombard certainly does not fall into the category of the deluded historian who believes he can remain objective.’20 Lombard may begin by ‘checking some events and dates’ (257) but he recognizes that he will have to construct some form of narrative that will impose ‘a pattern on events that were mostly casual and haphazard’ and in which ‘imagination will be as important as information’. This approach to historiography is in line with Ricoeur’s view that ‘no one undertakes to explain a course of events without making use of some express literary form, of a narrative, rhetorical or imaginative character’ (137). In Friel’s drafting of the play, the image of Archbishop Lombard writing was central to its conception. Originally, it was framed by the late scene in Rome, with Lombard at his desk writing and checking with O’Neill ‘for confirmation of facts’. O’Neill replies to the Archbishop’s questions but also addresses the audience directly. ‘And through O’Neill’s monologues, we move from place to place and backwards and forwards in time.’21 This framing is similar to that of The Freedom of the City with the authenticity and authority of the written official report being both undercut and replaced by the act of theatre itself, where the truth of drama trumps the ‘facts’. But Friel decided that such an approach was not appropriate in this case and opted instead for theatrical objectivity. In the finished version of Making History the events unfold chronologically, beginning with Hugh O’Neill’s third marriage in 1591 (when he was 41) and concluding in Rome close to his death in 1616. It is important to stress the chronological approach Friel finally decided upon, since much has been made of the fact that he conflates almost an entire decade into the continuous action of the second scene. The objective approach has the effect of stressing the parallel between the activities of O’Neill and Lombard. The play is divided, curiously, into four chronological breaks, with the first two grouped into Act 1 scenes one and two followed by Act 2 Scenes 1 and 2. In part this structure is intended to reflect the play’s clear division midway through into a pre-Kinsale and a post-Kinsale period, hinged around the battle in which the union of the Irish and the Spanish was definitively routed by Queen Elizabeth’s army. In the first half, O’Neill is in the ascendant, ‘full [of] power, arrogant, etc., but with misgivings’, as Friel’s note puts it;22 in the second he is coping with devastating ‘poverty, exile and defeat’, as O’Faolain put it.23 But the division also suggests parallels and allows for mirroring, especially between O’Neill and Lombard in the second half. If Lombard in Rome is writing his official history, Hugh is seen engaged in the act of writing through most of the previous scene, as he hides out in the Sperrin Mountains in the immediate aftermath of Kinsale. What he is engaged in writing, as becomes clear when

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his isolation is broken in upon, first by his ally Hugh O’Donnell, then by his secretary Harry, is his abject submission to Elizabeth, entreating her ‘to restore me to my former living and dignity where as an obedient subject I vow to continue hereafter loyal to her royal person, to her crown, to her prerogatives, and to her English laws’ (311). At the close of the play, what we are confronted with are two contending narratives: Lombard reads O’Neill’s distinguished Gaelic lineage, reaching back over six centuries, while Hugh recites his act of submission to the English queen who first created him Earl of Tyrone. The whole scene is not just a question of two contending, selective and diverse historical narratives. It brings up the crucial role that memory has to play in the writing of history and in Friel’s play. For in relation to the act of writing Ricouer asserts that ‘it is above all the setting out in writing of the historian’s knowledge […] that gives rise to the question of […] what finally becomes of the relation between history and memory’ (138). When Hugh enters his empty Roman apartment in the last scene, he has the opportunity to read the opening pages of Lombard’s history. In it, he is described as having been ‘fostered and brought up by the high-born nobles of his tribe, the O’Hagans and the O’Quinns’ (319). While it is historically accurate that the young O’Neill was fostered out to those two families, as was the Gaelic practice, what is missing from the biography is the salient fact that he spent seven years in England from the age of 9 to 16 in the house of Sir Henry Sidney, the poet’s father. The most outward and audible sign of Hugh’s rearing in England is the accent in which he habitually speaks, ‘an upper-class English accent’ (247); there is the odd occasion when he deliberately breaks with that and speaks in a Tyrone accent, when he is keen to stress his Irishness. Friel represents Hugh O’Neill, not as a ‘pure’ Gaelic chieftain, but as a linguistic, cultural and racial hybrid. It is this inbetweenness that gives him greater insight into the complex political situation, or what the play terms ‘the overall thing’ (299). The multiple aspects of his personality are spelled out in the opening scene with his varying allegiances to his Gaelic kinsmen and the English in Ireland whom he knew at Sir Henry Sidney’s residence. When his secretary urges Hugh to accept the fishing invitation from the new Lord Chief Justice in Ireland and suggests it might be worth renewing their English acquaintance, Hugh responds in a ‘Tyrone accent’: ‘Just to show him I haven’t reverted completely to type?’ (250). Hugh at one point sees his strength as being able to keep faith not just with both the Irish and the English, but with all of the various castes living on the island: the Gaelic tribes, the Old English, the New Planters. But when the Archbishop tells him Spanish troops are on the way and that Hugh is set to become the leader of what is ‘no longer a casual grouping of tribes but a nation state united under the Papal colours’ (291), Hugh goes silent. When he finally speaks, it is not as in his other lengthy speeches of trying to reconcile the ancient ways of his people with the modernizing, progressive developments of the Renaissance in Europe. Instead, he offers a lengthy

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memory of his growing up in England: ‘I’m remembering Sir Henry Sidney and Lady Mary, may they rest in peace’ (291), a man he goes on to acknowledge as ‘the only father I ever knew’ (292), to whom he was closer than the Irish families by whom he was fostered. The specific memory is of the night before his sixteenth birthday, when he is scheduled to return to Ireland. The night is spent as it has often been at Penshurst, with discussion of the new ideas sweeping Europe, under the shaping hand of Sir Henry. Finally, he turns to the young Hugh and quotes a letter from a friend: ‘“Those Irishmen who live like subjects play but as the fox which when you have him on a chain will seem tame; but if he ever gets loose, he will be wild again.” So. Speak to that, Fox O’Neill’ (293). The Earl of Tyrone describes it as the only ‘failure in years of courtesy’ and one that has been a wound in his memory ever since. But now that he is to take up a single Irish identity at the cost of ruthless simplification, he can acknowledge he is losing an important part of himself by admitting that ‘all my affection for Sir Henry returns without qualification’. If Hugh O’Neill’s seven years’ growing up in England is missing from Lombard’s history, it is supplied in Friel’s play by Hugh’s remembering the last night in Penshurst when he was dubbed ‘Fox O’Neill’. An even greater omission – as Hugh points out with increasing insistence as the play nears its end – is the part played by his wife, Mabel Bagenal. The Archbishop is already sufficiently exercised by the fact that O’Neill had four wives, which he will have to account for and justify to his future Irish Catholic readership, not to overly concern himself with any of them. In the nationalist narrative Lombard is constructing, the narrative focus is on the leaders, all of them men, with the women relegated to a passing mention as wives. But Hugh O’Neill and Brian Friel think otherwise, and Making History is accordingly centred on the relationship between Hugh and his third wife, Mabel Bagenal. Halfway through his deliberations with Hugh O’Donnell and Peter Lombard in the first scene, Hugh calmly announces he is married. It emerges that his new bride at 20 is less than half his age, but to the much profounder shock of his companions that she is a Planter of Protestant stock and the daughter and sister of his two greatest enemies, the past and present Queen’s Marshal in Ireland. When he follows up on this revelation by bringing Mabel in, Hugh and Peter are unable to say a word and only take her hand because she thrusts it in front of them; one is reminded of the symbolic force of a handshake in Irish politics when it was many years before a constitutional politician would shake a Sinn Féin leader’s hand. The details of the meeting and marriage of Hugh and Mabel in the first scene are drawn from Sean O’Faolain’s revisionist history. If Peter Lombard is to deny to Mabel any place at all in his history, O’Faolain brings her into his narrative and realizes to what extent the O’Neill’s history is complicated by this particular alliance. O’Faolain’s interpretation of Mabel Bagenal’s character and role in the unfolding political drama is, however, seriously compromised by gender

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bias. This young woman of 20 is repeatedly referred to by him as a ‘girl’, usually prefaced by the epithet ‘poor’.24 These attributions work to diminish her agency. They undercut the independence and courage of the character it took to leave not only her family but the Protestant ethos that was ‘civilizing’ Ireland. She did so to enter marriage with the head of a wild and barbarous people, for all that he may have spent some years in England. O’Faolain laments that the young Mabel Bagenal was not ‘a woman of tremendous character and intelligence [who] could have made a success of that marriage, so full of incongruity in race and rank and religion’ but ‘a poor child [who] cannot have brought any great experience of life’.25 Friel’s most extensive revision in his dramatic making of history was not only to build up the centrality of the marriage to an understanding of the wider political/ cultural dynamic between Ireland and England, but to significantly revise O’Faolain’s characterization of Mabel Bagenal. The two writers are agreed in the feelings of isolation the young Protestant woman of Planter stock must have experienced ‘in this foreign world of Gaelic Dungannon’; these are all too evident when her sister Mary visits in Act 1 Scene 2. And Friel concludes that scene with Mabel insisting to her husband: ‘I want your mistresses out of this house immediately’ (300). O’Faolain is keen to make this incident the source of a break between them: ‘when she refused to countenance his mistresses any longer, acknowledged to herself that she hated him, fled from him to her brother and laid public complaint against him in the Council, the humiliation was bitter and mutual’. So emphatic is the account of this rupture that it is easy to overlook the contradictory implications of the virtual aside with which the paragraph concludes: ‘Nevertheless it was at Dungannon that she died [in 1595], so that they must have patched up some sort of reconciliation before the end.’ The other aside, two pages earlier, also suggests an alternative scenario to the one on which O’Faolain is insisting: ‘It is to be noted, in passing, that after her marriage Mabel became a Catholic.’26 Hugh O’Neill tells the shocked Lombard and O’Donnell in the first scene that he has married ‘a very talented, a very spirited, a very beautiful young woman [who] has left her people to join me here’ (265). Friel includes in his scenario the sense of isolation and shock that O’Faolain refers to and which the historical Mabel Bagenal must have experienced; he treats them with sensitivity and insight. But the playwright also shows Mabel’s determination to face up to the cross-cultural, politically fraught transition she has committed to undertake. As she says after the bruising initial exchange with O’Neill’s two companions has caused her tears: ‘I’ll never cry like that again. […] Never again. Ever. We’re a tough breed, the O’Neills’ (272). The clue to the development of Mabel’s impatriation in the next scene is embedded in the word ‘breed’. For after she has insisted that her husband’s mistresses be banished, and he has declined the request, Mabel reveals that she is pregnant. In relation to the historic fact of her early death in 1596

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at the age of 25 (in Dungannon with her husband, as O’Faolain reluctantly notes), Friel asks the question in his drafting of the play: ‘Why did she die in the fifth year of marriage?’27 and speculates that she might have done so in childbirth. As he keeps faith with the ‘heart of the play’ being the Mabel– Hugh relationship, Friel comes to recognize that if it is to be so ‘violence could have to be done to certain historic facts’.28 The major act of historic ‘violence’ is to extend Mabel’s life beyond Kinsale (a further six years, given that the battle took place in 1601). The nine months of pregnancy is the historic time scale to which the more public chronology must now give way. And so a full ten years of political activity is accelerated in the scene that announces Mabel’s pregnancy and concludes shortly thereafter with the Spanish being expected at Kinsale. The next scene has the defeated O’Neill drafting his submission to Queen Elizabeth and waiting for news of his pregnant wife. (The two women are consistently doubled throughout the play, from the moment O’Neill gives his wife a wedding present of a watch and declares that only Elizabeth has its like.) When news of Mabel comes from the ever-loyal Harry Hoveden, it is to reveal that both mother and child died in childbirth. The emotional reception of this tragic outcome by the Hugh O’Donnell who earlier could scarcely shake her hand shows the extent to which Mabel has made inroads on the native Irish. In the final scene, it is her pointed absence from Lombard’s history, and the O’Neill’s determination that she be given her proper place in the official narrative, that leads to the description of their exchange as the final battle. From what Lombard says, it is clear that Hugh – and Mabel – have lost. Ricoeur gives a wonderful and apposite description of the kind of ‘skepticism’ that provokes O’Neill’s repeated request for the ‘truth’ in Lombard’s history and asks whether the ‘idea of truth […] can be radically historicized without disappearing’ (304). He goes on to suggest that the ‘peremptory question’ addressed to an adversary – ‘Where are you speaking from?’ – can ‘finally turn against the one making it and become internalized as paralyzing suspicion’ (304). This is how O’Neill ends up at the close of the play, paralysed by suspicion of the Archbishop’s history (and by alcohol), sitting slumped in a chair weeping and asking Mabel to forgive him. Friel’s next play, Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), was not offered to Field Day. Instead, the script was sent to producer Noel Pearson, with whom Friel had previously collaborated on a post-Field Day Dublin production of Translations in the early 1980s. When Pearson read the play, his honed theatrical experience told him it had the potential to ‘go the whole ten yards’, to which Friel sceptically replied: ‘Your left foot must have kicked you in the head.’29 (Pearson had just produced the Oscar-winning film of disabled Dublin writer Christy Brown’s biography, My Left Foot.) But so it proved. In 1990 Pearson was Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre and the play received its world premiere there on Tuesday, 24 April, sensitively directed by Patrick Mason in the memorable ‘field of wheat’ design by Joe Vanek. The production

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gathered momentum as audiences were drawn into and responded to the plight of these five Donegal women from the 1930s. It moved the energies of women from the margin to the centre stage of Irish drama and shared the historical moment with the election of Mary Robinson as the first woman President of Ireland in that same year of 1990. The production went on to even greater acclaim in London and New York, where it won an Olivier and a Tony award respectively as Best Play. Why was it not offered to Field Day? There was some question of the resources the company could commit to a production. And there was no obvious leading role for Stephen Rea (who had played Manus in Translations and Hugh O’Neill in Making History). But in its foregrounding of women there is an implicit critique of the all-male bias of the Field Day Board, the plays they produced and the notorious three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which appeared in 1991. Its main editor was Seamus Deane; but all twelve of the editors of the individual sections were male; and women writers scarcely featured. As Martine Pelletier has argued, ‘the relegation of women to the margins of Irish literary history caused great outrage and led to the commissioning by Deane of a further volume to be devoted to women’s writings, eventually published as two volumes in 2002’.30 This resonates in a fascinating way off Hugh O’Neill’s protest to Lombard of Mabel’s exclusion from the latter’s history and suggests Friel’s awareness of what was to come. The strongest scene in Making History is that between two women, Mabel and her sister Mary, in a generally male-dominated play and is certainly one of the seeds of Dancing at Lughnasa. Brian Friel remained a member of the Field Day Board for several more years, attending (and indeed speaking) at the Dublin launch of the Field Day Anthology in 1991. But the writing was on the wall with the Abbey production of Dancing at Lughnasa, and he resigned from the Field Day Board in January 1994. Dancing at Lughnasa is the most autobiographical of Brian Friel’s plays. And this most reticent of writers not only granted an exceedingly rare interview (to theatre critic, John Lahr) in 1991 but opened up to him about the autobiographical origins of the play. Attending a production at London’s National Theatre in 1987 with fellow playwright (and Field Day board member) Thomas Kilroy, Friel and Kilroy walked across Waterloo Bridge and up the Strand, hearing as they did Irish voices drifting out from the doorways where people were preparing to sleep rough. Friel disclosed that he ‘had two aunts who, I think, ended up something like that’.31 Kilroy immediately suggested he write a play about it. On the occasion of Friel’s seventieth birthday in 1999, Kilroy wrote his own, more detailed account of this experience in a piece entitled ‘Friendship’. Neither account, however, specifies that the production they and their wives were attending at the National Theatre in London was the premiere on 8 July 1987 of Friel’s dramatization of Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons. He had been working on the script of Making History for almost four years, but was clearly distracted by Field Day

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business. I would argue that this context of Friel seeing a new work of his staged, the first in five years, not only encouraged him to finish the Hugh O’Neill play (it was staged by Field Day less than a year later) but prepared the ground for the Lughnasa memory. In Kilroy’s account, Friel is accorded more agency than in his own: ‘he told me the story of himself as a young man setting off for London to search for the two aunts who had left Donegal years before. What he found was destitution.’32 The play that Friel eventually wrote surprised Kilroy inasmuch as he expected this incident to occupy a central position in it whereas it only ‘occupies a few, potent sentences’.33 Why that is so has to do with the play’s moving witness to both memory and history. The second autobiographical source is archival: pages clipped from two newspapers, The Derry Journal and The Ulster Herald from 10 and 15 July 1950 respectively.34 The two texts are (virtually identical) obituaries of Father Bernard Joseph MacLoone, known as the ‘wee Donegal priest’, at the home of his sisters, the Laurels, in Glenties. Father Barney, as he was known, is the real-life prototype of Father Jack in Dancing at Lughnasa. The biographical details are congruent. Father MacLoone was a missionary priest in the Leper Colony at Nyenga in Uganda. He served for the last two years of the First World War as chaplain to the British forces in East Africa. In 1946 illness, principally recurrent bouts of malaria, caused him to return to Donegal to the home of his MacLoone sisters. According to the obituary, he ‘regained some of his strength but never enough to give any hope of the realization of his desire to be back again amongst his beloved lepers’, and he died quietly there in 1950 at the age of 65. The list of family mourners at the priest’s funeral mass identifies the five sisters: Miss Kathleen MacLoone, ex-N.T. [National Teacher], Glenties; Miss Margaret MacLoone, ex-P.T. [Primary Teacher]. Newtownstewart; Mrs P. Friel, wife of Mr P. Friel, principal of the Long Tower Boys’ School, Derry; and Misses Rose and Agnes MacLoone, London. Kate, Maggie, Rose and Agnes all retain their names in the play. Friel’s mother Christina/Chris is refashioned into a character who does not marry but has a child ‘as it was called then – out of wedlock’ (17); his respectable schoolteaching father gives way to the wandering Welsh playboy, Gerry Evans. But the biographies of the other four sisters remain similar. None of them is married; the eldest, Kate, is a secondary school teacher, a position that financially supports the rest of the family and which she loses in the course of the play; and Rose and Agnes have emigrated to London. Any immediate thought of the possible glamour that this address might have transmitted to the folks back home is banished by the other Friel/Kilroy narrative and its account of the ‘destitution’ they experienced there. The Father Jack who returns malaria-ridden to his sisters’ Donegal home from his leper colony articulates heterodox sentiments that shock his pious sister, Kate, and reveal the extent to which he has converted to the pagan beliefs of the Ryangan aboriginal population. The obituary in The Derry Journal recounts that Father

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Barney MacLoone ‘spoke with grateful remembrance of the Franciscan sisters who staffed the leper hospital which he founded in Nyenga’ rather than as Father Jack does of his houseboy, Okawa, and of the goddess Obi. But in one of his Notes for the play, Friel wonders whether in addition to his malaria his uncle might not have ‘been sent home? – because he was dabbling in joyous paganism?’,35 and from this intuition he has developed the counter-Catholic cultural discourse of the priest who has ‘gone native’. The evocative opening line of Dancing at Lughnasa declares it to be the most powerful fusion of memory and history in Friel’s oeuvre: ‘When I cast my mind back to that summer of 1936 different kinds of memories offer themselves to me’ (7). In the personal history of the MacLoone family, the death of Father Barney has been moved back 14–15 years but is centrally revealed in the opening monologue: ‘And now in his early fifties and in bad health [my Uncle Jack] had come home to Ballybeg – as it turned out – to die’ (8). The other family deaths so central to the play’s origins and dynamic, those of the sisters Agnes and Rose in England, cannot be so readily removed from the 1950s to 1936. The historic moment at which Friel wishes to set his play is the period in Eden just before the Fall, at a time when the family is all still together and mutually supportive but with the cracks of dissolution all around. As Kate correctly intuits and confesses to Maggie when she briefly loses self-control, ‘if this house were broken up – what would become of our Rosie?’ (57). During that summer of 1936, the Industrial Revolution will arrive in Ballybeg with the opening of the new factory, and the knitting services of the two sisters will no longer be required. A note will be found mere days after the play’s end written by Agnes in which she announces their departure. In his penultimate monologue, the narrator Michael will speak those few, potent sentences describing what he will find at the end of his personal search decades in the future: ‘And by the time I tracked them down – twenty-five years later, in London – Agnes was dead and Rose was dying in a hospice for the destitute in Southwark’ (91). Friel in his notes makes his by-now-usual inquiry of a history play as to whether it is to be told in flashback/narrative or in linear, chronological fashion: ‘Either it is the son’s story – a framed play – OR – it is a straight-line story.’36 In his previous play, Making History, he decided finally to tell it as a straight-line story, since the double presence of O’Neill and Lombard carried the memory–history dialectic with them. In Dancing at Lughnasa, the circumstances of the play’s composition that have been examined here absolutely required the play’s frame. In that frame, the son of the Mundy household, Michael, a young man, narrates his memories of his childhood home in the dramatically reincarnated presence of his mother and four aunts, in the year 1936, when he was seven years of age. He was therefore born in 1929; so was Brian Friel. The necessity of this approach to linking memory and history is articulated by Paul Ricoeuer as ‘a phenomenology of memory’. It requires ‘the

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participation of subjects capable of designating themselves as being, to different degrees of reflective consciousness, the authors of their acts’ (128). Michael assumes this authoritative role as he steps forward at the beginning and end of the play, and at key points in its progress, to make declarative statements about the people – the five women and the two men – whose lives and behaviour we are witnessing. To what extent does Michael control and determine what the audience sees? In his notes, Friel poses a key question that goes to the heart of this dilemma: ‘Has the play its own reality? Or has it existence only in the head of the narrator?’37 Michael’s role as narrator is limited and compromised by the fact that he is also a character in the drama we are witnessing. In front of the house are two kites on which the child is working; he engages directly in dialogue with the various aunts as they pass in and out of the house (though never with his mother). The actor playing Michael is not required to directly represent a seven-year-old boy. As Friel’s stage directions stipulate, the convention should be ‘established that the (imaginary) Boy Michael is working at the kite materials lying on the ground. No dialogue with the Boy Michael must ever be addressed directly to adult Michael, the narrator’ (15). Michael’s independence and autonomy are, therefore, compromised by the double role he has to play, of adult and child, of narrator and character. He is also absent from the stage for significant portions of time. His frequent entrances and exits do not appear to correspond to particular dramatic moments within the unfolding action of the play but are motivated when he is no longer required for dialogue with his aunts or for a monologue. Ricouer writes in ways that are relevant to Michael’s narration that, ‘in its declarative phase, memory enters into the region of language’ whereby ‘memories spoken of, pronounced, are already a kind of discourse that the subject engages in with herself’ (128). Does Michael need to be present to witness and describe everything he discourses on in the monologues? Since it is framed by his words, can everything we see on stage in between not be seen as proceeding from his ‘reflective consciousness’? Michael’s ambivalent position could be read as Friel’s acknowledgement that, for all of the play’s emphasis on women, it is being authored by a man. What is so striking in any viewing of Dancing at Lughnasa is the extent to which these memories elude their narrator, possessing a range and meaning beyond his conscious control. Ricoeur makes the important point that ‘this elevation of memory to language is not without its difficulties’ (129). I would argue that the key resistance to Michael’s self-communing discourse is provided by the play’s frequent reference to and demonstration of the limits of language and to its centralizing of dance in its dramatic construction. There is a central irony to the fact that the play concludes with Michael’s invocation of memory through the metaphor of dancing, ‘dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary’ (108) and that this epiphany is rendered through some of Friel’s most exquisite language. But it also needs

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to be pointed out, as Frank McGuinness has done, that Michael is the only character in the play who does not get to dance.38 In that context, his words are clearly compensatory. The central scene of Dancing at Lughnasa, the one that is most deeply lodged in the memory of all those who have seen it world-wide, is the dance of the five sisters in Act 1. Although the scene is heavy with Friel’s directions as to how it should be played, Helen Lojek is surely right to observe that ‘the dance depends upon an ensemble cast of women to portray a moment during which unity is accompanied by individuality’.39 It is also reliant on the visual in the detailed movements of the women as they not only pursue their individual patterns of movement but also whirl each other around and move closer together, further apart. When Paul Ricouer urges a middle ground between individual and collective memory, he locates it ‘at the level of our close relations, […] those people who count for us and for whom we count’ (131). Such a close bond is constituted by the five sisters, their closeness to each other and to Michael. When Jack remarks to Chrissie that she’s lucky to have her son, another of the sisters replies: ‘We’re all lucky to have him’ (64). When Ricoeur describes the ‘dynamic’ with and between close relations, he does so specifically in terms of movement and proximity: ‘a dynamic relationship ceaselessly in motion, drawing near, feeling close’ (131). The dance also features a range of sounds beyond or below verbal articulation: the sound of Irish céilí music coming from the radio (which is exclusively instrumental and contains no vocal), and the primordial release of the normally physically restrained and verbally controlling Kate when she ‘suddenly leaps to her feet, flings her head back and emits a loud “Yaaaah”’ (36). The dance has difficulty emerging and when it does the energies it releases are soon stifled. That the dance does succeed in breaking through is explicitly referred to the force of memory emanating from two of the sisters, Agnes and Maggie. When Kate returns from town to report that the whole of Ballybeg is ‘off its head’ with talk of the harvest dance, Agnes responds by declaring: ‘I remember some great harvest dances’ (20). That she is speaking for more than herself and voicing a collective memory binding all five of the sisters is confirmed by Chris’s murmured ‘Don’t we all’ in response. The Katedominated discourse continues, until Agnes’s memory and the rebellion it is provoking surfaces with the suggestion: ‘Wouldn’t it be a good one if we all went […] to the harvest dance?’ (22). The ‘simple’ sister Rose, the most in touch with her unconscious and with the Lughnasa rituals we hear are being performed in the ‘back hills’, launches into ‘the first steps of a bizarre and abandoned dance’ (24), rousing Kate’s sense of panic and causing her to rule out Agnes’s proposal. She does so by stressing respectability and what Ricoeur describes as ‘a sense of shame, […] the fear of revealing one’s inferiority’ (208). Maggie has been absent for this exchange but her being told about what she has missed is not enough in itself to resurrect the suggestion

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that they all go to the harvest dance. Instead, Maggie speaks a long onstage reverie, a memory that surfaces from when she was 16. The memory is prompted by Kate’s having met a returned emigrant, Bernie O’Donnell, a friend of Maggie’s back for a brief visit to Ballybeg with a Swedish husband and identical teenage daughters in tow. Maggie’s memory is of her friend Bernie and herself going to a dance in Ardstraw. Maggie is paired with a young, bald, small youth in whom she has no interest. The boy she fancies is with Bernie and ‘crazy’ (34) about her. Her memory is concentrated on how beautifully Bernie and Brian danced together and how wrong it was that they did not win the dancing competition as they deserved. The final detail of the memory is the emigration to Australia of the young man Maggie longed for in vain. The returned Bernie O’Donnell has asked whether any of the sisters is married and this whole section suggests the extensive emigration from Donegal of both its young men and women and the devastating effect this has on the survival let alone flourishing of the community. Maggie’s memory holds her still in its wake, and is replaced by the raucous, sensual, abandoned dance it has directly triggered, as she smothers her face with the flour she is kneading, pushes her head back from her face, and immediately begins to dance, exhorting her sisters to come and join her. So the Mundy sisters do get to dance after all. They do not do so in public, however, but in the confines and privacy of the home. This is the point where the furthest extreme of the continuum Ricoeur has outlined needs to be considered. If Michael is the individual consciousness and the five women, along with his returned Uncle Jack and visiting father, are the close relations, there is an important dimension of Dancing at Lughnasa that bears on the public domain and the historicizing specificity of its being set in ‘that summer of 1936’ (7). In relation to the Mundy sisters being placed in proximity to, in interaction with but at one key remove from the small town of Ballybeg, Ricoeur sees ‘the play of exchanges between center and periphery’, which is so central to all of Friel’s plays that are set in Donegal (and most of them are) in the following way: ‘the question comes down to asking whether the village is a favorable place for identifying the intermediary forms of power, through which power in the village articulates the power of the state as it is exercised in that time and in that region’ (215). Nowhere is this more apparent than in the person of the parish priest, an offstage presence throughout though one who wields considerable power in the lives of the Ballybeg community and of the Mundy sisters.40 As a national teacher, Kate is directly answerable to the Catholic Church which runs the Irish educational system and the parish priest who is their local representative. Rose reveals that the respectable Kate ‘has a notion’ (19) of the man who runs the local arcade but that Austin Morgan is in love with a much younger woman; their wedding is signalled by the sound of bells in Act Two and as Michael’s narrative reveals Kate ends up tutoring Austin Morgan’s children.

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But had she married him, she would immediately have lost her job. That she does so in the course of the play is attributed by the parish priest to falling numbers. But as Kate points out, the enrolment numbers at the school are not falling. She can only attribute the fact that the priest cannot look her in the face and fires her at the end of the summer to the embarrassment caused by the rogue priest who has returned to Ballybeg rather than the hero they were expecting (an echo of one of Friel’s earliest plays, The Blind Mice). It is her respectability as a teacher, and the fact that many of the pupils she has taught will be there, which causes Kate to draw back from the joint scheme to attend the harvest dance. The setting of the play in 1936 and the confinement of these vibrant and talented women to the domestic space, the ‘home’, cannot but resonate off the key political development of the following year: Taoiseach Eamon de Valera’s framing of an Irish constitution in close consultation with the Catholic Church. As Melissa Sihra puts it, the 1937 Constitution ‘valorized the heterosexual family unit and glorified the role of motherhood’;41 it also identified woman’s proper place as in ‘the home’: ‘the state recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.’42 A long-time Republican supporter of de Valera, the writer Dorothy MacArdle, recognized how inimical the constitution was to the equal treatment of women and broke with him over it. de Valera is early and explicitly referred to by Maggie and Rose’s comic song, ‘“Will you vote for de Valera, will you vote?”’ (11). In 1932, the Republican de Valera who had remained not only in opposition during the 1920s but outside the constitutional framework of the Dáil revised his position and he and his Fianna Fáil party secured the election. As Diarmaid Ferriter shows, by calling a ‘snap’ election the following year in 1933, they actually increased their vote and consolidated their power in government through the decade.43 The Ireland of the 1930s has long been a by-word for conservatism (the title of a Sean O’Faolain short story memorably refers to it as ‘A Broken World’), and it is tragically ironic that such a political condition should have derived from the former revolutionaries who promised a transformed society. The most betrayed character in this respect is Kate. She is critical of the period during the First World War her brother Jack had spent as chaplain to the British Army in East Africa because, as Michael reveals, ‘Aunt Kate had been involved locally in the War of Independence’ (17). This identifies Kate as a supporter of de Valera in his revolutionary phase but also indicates why she has continued that allegiance now that de Valera has come to legitimate power. Her defence of the Ireland of the 1930s requires her to adopt the following ideological positions: to condemn the heterodox beliefs of Father Jack’s espousal of Ryangan customs as not something of which the current Pope would approve; to condemn Gerry Evans’s decision to go off and fight in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans; to withhold the Mundy sisters from their plan to go to the harvest dance

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because they should remain within the home. In doing all of this, she is betraying her own deeply held Republican beliefs. From the point of view of the women at the centre of the play the Irish Revolution that the males claimed had been achieved was deeply flawed and far from complete. The increasingly patriarchal political narrative of 1930s Ireland is challenged from within by the Mundy household. Christina has had a child ‘out of wedlock’ (17), and elected to keep the child and raise it as her own rather than giving it up for adoption. In this, she is supported by her sisters, including (let it be noted) Kate, who does not balk at supporting and acknowledging a ‘love-child’ (63), in Father Jack’s memorable phrase. It is also worth noting that women teachers who had children in such circumstances were being dismissed from employment in Irish Catholic schools into the 1970s. When Gerry Evans visits in Act 1, he asks Chrissie to marry him, as he has clearly done before. The conventional and socially respectable response would have been to accept the proposal of marriage from the father of her child. Instead, Chris lovingly but firmly turns him down, recognizing that Gerry would walk out on her again: ‘that’s your nature and you can’t help yourself’ (54). And as Helen Lojek notes, ‘they do not abandon Rose to an institution’.44 The most seriously misrepresented character in the productions I have seen is Kate, all too often portrayed as frozen rigid by repression. But Friel is careful to give her the first scene in loving exchange with the young Michael as he builds his kite. And her condemnation of Gerry Evans as a wastrel softens briefly as she watches him dance with Chris and has to acknowledge what a lovely couple they make. The ‘future’ that the narration by Michael shockingly discloses in his penultimate monologue bodes ill for all five sisters. The emigration that continued to flourish through the 1950s will soon claim Agnes and Rose, as we have seen; the isolation of a neutral Ireland in the Second World War will cut off all contact between Michael and his Welsh father. Much of the singing and dancing in the play is supplied by the joker, Maggie, addicted as she is not only to lame verbal riddles but to the much more expressive show tunes of the 1930s, the music and dancing of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers movies. And Chris gets to exercise her talent for dancing for the brief period that Gerry visits. Maggie opines jokingly at one point that what she wants is a career on the stage and that she is an artiste who cannot be expected to perform without notice. But none of those women could have considered a career on the stage in the 1930s. There was no professional theatre in the Donegal of the time; and social conventions would have prohibited their even considering such a move either to and in Dublin, Belfast or further afield. It would take time for the young boy who witnessed the originals of ‘those five brave Glenties women’ (1), as the play’s printed dedication puts it, to unlock them from his memory and put them on the stage. In the 1990s Ireland and the world proved more than ready to receive them.

8 Negotiating the Present

It might have seemed that in the period covered by the previous two chapters, the 1980s through into the 1990s, Brian Friel was dedicated to writing history plays and that, however much those plays might have resonated off then-contemporary events in Northern Ireland, there was no explicit engagement with the present in his drama. Such an impression would be misleading. During that period, Friel wrote four original plays which did just that and which this chapter will examine in terms of their negotiation with a contemporary Ireland: The Communication Cord (1983); Wonderful Tennessee (1993); Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997). Part of the reason for this misleading impression is commercial: these contemporary plays are less well known and were seen by a lot less people than either 1980’s Translations or 1990’s Dancing at Lughnasa. The success of those two plays world-wide was on a very great scale, by Friel’s or any other acclaimed contemporary playwright’s standards. But whereas Lughnasa had an extended run of a year on Broadway, the much-anticipated Wonderful Tennessee, when it likewise opened at the Plymouth Theatre, New York on 23 October 1993, was to close prematurely after 20 previews and nine performances. It is worth remembering that it had already had a successful run of several months at the Abbey Theatre over the summer.1 The following year Molly Sweeney was to transfer from its successful premiere at Dublin’s Gate Theatre to the Almeida Theatre in London; and the National Theatre of Scotland in 2007 toured a production of the play through the village halls and abandoned kirks of the remotest parts of the country in addition to playing conventional theatres in the bigger towns and cities. The 2008 London production of Give Me Your Answer, Do! revealed a greater structural shape under the direction of Robin LeFèvre than it had under the uncertain direction of its author at the Abbey the year before.2 The one play that has not had a real history of production since its 1983 premiere with Field Day is The Communication Cord. Stephen Rea wanted at one point to tour a double production of this play with Translations but did not receive the necessary funding. His reason for wanting to pair the two plays is that Communication 177

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Cord has always been viewed critically as a natural successor to Translations, a retaliatory farce that relentlessly satirizes the themes of the previous play. Likewise, Wonderful Tennessee has usually been paired with Dancing at Lughnasa as a deliberate updating of the theme of pagan–Christian conflict so central to the 1990 text. And there is in both of these ‘sequels’ a sense of the author reacting against the huge success of their predecessors and a concomitant simplification of their complex materials, as their deep-felt emotion is sentimentalized, their political and historical ironies flattened or removed. Friel has never shirked from clearing the ground already established, from striking out in new and unexpected directions, and this was no less true of his embarking on Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa, whatever their subsequent success. I would rather view both The Communication Cord and Wonderful Tennessee in this prospective rather than retrospective light, a breaking of new ground in an engagement with present-day Ireland, and that while they are to some degree conscious of the plays that precede them, they would benefit at least as much from being seen as enabling the plays that followed. These four contemporary plays by Brian Friel, when considered together, reveal some fascinating patterns in relation to character and setting. The protagonist of The Communication Cord is Tim Gallagher, a young academic memorably rendered by Stephen Rea with a shock of black hair, thick spectacles, nervous grin and a steady run of academic ‘chat’. Friel is very careful to specify that Tim is still writing his thesis and that his being given tenure in his academic position as a lecturer in linguistics depends on its successful completion. The only time the rather tongue-tied young man becomes linguistically fluent is when he is discoursing on his thesis topic, appropriately entitled ‘Discourse Analysis with Particular Reference to Response Cries’. And Friel enjoys himself with some academic set-pieces where Tim succeeds in confounding the on-stage audience with his theories of communication. Academics have featured as characters in Friel plays since the 1970s. But previously they have been positioned on the extreme edge of the dramatic action, mouthpieces for the articulation of a (usually empirical) perspective on the dramatic action we are viewing: Dodds articulating his views on the culture of poverty in The Freedom of the City (1973); Tom Hoffnung doing on-site research on the culture of the Big House in Ireland in Aristocrats (1979). But in the contemporary plays of the 1980s and 1990s the Frielian academic has been promoted centre stage into the role of a protagonist, with attendant dramatic complications. For Tim, there is a huge gap between his fluency on discourse analysis and his difficulty in linguistically coping with the growing farcical complications of the play. Friel’s notes for Wonderful Tennessee show that he considered making one of the play’s three males, Frank, a junior lecturer in folklore. One of the play’s central concerns is time, and Friel’s preferred method for working such material into these later plays is to have a character engaged in writing a book on the subject.

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In the finished play Frank is writing a book, The Measurement of Time and its Effect on European Civilisation, on which he has been engaged for three and a half years. But Friel very much needs the three couples of Wonderful Tennessee to be middle-aged and so Frank cannot be like Tim Gallagher a young junior lecturer. Instead, he becomes ‘a journeyman writer, scrounging commissions’3 but still hoping for a sense of personal validation from the completion of his magnum opus. The academic in the play is instead Frank’s wife Angela, who has returned to ‘lecturing after all these years’ (395) to support Frank. At key points in the play, Angela comes out with learned commentary on such key tropes from classical Greek literature as the Eleusinian mysteries or the Bacchic rituals of Dionysus. This kind of discourse shows the cultural distance travelled in Ireland from the history plays. Father Jack in Dancing at Lughnasa has much to say about the ritual practices of the African people among whom he has spent his time. But for an academic account of such practices we need to be directed to the anthropological writings of Victor Turner by a critical work like Richard Pine’s The Diviner or turn to a chapter on the play entitled ‘Dionysus in Ballybeg’ by F. C. McGrath.4 The contemporary characters are no longer naïve about the cultural practices in which they participate. When the six characters arrive on stage in Wonderful Tennessee they do so performing a ‘parodic conga dance, heads rolling, arms flying – a hint of the maenadic’ (354). The malaise that they subsequently reveal is clearly not going to be cured by engaging in dance; they are far too knowing for that. In Molly Sweeney the husband (another Frank) is an auto-didact in direct line of descent from Willie Logue in Friel’s first stage play, an enthusiast who picks up (and drops) a variety of schemes in the course of the play. But a sense of the distance travelled is conveyed by the other character, Dr Rice, who unlike Molly’s husband Frank has had a lengthy academic and professional training. As his monologues make clear, Dr Rice has enjoyed a global career in medicine, matching himself against three colleagues from other countries and enjoying the high life that accompanies it. But Dr Rice has slipped in the rankings and has found himself in the backwater of Ballybeg (‘not in Paris or Dallas or Vienna or Milan’5); he has a huge hope that the ‘miracle’ cure of Molly’s blindness will not only restore her vision but his world reputation. The action of Give Me Your Answer, Do! centres on the decision by its central character, a writer of novels, as to whether he should sell his archive to a Texas university. Such a decision would not have had to be faced by the early protagonists of Friel’s plays or by the young Derry teacher himself. But it is biographically true of the mature Brian Friel of the late 1990s, with a world reputation and fifty years of writerly accomplishment behind him. A key character is the Irish man who arrives on behalf of the US university to assess and evaluate the archive – not a marginal Tom Hoffnung but a central component of the unfolding dilemma. In a note Friel compares the assessor David Knight in Give Me Your Answer, Do! to Tom in Aristocrats: both are ‘a device to allow

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the writer [or character] to parade’, but he adds an urgent addendum weeks later: ‘Make him real’.6 The decision to make the protagonist of the 1997 play a writer follows on from Archbishop Lombard in Making History (1988) but now makes the writer the central presence, displacing such personae as the Earl of Tyrone or a hedge schoolmaster. On first viewing, the set of The Communication Cord is deceptive. There before us is a ‘traditional’ Irish cottage, suggesting that what is about to unfold is set in the early twentieth century rather than the contemporary Ireland of the 1980s. The stage directions are elaborate in specifying the properties required to fill out the setting: a settle bed, a large churn, a wooden flail, etc. And there stretched across the kitchen is the clothes line on which Irish housewives traditionally hung the family washing for drying before the arrival of the ubiquitous dryer. But the traditional setting is rendered surrealistic by the one item of clothing pegged to the line, ‘a pink nightdress’7 of distinctly contemporary provenance. This discrepant item reflects back on the authenticity of the setting and calls it in question. For this set is pristine, with none of the wear and tear of the crockery or smoke-darkened walls that repeated usage would produce. As Jack McNeilis tells his friend Tim to whom he is lending the family cottage for the weekend, this house is the ‘ancestral seat of the McNeilis dynasty, restored and refurbished with love and dedication, absolutely authentic in every last detail’ (15). At least on one level, the set is a knowing, acerbic commentary on the tendency for Irish plays to be the more marketable globally if they are set in a traditional Irish cottage rather than in something more contemporary, which would be more anonymous and less identifiably ‘Irish’. The pristine quality of the settings also argues for the wish of producers mounting a lavish production of an Irish play to build an elaborate and expensive set, and one that does not display a poverty that would remind the Irish-Americans in the audience of the abject circumstances from which they emigrated. The ‘pink nightdress’ is also a theatrical sign that what we are about to witness in The Communication Cord is a sexual farce, with clandestine assignments between lustful men and women whose designs will be thwarted by an uncooperative universe. Tim naturally wants the cottage for an assignation with a young woman. But he is the play’s romantic and hence sexual innocent, and what he has in mind by way of assignation is a visit by his girlfriend Susan, not on her own, but accompanied by her father, an Irish Senator who can influence whether Tim is given tenure at his university. The more experienced Jack is the philanderer and, once Tim and his friends are out of the way, Jack intends having a sexual tryst with a young French woman called Evette. The two couples arriving in the same place on the same afternoon is a potential for complication and disaster, with timing being (as always in farce) of the essence. But the wild card is the unannounced presence of a third woman, already ensconced in the cottage and the owner of the pink nightdress. Claire, a local young woman, has been

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carrying a candle for Tim for a long time and is determined to win him back from the other woman; her main design is to sexually compromise him by serially hanging her sexy underclothes on the washing line. Tim is unaware of her presence and each time reacts to the sexy apparitions with consternation. Grabbing them from the line, he recurrently stuffs them in his pocket where they peek out to compromise him further. Claire functions as the mischievous spirit of the house. The cottage also takes on a life of its own: the door blowing open unexpectedly and the fire belching out plumes of soot. The sexual shenanigans rarely go beyond this, even though Friel speculates at one point in his notes on ‘bedroom possibilities’,8 and all of the sexual manoeuvrings remain rather chaste. The monstrous figure in the play is not any of the young lovers but Susan’s father, Senator Donovan. As Friel notes: ‘Even if the play is a farce – particularly if it is a farce – it will have the present modes of society as its first concern: how does it stand with regard to […] politics – politicians, our “cultural heritage”?’9 The presentation of the senator and his daughter is in line with that already advanced in Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Susan has the same bourgeois wish as Katy Doogan to make a more financially advantageous marriage and is putting the pressure on Tim to have her father support his job prospects. Senator Donovan uses the occasion of the authentic Irish cottage to deliver a speech showing that he has not lost touch with his native roots and to honour the pieties of true Irishness. He does so in a markedly Yeatsian key, claiming that ‘despite the market-place, all the years of trafficking in politics and medicine, […] this transcends all those … hucksterings’ (32). When Jack’s French woman finally shows up, she recognizes Senator Donovan from the fact that she and this married Irish politician have been conducting an affair: ‘We’re old friends. We’ve known each other for ages and ages. He’s taking me to Washington with him next Friday’ (80). Senator Donovan pays verbal lip-service to the traditional verities of the Irish past while simultaneously leading an opulent lifestyle, jetting to Brussels for European Union business and the US to develop Irish-American interests. His lineaments would fit any number of the suited brigade of Irish politicians in the 1980s but none more so than Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey. In his 1982 farce, Kill, playwright Hugh Leonard had presented a thinly veiled portrait of Haughey in the figure of his central politician Wade, but the drama failed because of the dependence on that resemblance. Friel makes no such error in his own political farce. Senator Donovan is an independent dramatic creation, with his own blustering life-force. But he represents the same contradictions that were so perfectly embodied in Haughey and that made him so emblematic of Ireland in the 1980s. Charles J. Haughey first came to attention as a modernizing Minister of Finance in the Fianna Fáil government of the 1960s.The eruption of the North saw him as one of two government ministers on trial in 1970 for an alleged effort to import arms into Northern

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Ireland in order to support the besieged Catholics. Haughey came back from this disgrace by relentlessly working the rural circuit in the 1970s and seeing himself installed as party leader in 1979. Several times Taoiseach in the 1980s, he projected an image that ‘seemed to blend the Renaissance prince and the Gaelic chieftain’.10 On the one hand, Haughey worked to demonstrate that he was still unchanged from the core rural values, and sought a relationship with the land to the extent that he bought one of the revered Blasket Islands, part of the original Gaeltacht. On the other hand, he lived in a large Georgian mansion in Dublin, purchased expensive art and insisted on only wearing Charvet shirts. Though married all of his life, Haughey had a high-profile mistress with a column in an Irish Sunday newspaper that made coded references to her affair with the then-Taoiseach. Above all, there was the mystery of Haughey’s finances: where did all the money come from to finance this lavish lifestyle? It would take the tribunals of the 1990s to call Haughey to account and disclose the combination of bankers and businessmen who had privately funded him.11 And yet Haughey was the only Taoiseach to display any interest in the arts. His intervention led to the granting of tax-free status to writers and artists, a fact Friel acknowledged when Haughey launched The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing in 1991. Friel has penned two scathing portraits of Irish senators, Doogan in Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Donovan in The Communication Cord. So there was a particular irony when Haughey as Taoiseach appointed Brian Friel to the Irish Senate in 1987. The playwright’s stint as senator proved a short one. Exactly a year later, he wrote an utterly courteous letter of resignation to Haughey, stating that his own work was taking all of his time and that he could no longer draw ‘a salary that is not earned’.12 The time coincided with a fruitful renewal of Friel’s playwriting, resulting in Making History and Dancing at Lughnasa. Senator Friel kept his peace during his 12 months in the House. Senator Donovan is never done mouthing pious platitudes about the restored cottage; until he demonstrates how cows were chained to the wall and ends up locked in that position for the remainder of the play. The rhetoric cannot sustain the physical discomfort and suffers a breakdown: ‘This determined our first priorities! This is our native simplicity! Don’t give me that shit!’ (75). Even here, the salty speech is a reminder of the notorious interview Haughey conducted in December 1984 with Hot Press magazine (the Irish equivalent of Rolling Stone). The rock-and-roll context and the journal’s unbuttoned style led Haughey to indulge freely in ‘fucks’ to a degree unprecedented in Irish political discourse up to that point. In representing an Ireland that is increasingly post-national and hybrid in its membership of the European Union, The Communication Cord demonstrates a marked fluidity with regard to identity both gendered and political. Though Tim remains resolutely straight, appearances suggest otherwise as he is forced to claim the ever-accumulating sexy underwear as his own. Charged with transvestism by the Senator, Tim lays the charge at another’s

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door, leading the Senator to denounce an utterly innocent third party as a ‘land-grabbing transvestite’ (87). Both of the Irish women are misidentified in the play at various times as the French woman Evette; Claire plays up to the mis-identification by repeatedly saying ‘I understand everything you say’. When inevitably the real Evette turns up and is introduced as such to the German neighbour who has now met all three, he replies: ‘Evette? Good, ha-ha-ha. (Pointing to CLAIRE) Evette also. (Pointing to SUSAN) Also Evette. Perhaps is every Irish girl named Evette?’ (82). If Irish women can now so readily become French, then German immigrants can pass for native. The setting of The Communication Cord is not home for its main characters. Jack’s family may have started in Ballybeg but he practises as a barrister in the city. Both he and Tim come from there for a weekend ‘away’. Senator Donovan and his daughter are likewise visiting. Claire may be a native but she takes up residence in the McNeilis cottage and brandishes her bra, not to burn it but to establish her modernity. Nora Dan, the one ‘authentic’ native, plays up to the stereotype of the Irish peasant while wheedling her way into taking possession of the cottage. The one character who seems secure in his Ballybeg residence is Barney the Banks, the German who lives happily in a nearby caravan and whose German name has been Hibernicized. When Jack enters, he does so in the guise of Barney the Banks, offering to buy the house: ‘A million Deutsche mark, Herr Gallagher. I hoffer you any monies you hask for’ (64). No national identity can be securely claimed any more. Friel’s satire relentlessly parodies those who claim to be unaltered in their essential Irishness and mines the comedy of mixed identity for all of its protean possibilities. With Wonderful Tennessee (1993), Friel is writing a play set during the period when Ireland had entered its ‘Celtic Tiger’ phase, when unprecedented and (as it turned out) unregulated investment and development led to a temporary prosperity. Nothing in the play operates better as a sign of the conspicuous consumption of the time than the two hampers that the six characters bring with them on their sojourn in County Donegal. The trip has been organized by Terry Martin, a wealthy concert impresario, who enters carrying ‘two large expensive hampers filled with food and drink’ (350). Terry has not purchased the food nor filled the hampers himself, but has paid to have them furnished by some designer food emporium. When the hampers are opened at the start of Act 2, their contents include the following exotic items: venison and apricot compote; honey gateau; brandied peaches and Romanian truffles. As Terry ruefully remarks when the inventory is complete: ‘I order two hampers of good food and they fill them with stuff nobody can eat’ (394). In his notes for the play, Friel – no doubt remembering his own childhood – had itemized the contents of the picnic as ‘lemonade [and] a half ton of biscuits’.13 But it is not a childhood memory of the past à la Dancing at Lughnasa that is required for Wonderful Tennessee but an evocation of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ present.

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Terry’s largesse also manifests itself in what is disclosed in the course of the play about his financial support for several other members of the group: notably his friend Frank while he works on the book about time. Frank’s wife Angela may have resumed work as a teacher but, with a large family of ten children to support, they have been subsidized by Terry. Not everyone in this representative group of six Irish people is well off, despite appearances. Terry has brought his wife and four friends to the pier in County Donegal where Wonderful Tennessee is set in order to spend the night on an offshore island that he and his father visited when he was a child. It transpires that Terry has actually bought the island, which puts him in the company of John Lennon and Charles Haughey. In his notes for The Communication Cord, Friel names a few real-life members of the Irish Senate as he builds the portrait of Donovan; but there is no explicit mention of Haughey. In the notes for this play, Friel drops a resonant, quoted phrase into the middle of a paragraph stressing the psychologically as well as financially dependent relationship that exists between Frank and Terry: ‘And mightn’t Terry Martin have a kind of batman – “Yes, boss” – once alcoholic, once derelict, now “a success – Terry saved me”.’14 Henry Patterson writes that as Taoiseach Charles Haughey’s leadership style ‘was characterized by the encouragement of a deferential and at times fearful loyalty amongst his supporters, who called him “Boss”’.15 The phrase gained even greater currency in relation to Haughey in the hugely successful RTE radio satire series, Scrap Saturday, where a recurrent feature was the voice of Haughey (whose nasal tones were perfectly reproduced by star and co-writer Dermot Morgan, in the days before Father Ted). Haughey’s lengthy self-serving monologues, full of ever more elaborate fantasizing and self-mythologizing, were addressed to a character called ‘Mara’, a fictionalized version of Fianna Fáil press secretary P. J. Mara, whose repeated catchphrase by way of response was ‘Yes, Boss’. If Charles J. Haughey is a figure who feeds into Terry Martin, a source closer to home is the producer and impresario Noel Pearson. As stated earlier, Pearson produced Dancing at Lughnasa (the 1990 play and the 1998 film version) and Wonderful Tennessee itself. At the outset of his career, he had been a concert promoter, managing bands like the acclaimed folk group, the Dubliners. Terry has been a concert promoter throughout his career, as dramatized through his relationship with the third male of the group, George. George in the present is dying of throat cancer and finds it extremely difficult to speak. Instead, he ‘speaks’ through the almost nonstop array of musical pieces he plays throughout on his accordion, from sacred hymns to secular show tunes and back again (including the number ‘Down by the Cane-Brake’, which features the title ‘Wonderful Tennessee’ in its lyrics). Terry and George have been friends since college days, and Terry has managed the more commercial of George’s two musical enterprises, the popular beat group the Dude Ranchers (the other, the Aoelians, indulged his love of classical music but did not pay the rent). As Terry remembers when

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his sister Trish is recalling her marriage to George, she persuaded her brother to take on the management of her fiancée’s musical career. The latter followed Terry’s advice, ‘packed in the Aeolians’ to concentrate on the Dude Ranchers and ‘to make some money – so that you and he could get married’ (411). Terry goes on to indicate that his management of George and his popular group made him financially and professionally: ‘We would never have come to anything without George’ (411). But it turns out at the end of the play that, despite appearances and what he’s been saying, Terry is broke and will not be able to take up the option on the island: ‘I haven’t the money. The bookie business – concert promotion – the last few years have been disastrous’ (441). Terry is a gambler, a broker in risk, and as Declan Kiberd has written, there are close affinities between the commercial businessman and the artist: ‘both artists and entrepreneurs have one thing in common: each is a broker in risk, a devotee of an instinctual insight which can only be confirmed or negated by subsequent years of exhausting hackwork’.16 The success of Dancing at Lughnasa was followed, from the producer’s point of view, by the failure of Wonderful Tennessee. But Noel Pearson has continued a close working relationship with Brian Friel ever since, not only on the Lughnasa film but on a TV documentary in the year of the playwright’s seventieth birthday and a production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 2010, returning the play to the beautiful theatre where it was originally staged (Dublin’s Gaiety) 46 years after its premiere. Terry has brought the three couples to this spot for reasons that remain unclear: to celebrate his birthday (the hampers also contain a cake), to visit the island. But while that may have a memorial and personal importance for him, what could it mean to the other five, even his sister? When Trish asks Terry what he and their father did out there, his reply makes clear that the island in the Ireland of forty years before was a site of pilgrimage. They prepared for the passage by fasting, and while there were only allowed bread and water to drink. The personal memory Frank centres on is his father filling a bottle with water from a holy well. The place as a site of cure is signified by the crutches and walking sticks that have been left behind (an image redolent of Faith Healer). The key image is of fragments, ‘bits of cloth […] a handkerchief, a piece of shawl’ (371), which pilgrims have pinned to the bush beside the well. These fragments are central to the meaning and technique of Wonderful Tennessee. The term his father used to describe them was ‘bratóga’, an Irish word meaning ‘rags’ or ‘coverings’. ‘Bratóga’ is itself a verbal scrap or residue of the Irish language in the English of the play, reduced almost to the point of extinction from the early nineteenth century of Translations (which dramatizes the beginning of that decline). The one other scrap of Irish in the play is the name of the island itself: ANGELA: Has it a name, our destination? TERRY: Oileán Draoíchta. What does that mean, all you educated people?

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TRISH: That rules me out. Where’s our barrister? (Berna) BERNA: Island of Otherness; Island of Mystery. (369) Where the Irish language was once oral and frequently unlettered, it can now only be acquired through an elaborate education, years of schooling that leave many children unable to construct a single sentence in the language. And yet it is a potent remnant of cultural memory even if fragmented – arguably more potent when fragmented and suggestive rather than in the deadly daily rote of mechanical learning. The language of Wonderful Tennessee is, as with all of Brian Friel’s plays, English. But what is a particular feature of the language of this play, from a writer who had concluded his previous play Dancing at Lughnasa with one of the most lyrical and memorable speeches in the contemporary canon, is its insufficiency. The opening lines make this clear with their insistent repetitions and the fact that most of the lines spoken by the six characters are interchangeable. Within four pages of dialogue (though one can scarcely call it that), Terry their leader who has brought them all there says ‘Believe me’ at least four times. The refrain ‘it is wonderful’ not only devalues each of the words but insistently points to their inability to describe or articulate what it is these characters want. The acoustic of the opening stage directions calls for ‘silence and complete stillness’ (347) as the natural order of things in this theatrical space. No matter how much the characters may talk, silence remains the ground against which they do so. The point is made dramatically by delaying the physical entrance of the three couples. Their arrival is announced instead by the offstage noise they make and the Babelian chatter of their clichéd phrases. Why they have come here is not initially clear. The ‘bright summer clothes’ (350) they all wear, the jollity and singsong with which they enter and the two hampers Terry carries all suggest some kind of a holiday or brief respite from the cares of their everyday worlds. The Communication Cord and Wonderful Tennessee both centre on visitors to the Donegal setting, characters who are coming to a holiday spot for a weekend away and who therefore may be seen as tourists in their own country. Jack McNeilis and Terry Martin are the ones returning to their childhood homes; but that return is presented by them in an extremely self-conscious way to the friends they have brought with them. Both Tim and Jack have more elaborate designs to be transacted in the restored peasant cottage, involving women and work prospects. The purpose of the visitors in Wonderful Tennessee takes some time to become apparent, and never comes entirely into focus, but is thematically informed by Terry’s discussion of his visit to the island with his father when he was seven. The island 40 years earlier was a traditional site of pilgrimage, as the holy well and the accompanying bratóga attest. But in the Ireland of the 1990s, ‘nobody does that sort of thing, nowadays’, as Terry says in responding to Frank’s claim that ‘people stopped believing, didn’t they?’ (372).

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As far back as 1983, Friel had made notes on what he termed the ‘Lough Derg’ play, one that would concern itself with and take the narrative shape of a journey to the island traditionally associated with Catholicism’s penitential practices of fasting and formal prayer. In 1984, Seamus Heaney published a volume of poetry entitled Station Island. Heaney’s suite of poems intermingled a contemporary pilgrimage to Lough Derg with prior literary renderings by such Irish writers as William Carleton in the nineteenth century and Patrick Kavanagh in mid-twentieth; these earlier writers are represented by Heaney as spectral fellow pilgrims. Friel’s return to the play in 1990, no doubt with the Heaney volume in mind, resolved that his pilgrims should not go to Lough Derg. A visit to Doon Well on 28 June 1990 had shown him ‘the bush with the bratóga, looking tawdry and soiled’,17 and it was an image he held through all the later transformations of what was to become Wonderful Tennessee. The definitive move away from Lough Derg was not only a move away from deliberate literary influence but even more so from traditional Catholic belief. Late in the play, Terry tells a story about a group of drunken young men and women who went to the island and conducted a pagan ritual in which one of their company was dismembered. The year was 1932 and they had been returning to Donegal from the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, a ‘triumphalist’ celebration of Irish Catholicism with hundreds of thousands attending from all over the country. The date in the 1930s and the juxtaposition of the pagan excess with Catholic conformity identify this story closely with Dancing at Lughnasa. But both Terry’s story and the previous play with their shared 1930s setting stand in marked contrast to the present-day narrative of Wonderful Tennessee. If the six contemporary characters still adhere to any form of Catholicism, it is the social practices that accompany it, in particular the obligation to stay married that still binds even the unhappiest of the couples to each other. But of a rigorous set of practices with a core belief system at its centre, virtually nothing remains. These present-day pilgrims, still driven by the need for something spiritual to redeem the tawdriness of their daily lives, come on their ‘pilgrimage’ now with more questions than answers, more with a quest for the transcendent than any form of rituals to which they can submit. As Friel noted, ‘whether the venue is pagan or Christian doesn’t matter’.18 But he held to the idea or image of the island, even as it moved away from the traditional location of Lough Derg. A crucial decision was to move the island offstage and instead centre the play’s setting on a stone pier from which it could be viewed. None of these latter-day pilgrims views the island alike. For Frank, with his concept of time, it’s a perfect circle; for Trish, with her musician husband, it resembles a ukelele; and for the complicated Berna, trained as a lawyer and drawn to parables, it’s a rectangle. If the island is offstage, much of the anticipation of the play in its initial stages has to do with the pilgrims waiting for the local boatman to ferry them across. He, like the title character of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For

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Godot (1955), though much anticipated, never arrives and so never makes an appearance in the play. Frank returns from the boatman’s cottage to give a graphic description of the revenant he encountered there: ‘Ancient; and filthy; and toothless. And bloody smiling all the time’ (385). But can anyone still be living in a landscape that is completely depopulated, one from which the last emigrants have departed decades before? There is only Frank’s word that the boatman actually exists. And he is also the one who gets all of the others into a state of readiness and frenzied excitement by announcing that the boatman is ‘here! He’s bloody here!’ (390) before confessing shamefacedly that he is only crying wolf. The boatman bears the overtly mythological and non-naturalistic name of Carlin, which immediately suggests the ferryman over the River Styx. The name has the same supernatural aura as Godot, signifying someone who has a bearing on the fate and fortunes of the characters who await him. Since they cannot sail to the island without the boatman, the six characters spend the night on the pier waiting for him to materialize and occupy the duration of the play, like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, filling in the time with inconsequential dialogue, aborted stories and snatches of song. On 31 August 1990 Friel’s diary records an ‘uneasy thought: the relationship between the Island and Godot’.19 While he remained intent on shying away from more traditional Irish literary models treating of pilgrimage and striking out in a more deliberately abstract and post-Catholic direction, the sudden and unexpected appearance of Beckett’s modernist play on the horizon was clearly something Friel was prepared to risk. A comparison with another Beckett play, Happy Days (1961), will shed even more light on Wonderful Tennessee. For much of the content of both plays is made up in a more overtly postmodernist manner than Godot of a collage of interwoven textual quotations. Furthermore, neither provides the case of the author engaging directly with the reader or audience over the heads of the characters in terms of those literary references (as Joyce does in Ulysses, for example). Beckett’s Winnie and Friel’s pilgrims are only too conscious of the fact that they are deliberately quoting. In the case of Happy Days, one of Winnie’s most reiterated refrains is ‘what are those wonderful lines?’20 On each occasion, it serves to introduce some half-remembered fragment from various classics of the traditional canon of English literature, mainly the plays of Shakespeare and a number of eighteenth-century poets. In Wonderful Tennessee, much of the ‘dialogue’ operates between George on his accordion playing a particular fragment of music and some or all of the other characters singing the accompanying words. In relation to a traditional Catholic pilgrimage, George will play an appropriate hymn like ‘Bring Flowers of the Fairest’. But he is just as likely to play a hymn more associated with the Protestant (and English) tradition, as he does with ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ at the opening of Act 2. Nor is his repertoire confined to religious music since many of the pieces he

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briefly quotes are popular American show tunes from the 1930s. Many such songs feature in Dancing at Lughnasa; but they would then have been contemporary, widely disseminated through the cinema and radio (‘Marconi’). Religious songs like ‘Bring Flowers of the Fairest’ would 60 years earlier in Catholic Ireland have been imprinted on people’s memories, a cornerstone of liturgical practice and church attendance. It is not just or primarily the case that Brian Friel is remembering beloved songs both sacred and secular from his childhood and granting them their full, evocative power. These are once recognizable features of a cultural landscape that has been almost entirely eroded over time – all that survives are textual and musical fragments. These can and are quoted by the characters from their fallible, decaying memories. But they are no longer meaningful in their entirety or have a context in which their original force and significance could be transmitted to the understanding of the audience. In Act 1 of Happy Days Winnie begins her day as follows: her ‘lips move in inaudible prayer’ before she concludes by saying aloud ‘For Jesus Christ sake Amen’.21 The act of public prayer has become almost entirely internalized; only the concluding line is spoken. In Act 2 Winnie denies that she prays and begins her day with a fragment from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Both Beckett’s and Friel’s plays are enacting a process of cultural loss. With so little to look for or to be found remaining in the official culture, the rituals of survival have to be improvised. The characters do this by means of verbal repetition, but the threadbare nature of the language, its insufficiency, soon declares itself. Both draw on the materials at hand to structure the day and give it meaning. Winnie does so by enumerating the contents of her handbag, raising the parasol, and even essaying a fragment of a song to formally end her day. The pilgrims in Wonderful Tennessee also improvise out of what surrounds them – in this case, the remains of the once thriving fishing industry that litter the pier. Terry describes the ritual that the traditional pilgrims on the Island of Mystery performed: There were three beds – you know, mounds of stone – and every time you went round a bed you said certain prayers and then picked up a stone from the bottom of the mound and placed it on the top. (371) The pier, among its other obsolescent remains, has a ‘listing and rotting wooden stand, cruciform in shape, on which hangs the remnant of a life-belt’ (344). As they are packing up their belongings prior to leaving, Berna takes off her scarf and ties it to the stand. Trish then hangs up a bracelet to balance Berna’s scarf and, removing his handkerchief from her husband’s pocket, adds it to the tally. Terry is reluctant to part with his one shirt, and when the others gather to rip it from his back there is a whisper of surrogate sacrifice. Once the wooden stand bears signs of their presence, a variation

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on another earlier ritual is played out as, one by one, each of the pilgrims picks up a stone and places it on top of a mound.22 Berna has spoken all along about the need to attest that has drawn them there. In the end Angela speaks for them all when they promise to return the following year. She validates an experience that could all too readily be termed a failure (Terry calls it ‘a mess, the whole thing’ [439]) by declaring: Yes, we will! Next year – and the year after – and the year after that! Because we want to! Not out of need – out of desire! Not in expectation – but to attest, to affirm, to acknowledge. (442) The play might almost have been called: Six Characters in Search of a Religion. The six characters in Wonderful Tennessee are barely that. Like Beckett’s tramps they have little differentiating bourgeois detail to give them ‘character’ and that is only in part because they have moved from the routine of their everyday lives into a more abstract and abstracted setting. This bothered Friel periodically when he was working on the play, but he increasingly developed a sense that the traditional dramatic concern with individuated characters needed in this instance to remain subservient to the ‘one certain thing – a location’ and the play’s ‘large and potent theme’.23 All of the characters are interrelated in a number of complex, almost mathematical ways. Terry and Trish are brother and sister; Angela and Berna are sisters. Terry is married to Berna but having an affair with Angela, who is married to Frank. (Like Eamon in Aristocrats, Terry has married the wrong sister.) Frank and Angela bicker, but he is always courteous and attentive to Berna. Trish is married to George, whose musical group was managed by Terry. The six characters move around each other like figures in a complicated dance, achieving a greater degree of dialogue and togetherness in the various fragmented songs they sing than in the banalities they exchange. It is only in isolated moments that they admit the despair underlying the deliberately upbeat banter. When Friel put the question to himself on 21 August 1990 of what the play was about, he answered with the avowal that ‘it is about a group of people who are drawn to this place because of its Otherness, because they feel they can touch the Other there. What the Other is they do not know.’24 One answer has been offered by Ciarán Benson in The Cultural Psychology of the Self: ‘The “Other” is that in dialogue with which I define my own identity.’25 Wonderful Tennessee is Friel’s most postmodern play, not least in the interdependency of its characters; and Richard Kearney has written that a postmodern republic is ‘a community where identity is part of a permanent process of narrative retelling, where each citizen is in a state of dependency on others’.26 Christopher Murray has noted the extent to which the play echoes Waiting For Godot but argues that the contrast between the two is ‘far more significant’.27 For him, this turns on a reading of the Beckett

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play as unrelentingly bleak whereas the characters in Wonderful Tennessee ‘begin to stir towards renovation’. For me, Beckett’s bleakness cannot be all-pervasive because it is always accompanied by laughter, even if it is the laughter that accompanies unhappiness. And for all of Tennessee’s gestures towards renovation, its six characters still have to face back into the bleakness of their individual lives at the close; but they do so having at least entered briefly into a proto-community where the Other was approached and acknowledged. And I certainly agree with Murray that Friel’s Wonderful Tennessee is ‘a far better play than its failure on Broadway might suggest’.28 With Molly Sweeney (1994), Friel returned to the monologue form of Faith Healer (1979). He may have been partially encouraged to do so by the new production of the earlier play at the Abbey Theatre in 1991. This had two important features in common with the Irish premiere at the Abbey 11 years earlier, which after its failure in the US made the play not only a commercial success but an influential and defining moment in the development of contemporary Irish drama. The success of Faith Healer at the Abbey in 1980 helped to develop an Irish audience for spare, demanding plays of spiritual and emotional crisis where a good deal was asked of that audience by way of engagement and response. It presented Donal McCann as Frank Hardy with his greatest, most demanding and defining role. McCann was the most intellectually passionate of actors and the outstanding Irish actor of this and the subsequent decade (he died prematurely from cancer in 1996). The 1991 production saw McCann returning to the title role. The direction was once again by Joe Dowling, who had persuaded Friel to let a production by him go ahead in Dublin after the Broadway debacle (and who was to return to acting in 2009 at the Guthrie, where he played the title role and directed the play). What had occurred to McCann in the meantime was a six-year absence from the stage owing to a severe drink problem. Brought back in 1986 by the Gate’s Michael Colgan to play Captain Boyle in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, McCann then gave himself to one production a year for the remaining decade of his life. Three of them involved Friel. McCann had forged an important theatrical partnership with the actor John Kavanagh, for whom Casimir was written and who played the original Irish Teddy. McCann and Kavanagh were to team up again in 1992 in Friel’s version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country at the Gate. And in 1993 they were the original Terry and Frank in Wonderful Tennessee, the first time Friel had written for them as a conscious double-act. In his notes for Molly Sweeney, the playwright rapidly determines (for reasons that will be examined) that the new work will signal a return to the monologue form. He realizes that this will bring it into relation with Faith Healer but is committed to the form as appropriate to the theme – of a blind woman having her sight restored – and is determined to proceed with it. He also considers (on 15 September 1993) that this time around the monologues may not be distinct but rather ‘contrapuntal; overlapping’.29 The key role of

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Molly Sweeney was played by the Irish actress Catherine Byrne, and it seems likely that it was written for her (as Terry and Frank had been for McCann and Kavanagh in Friel’s previous play). The doctor’s description of Molly as he sees her walk to the hospital on the morning of her operation – ‘she moved briskly with her usual confidence; her head high; her face alert and eager’30 – would have been borne out to the audience by the face of the actress in front of them. The play is something of a chamber piece – Friel describing it at on 22 September 1993 as a ‘trio for three voices’ – and benefited from its intimate staging in Dublin’s Gate and London’s Almeida (where it transferred), where all three of the actor’s faces, but especially Molly’s, could be studied in close up. The actress playing the part could not and cannot fully represent Molly’s ‘moving briskly with her usual confidence’ in the restricted world of the play; but the audience of Wonderful Tennessee would have seen Catherine Byrne as Angela doing so after a brief, whispered exchange with Terry: ‘She touches his shoulder quickly, lightly, and moves away’ (357). And when Molly describes her best friend Rita washing her hair for her and remarks ‘my bloody useless hair – I can do nothing with it’ (479), there is a very conscious reference to Christina’s complaints about her hair being like a whin bush in Dancing at Lughnasa and so to the first part Catherine Byrne had played in a Friel drama. She was to go on to appear as the writer’s wife Daisy in 1997’s Give Me Your Answer, Do!, completing a decade-long engagement at the centre of Brian Friel’s drama. Donal McCann and Catherine Byrne’s collaborations with Friel in the 1990s reveal how more central than ever actors were to the parts he was writing; they got to play opposite each other as Terry and Angela in Wonderful Tennessee and as the doctor Shpigelsky and the heroine Natalya in A Month in the Country. Friel himself undertook the direction of Molly Sweeney (as discussed in Chapter 2) and, when Byrne asked him how she should physically play the part of a blind woman, he replied that she as an actress best knew how to interpret the role.31 T. P. McKenna, who played Dr Rice, also indicated that he was left by the writer-director to his own best instincts as a performer when it came to his interpretation.32 McKenna was an Irish actor who had had a long career in London on stage and television. His acting origins and particularly his distinctive, nasal, polished but still recognizable voice matched up nicely with Dr Rice, whose Irish origins had become plummier with international success but who could lose this in moments of excitement, as Frank notes Rice does in the moment of triumph at the operation’s success: ‘He [Rice] was so excited, there was no trace of the posh accent’ (485). In the third and equally important role of the husband Frank, Mark Lambert (again, an Irish actor who had extensive London experience) with his mobile features and expressive face perfectly captured Frank’s nervous energy, moments of enthusiasm and fundamental uncertainty. With the play’s emphasis on monologues and what Patrick Burke describes as this ‘small but accomplished cast’,33 the novice director Friel was on solid ground.

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And if he did not supply much in the way of direction as to how the actress playing Molly Sweeney should physically enact her blindness, the writer Friel is more forthcoming: Most people with impaired vision look and behave like fully sighted people. The only evidence of their disability is usually a certain vacancy in the eyes or in the way the head is held. MOLLY should indicate her disability in some such subtle way. No canes, no groping, no dark glasses, etc. (455) On the morning of the operation, when Rice watches the apparently confident Molly arrive with her husband, he notes that she ‘didn’t have her cane’ (480). This suggests that usually she did. There is no physical description of how Molly moves about, negotiates unknown space, when she first comes to Rice’s house for an examination. Instead, he is struck on meeting Molly Sweeney by her calmness and ‘her independence’ (458). We take him at his absolute word when he says this, as the accurate perception of a patient’s inner state by a man who has a wealth and lifetime of experience to draw on. But were that first encounter to be represented naturalistically, the audience would have to witness some outward and evident signs that the woman being brought by her husband to see the surgeon has extremely poor sight. Would she move uncertainly or grope her way in? Would she require physical assistance from either or both of the men or at the least vocal cues as to where to move and situate herself? However minimal the aid Molly might have required, it would have placed her at a disadvantage both physical and psychological to the two men in the room. And how could Rice have conveyed to an audience his positive assessment of her calm and independent demeanour? If he had spoken it straight to her, it could only have been taken in part as designed to reassure and assuage the nervousness of a partially sighted woman contemplating a major operation. And it would also have had to counter the visual impression already conveyed. By using the form of the monologue to treat of this particular theme, Friel was redrawing the representational boundaries and codes in favour of his heroine, ensuring that she was not placed at a bodily disadvantage in the space occupied by all three characters and the actors who play them. Much is made in the course of the play about the medical fact that the restoring of Molly’s vision, however instantaneous and successful the physical restoration may be, is an elaborate act of reconstruction played out over time. Many of the details relating to Molly’s experience were taken from an essay entitled ‘To See and Not See’ by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, originally published in The New Yorker and reprinted in the volume An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (1995). In relation to acquiring sight, the cured person does not immediately see. Having previously depended on constructing meaning from the associations of what is conveyed to them by

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the other senses, they now have to forget what they knew and start over. As Sachs observes, ‘in the case of a man previously blind, learning to see is not like learning another language; it is, as Diderot put it, like learning language for the first time’.34 Friel uses the Diderot quote as an epigraph for the published text, since the analogy places Molly Sweeney squarely in line with the exploration of the expressive limits of language already examined in relation to Wonderful Tennessee. If the sacred and secular music played by George provided an alterative, here the enemy to be fought is the oppression of the visual, the everyday sights of the workaday world, and the meanings they traditionally enforce. By removing traditional visual properties from the setting, the playwright plunges the audience into the dark and hence into the same position as Molly Sweeney. She is no longer the most disabled but the most enabled of the three characters, positioned to relate directly to the audience and bring them to participate in the world she inhabits. It is therefore no surprise but rather absolutely necessary that she speaks the first and last monologues in the play. As the opening line of Beckett’s late novella Company (1980) so memorably puts it: ‘A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.’35 Seeking terms to convey the pleasure she derives from that world, Molly lists off her favourite activities: her work as a physiotherapist, her listening to the radio and to music. But by far the most self-expressive is swimming, a release into a different medium and element, a ‘world of pure sensation […] that could not have been enhanced by sight – experience that existed only by touch and feel’ (466). In the accumulating monologues of the three characters, Friel deftly suggests in the time-honoured dramatic fashion of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Shakespeare’s King Lear that the blind have more insight into their condition than those who can physically see. He does so from Molly’s opening monologue on. There, she describes her father instructing her in the names of flowers like Adam in the Garden; but late at night, lying in her bed listening, the world takes on a different aspect as Molly hears her parents arguing and her increasingly drunken father ‘grope his way unsteadily to bed’ (457) like a blind man. This perception of hers is matched by the times her father would whisper urgently in her ear: ‘“I promise you, my darling, you aren’t missing a lot; not a lot at all. Trust me.”’ Frank may be completely put off by Mr Rice’s ‘posh’ voice, but Molly’s acoustic keenness can penetrate that surface polish to recognize the uneasiness, ‘something … unassured’ (464) underneath. She is accurate in that perception, as Rice’s monologues reveal directly to the audience. Of the three people who are involved in her operation, Molly is the one who does not request it and does not need it. It is Frank who seeks out and brings her to Dr Rice, accompanied by all of the reading this self-educated man has done about her case. Given his own lack of achievement in his early forties, unmarried (till he meets Molly) and with no job or prospects, Frank fills his life with get-rich-quick schemes, most of which are as implausible as they are unlikely to succeed. Molly is his grandest scheme to date. As with

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Henry Higgins’ linguistic experiment on Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914), Frank promotes his ideas of social betterment and the challenge of working a transformation so single-mindedly that he is blind to what the female object of his attentions might suffer in consequence. Molly’s husband is in the long line of Frielian male fantasists explored earlier in this volume. And as the pattern in his life of such enthusiasms reveals, they are short-lived, so much so that he is already planning a withdrawal and setting up the next before the current one has had a chance to fail. The night before Molly’s operation, Frank is phoned by a friend proposing a scheme about a food convoy to Abyssinia. Although he loudly protests his loyalty to Molly, Frank later admits to the temptation his friend’s proposal offered him: ‘a phantom desire, a fantasy in the head’ (476). The professional fantasy is more apparent in Rice’s case: the temptation to pull off a medically unlikely cure that can restore a tarnished reputation. The downward arc of Rice’s career since his wife left him for a rival has landed him in the backwater of a Donegal hospital rather than the world theatre in which he used to ‘perform’ (his preferred term for the operations he carries out.) Both men, more so than Molly Sweeney, are looking for a miracle and are blind to the potential shortcomings of how the cure might negatively affect her. But even a medical success, a ‘miracle’, will not bring Rice’s estranged wife back. And Frank, if he had taken in an iota of what he had read and parroted, would have realized that helping Molly to see will not be an instantaneous transformation but a long, painful process of rehabilitation. There are three distinct phases to Molly Sweeney’s dramatic development in the play, three different landscapes that she views. The first, the world that she constructs from the senses of sound and smell, is defined by movement through time, the swimming in which she delights and the abandoned dance to which she surrenders on the night before her operation: ‘in a rage of anger and defiance I danced a wild and furious dance round and round that room’ (473). The second is what she ‘sees’ when her sight is restored. In Oliver Sacks’s account of what the ‘cured’ patient Virgil experienced, the emphasis is on the violence caused by the simultaneity of the different and uncomprehended sensations that crowd in: ‘Seeing light and shape and movements, seeing colours above all, had been completely unexpected and had had a physical and emotional impact almost, shocking and explosive.’36 Friel fills out the description of this chaotic and visceral impact on Molly in terms of how she has experienced it: After a time the mind could absorb no more sensation. Just one more colour – light – movement – ghostly shape – and suddenly the head imploded and the hands shook and the heart melted with panic. And the only escape – the only way to live – was to sit absolutely still; and shut the eyes tight; and immerse yourself in darkness; and wait. (492)

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What would have fed into Friel’s translation of Molly’s experience into language was the extraordinary coincidence that at the same time, in the same months of late 1993 and early 1994 that he was engaged in writing the play, Friel had to enter hospital to have an operation on his right eye. The diary he kept at the time, most of which is reprinted by Christopher Murray, records the initial diagnosis of cataracts and possible glaucoma as early as August 1992. In the meantime, he was involved in and had to finish writing Wonderful Tennessee. Having done so, almost a full year later, casting around for a new play, Friel records on 15 July 1993 the ‘first stirrings of a possible play’ of a man or woman who becomes blind while a child and remains so for 35 years before their sight is partially restored. When Friel finally had his own eye operation, he had been working on Molly Sweeney for several months and had written the first two monologues. In the case of both Molly Sweeney and Brian Friel, the operation was declared a success. And while Molly is to retreat back into blindness her creator was to make a full recovery. But the immediate months after the operation were not as straightforward as this might suggest. Initially, all seems well and Friel feels he can get on with his play. On 30 December he experiences some ‘discomfort (at least) with the right eye’, and by 17 January he has to return to the hospital, recording that ‘I’m very uneasy with the new eye. I don’t seem able to accommodate it. It flaunts its power.’ A week later he has completed Act 1, mainly covering the run-up to the operation with the fantasies of the three individuals involved, and realizes that Act 2 ‘must be post-operation’. Friel’s wife Anne also finds the first act ‘too short’, and this preys on him until he writes three short speeches for Molly at the close of Act 1. They collectively cover Frank’s courtship of Molly and their first dance together: they are among the finest passages in the play, particularly with regard to our understanding how the world appears to her prior to the operation. On 1 February Friel is ‘wrestling with various glasses [and] the new eye is bullying me’. In a moment where it is not clear whether creator or character is speaking, Friel reflects that he ‘is sorry I had the operation’ and resolves to return to the ophthalmologist. By the following week, he has written the first two monologues of the postoperational Act 2 (by Molly – or Martha, as she was called until the final stages of the play, and Frank). There are no further references by Friel’s diary to his own rebellious eye and its bullying ways. But on 3 April 1994, Easter Sunday, there is a true note of deliverance when he records that he finished the play, now called Molly Sweeney rather than Visions, the previous (Good) Friday. On 6 April, the diary’s final entry records his relief at having finished the play, as he ‘emerges, blinking into the sunlight’, his own sight evidently restored as he emerges from the self-enforced darkness of composition. But there is no such physical return to the sighted world for Molly nor, more seriously, to the world she formerly occupied and from which she describes herself as ‘exiled’ (473) by the operation. In the third phase, her sight diminishes more and more until she is completely blind, without the

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minimal vision she had originally enjoyed. Dr Rice confirms she is now ‘living in the psychiatric hospital’ (501), and when he pays her a last visit before leaving Ballybeg, he looks down on her sleeping figure and reflects ‘how I had failed her’ (506). But he is also persuaded that in her new darkness Molly is ‘trying to compose another life that was neither sighted nor unsighted, somewhere she hoped was beyond disappointment’ (501). All three characters deliver their monologues from a point in time well beyond the events they narrate. Frank looks out on tennis courts and hills that evoke a colonial landscape, a composite scene that underscores how all of his destinations and the plans to exploit the region visited have this colonial dimension. So does the project he has carried out on his wife’s body and mind. Dr Rice takes the story beyond the leaving of Ballybeg to only one more story: the funeral of the colleague who has bested him sexually and professionally and a brief exchange of farewell with his ex-wife. Molly narrates her story from the hospital where she now lives, and from her first monologue makes clear that the miracle cure is going to end badly. Two of the friends who come to the party the night before her operation have named their baby after the childless Molly: ‘she was just a toddler then’ (471). At first we take Molly’s account of the visits of these various friends to her at face value; but as they progress the people who visit now appear to have grown younger rather than older. The octogenarian Mr O’Neill now looks no more than 40 and is accompanied by his dead wife, Louise, in an outlandish green cloche hat and purple gloves. And Molly relates that she is visited regularly by her parents. At this point, the audience probably recalls the statement in her previous monologue that she seemed to be living on a ‘borderline between fantasy and reality’ (500). In her final lines to the audience, she offers a variation on this remark by firmly declaring ‘my borderline country is where I live now’ (509). The term ‘border’ is a loaded word in the political lexicon of the two Irelands. As Fintan O’Toole has remarked, ‘borders and boundaries, exile, shifting between states – these are consistent keynotes in Friel’s work, and they recur in Molly Sweeney’.37 There are political resonances here that it would be wrong to force into a point-for-point metaphor. As Friel drafted the play about the cost of enforcing a single way of seeing, a deleted entry in his diary for the play dated 9 November 1993 briefly opens a window on the simultaneous political developments in Northern Ireland in late 1993. It alludes to the ongoing sectarian violence: a bomb attack by the IRA on the Shankill Road killing ten people is rapidly countered by the Ulster Freedom Fighters machine-gunning customers at a Derry bar killing seven. These ferocious reprisals generate ‘instant demands for “Peace”’, both promoting and threatening the initiative between John Hume of the SDLP and Gerry Adams of Sinn Féin that is ‘central to it all’.38 On 15 December 1993 the Irish and British prime ministers signed a Joint Declaration at 10 Downing Street, which agreed ‘that it is for the people of the island of Ireland alone, between the two parts respectively, […] to bring

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about a united Ireland, if that is their wish’.39 These political noises continued to rumble in the background as Friel worked through the outcome of Molly Sweeney’s experience in his play. Whatever adjustments she had made in the end between ‘real – imagined – fact – fiction – fantasy – reality’ (509), she remained in exile; there was no going back to the unitary state of her original condition. With Give Me Your Answer, Do! three years later, Brian Friel was not only negotiating with the present but with the stage he had arrived at as a writer. For as such he is contemplating, not just one more individual work, but an entire oeuvre or canon written over more than four decades of continuous writerly production. That oeuvre is now substantially complete. There will be more works, adaptations from Chekhov and Ibsen, and original plays like Performances (2003) and The Home Place (2005). But another ten years is hardly likely to alter the outlines of the previous 40. The questions that attend the confrontation by a writer of his or her body of work can only deepen: has the work as a whole value, and if so of what kind? How can it best be assessed – by popular acclaim, academic study or monetary evaluation? Friel poses these questions in Give Me Your Answer, Do! and addresses them by the adoption of a persona that is closer than usual to the playwright. For a writer negotiating the sale of his papers, Friel chose a novelist rather than a dramatist, but the issues confronting both of them remain much the same. When I gave him the first copy of The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel at the 2006 launch, he declared himself ‘very nervous’ about reading it. ‘Why,’ I asked, ‘is it like a first night?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘it’s like all the first nights put together,’ since the volume lined up not one but all of the plays for critical judgement. Similarly, there on the floor of Tom and Daisy Connolly’s house are all of ‘Tom’s papers very neatly laid out in a line, one beside the other; mostly manila folders, but also a few box-files and shoe boxes. Perhaps about thirty items in all.’40 The Brian Friel papers lodged with the National Library of Ireland in 2001 and covering the years 1959 to 1999 numbered 136 boxes in all; but if these had been represented on the stage there would have been little room left for the characters and the action of the play to unfold. The boxes and the manila folders are a major presence in the mise en scène, however, an image of cultural production and of textuality that denaturalizes what we are watching. The setting itself, the home of the Connollys, is – not for the first or last time in Friel – a Big House at some distance from Ballybeg. Again, this can be read as virtually a quotation from his work as much as a realistic setting. The Big House in this play is in an even more visible state of decay and decline than the O’Donnell home in Aristocrats. Both families are Catholic; but the O’Donnells had owned their Big House for generations and were trying to keep up its appearances, whatever the financial constraints. The setting of Give Me Your Answer, Do! is ‘an old and graceless nineteenth-century house, now badly decayed’ (16), the most evident sign of which are some ‘broken’ window-panes

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in the French window . The original owners, whether Protestant or Catholic, are long gone, no doubt driven away like the O’Donnells by the escalating cost of maintaining it in the Ireland of the late twentieth century. It is now a rented property and one that is cheaply priced because the rental agency are happy to have it occupied at all, on however temporary a basis. As Tom points out when indicating their financially straitened circumstances: ‘this is the fourteenth place we’ve lived in […]; and they get more and more isolated and more decayed and of course cheaper’ (28). What is aggravating their financial crisis, and eating away at Tom’s sense of professional self-worth, is the fact that he has been blocked on his latest novel for five years. As indicated in the last chapter, Friel had undergone a similar five-year period during the Field Day decade; but in a sense this was only a prolonged aggravation of what the diaries reveal confronts him daily as a writer in the necessary encounter with the blank page. Any on-stage evocation of an Irish Big House and its French windows is bound to be seen as quoting W. B. Yeats in his poems about Lissadell and Coole Park. Yeats is much on Friel’s mind in this late phase of his career. 2003’s Performances will deliberately foreground Yeats’s late poem, ‘The Choice’, and its articulation of an artist’s dilemma in terms of the life and the work: The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.41 The poem and its author also hang over this play, with the Big House setting a far-from-heavenly mansion. The other setting, at least as important, is the dark with which the play opens and closes and which frames the sunlit scenes in the Connolly mansion. Yeats was the supreme poet of old age, the twentieth-century writer who most took on the vexed question of how to progress as an artist while the body grew infirm and to do so by continuing to break new ground rather than repeating a successful set of images. The dilemma is memorably glossed in the final paragraph of a prose work, ‘Anima Hominis’, from the essay ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’ of 1917. Yeats was then 52 years of age. Friel at the time of writing Wonderful Tennessee is 67 but indicates that his writer persona Tom Connolly is ‘in his middle to late fifties’ (11). Yeats’s essay poses the aging writer’s greatest temptation, not of whether to choose perfection of the life or of the work, but whether ‘when he is growing old […] he cannot keep his mask and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment’.42 To dispel this comforting illusion, Yeats summons the image of the archetypal Romantic poet Wordsworth, not in the latter’s revolutionary youth, but ‘withering into eighty years, honoured and empty-witted’. With that negative exemplar in front of him Yeats turns

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away from the garden and instead resolves to ‘climb to some waste room and find, forgotten there by youth, some bitter crust’. The ‘bitter crust’ that the aging writer must chew and the ‘waste room’ he must enter are both represented in Give Me Your Answer, Do! by the opening stage direction: ‘the stage is in darkness except for a pool of light downstage centre. In the centre of the pool is an iron bed with an uncovered mattress’ (11). On the bed is a woman in her early twenties with mouth open, eyes wide, ‘star[ing] vacantly in front of her’. When Tom enters, his opening remarks establish that this seriously damaged young woman is his and Daisy’s daughter Bridget. It is not clear that Bridget is able physically to hear her father let alone understand the deliberately upbeat and chatty monologue he delivers. But he cues her responses and speaks as if she does, as if it were a dialogue: ‘And what’s this? Her auburn hair swept back over her left ear? Now that’s new! […] The new night-nurse did it? Well, the new night-nurse has style’ (11). In the complementary monologue to Bridget with which the play concludes, her hair is now swept back over the right ear – or so Tom says. His speech is like an elaborate children’s story, with Bridget’s grandparents, Daisy’s mother and father, getting involved in various outlandish escapades. The maternal grandmother ‘makes herself grow two inches taller’ every week, for example, so that she can run progressively faster from her house to ‘the old clinic where she used to have her surgery’ (12). When we meet Daisy’s mother Maggie Donovan later in the play, she does indeed have a surgery, since she is a professional doctor; but her physical reach is now growing less, not more, as she progressively succumbs to arthritis. In Tom’s narrative, Grandpa Jack Donovan is ‘only three months out of jail’ for stealing plutonium. We assume this is complete fantasy until it emerges that the ‘real’ Jack, a jazz piano player, is also a compulsive kleptomaniac who is found with a missing wallet during the play. In Tom’s story to Bridget, Daisy has followed through on her decision to pursue a career as a concert pianist while he, naturally, has completed the stalled novel. The empty black room is one Bridget has been removed to from the regular hospital because she has been refusing food for three days and because of an outburst of violence which, according to the nurse, had his daughter ‘flailing about and roaring like a stuck bull’ (15). It is a room Tom declares he likes where ‘nobody can hear a word we say’ and where secrets can be disclosed – the dark room where the writer can go to create. The two scenes between father and daughter that frame the play also provide the most powerful sub-text to everything that occurs in between, the waiting for the assessor David Knight to deliver his judgement on the archive. Daisy persuades Tom to show him two items he has been withholding, two pornographic novels he wrote in a frenzy when Bridget’s condition was first diagnosed as a baffled response to this grotesque imperfection of the life. As Daisy correctly surmises, with the addition of these two novels, the archive is adjusted, complete, and David is prepared to make Tom a

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substantial offer. But should he accept it? The writer has spent most of the play waiting for this decision and at last has his answer. But the popular song quoted from in the title is insistently addressed, not to David, but to a character called Daisy. And it is the writer’s wife who must finally give him the answer, whether it is the one he wants to hear or not. Anne Friel told her husband that she thought Act 1 of Molly Sweeney was too short. In the end Daisy Connolly tells her husband that he ‘mustn’t sell. Of course he mustn’t sell’ (79). The financial incentives are considerable and will go a long way to helping in the care of Bridget. But their daughter, as Daisy recognizes, is ‘beyond knowing, isn’t she? And somehow, somehow bills will always be met’ (79). The sale of the archive may confirm that ‘the work has value […] – here is the substantial confirmation, the tangible evidence!’ But it confers that recognition, establishes that endorsement, only from the point of view of other people, the outside world. For the writer, it does not relieve the burden of the necessary ‘uncertainty’ he or she requires to continue living, to continue writing. In the real-life event, Brian Friel’s archive did not leave Ireland, to go to a US university from which he had received a substantial offer. Instead, it was lodged in the National Library of Ireland, where it has been superbly archived and widely consulted. At a reception to mark the event, the writer approached me and, bearing in mind where I teach, wondered whether it should not have gone to University College Dublin. I demurred, saying that he had chosen an all-Ireland home for his work, to which all comers would have ready access. I have trawled extensively through the Brian Friel archive for over three years. I did not come across two pornographic novels. When Daisy is persuading Tom to show these novels to the assessor, she encourages him by pointing out that he could always ‘insist that nobody would have access to them for so many years’ (25). The Friel archive includes seven hardback handwritten diaries dating from the stay in Minnesota at the Guthrie Theatre from 25 March to 15 June 1963 to 15 November 1999. Written in black bold capital letters in the archive catalogue is the following: ‘Not for consultation indefinitely’. Whether the National Library assessors were shown their contents or not, the rest of us can only speculate – and speculate indefinitely – as to what they might contain. In the settings of the four plays negotiating Ireland of the 1980s and 1990s, Brian Friel opts to represent the wealthy aspirations of the time in a subtle and oblique fashion. The setting of The Communication Cord may appear to date from 70 years earlier; but it speaks directly to the pretensions of the present for, as the stage directions indicate: ‘one quickly senses something false about the place. It is too pat, too “authentic”. It is in fact […] a reproduction, an artefact of today’ (11). Wonderful Tennessee is set in an abandoned space, a derelict setting whose native population has emigrated long ago to the ‘next parish Boston’ (356), as Frank proclaims. This empty space now becomes a sporting ground for a set of wealthy tourists, bearing

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two overloaded hampers with cuisine so haute it is inedible. The Big House of Give Me Your Answer, Do! has no ancestral or felt connection with the people who inhabit it; it is merely the latest in a long line of rented accommodation for the impecunious writer and his spouse. It is in his revival of the monologue form in writing Molly Sweeney that Brian Friel makes his greatest connection with the Ireland of the 1990s. For the adoption of that form of theatre by so many of the younger Irish playwrights who emerged in the decade, the ‘cubs’ of the Celtic Tiger, shows this to be the way in which Friel has most influenced formally the writers who have come after him. (There is considerable thematic influence too, especially in the wake of Dancing at Lughnasa.43) Conor McPherson’s This Lime-Tree Bower (1995), the play that established him, was written as a series of interlocking monologues and clearly owed a debt to Faith Healer. McPherson believes it to be no accident that the monologue form was favoured in the 1990s not only in his case but in acclaimed work by other younger Irish playwrights. Like Friel’s own Molly Sweeney, these monologue plays by Conor McPherson, Mark O’Rowe, Eugene O’Brien and others were written during a period of uncertainty and trauma in the light of political and clerical scandals: ‘Irish drama went “inside” because our stories were fragile, because everything was changing.’44 As I argued in relation to Faith Healer and as is certainly the case with Molly Sweeney, the use of the monologue form makes the plays more theatrical, not less, and allows for a more unmediated and intimate relation between actor/character and audience. Friel had written an earlier version of Molly Sweeney 28 years before in The Loves of Cass McGuire, when Ireland enjoyed its first (and equally short-lived) access of sudden wealth. Since Friel was not fooled the first time, he was hardly likely to be the second time around. But the continuing development in theatrical experience and his masterly use of the monologue mean that he now draws the audience into directly perceiving and sharing the spiritual hunger in Irish society that mere prosperity could not slake.

Conclusion

In 1999, the year of the celebrations of Brian Friel’s seventieth birthday, producer Noel Pearson and director Sinéad O’Brien prepared a television documentary on the playwright, which was released in 2000. It drew on freshly filmed interviews with fellow playwrights, actors, directors, academics and critics, including key members of Field Day (Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney). But what contribution, if any, would this most reticent of playwrights provide? In the event, those interviews are intercut in the finished documentary with scenes of the playwright filmed in and around his home in Greencastle, County Donegal. In each case Friel is the only person in the shot and has both face and body turned away from the camera: either staring out the window of his house at Lough Foyle while chewing on a Clint Eastwood-style cigarillo; contemplating the Atlantic surge washing in on the shore; or scurrying away down a country road. There are, however, two other contributions by Friel himself that play on and complicate the private/ public split. The first involves two filmed occasions when he is addressing a public gathering: both show a superb raconteur at work, in both timing and intonation, delivering two funny stories that draw appreciative laughter and applause. The second of the two public occasions is very recent indeed; for Friel makes specific reference to the fact that he has turned seventy at the start of the year. The story itself mines the Scriptures for black comedy as he tells how they predict only grief for anyone who outlives the natural span of three score years and ten. But the documentary also adds a postscript specifically recorded by the playwright after he had viewed a rough cut of the documentary. To the accompanying image of an utterly concentrated Friel writing with the ubiquitous black pen, he says how much the evaluation of the interviewed fellow writers means to him, that they help him have ‘the confidence to start trying again. Even in my old age, I would hope to try again.’ While claiming that the life’s work is ‘neither adequate nor complete’, he describes this hope as a ‘joyous aspiration’, and in a moving conclusion quotes a couplet by Yeats from the poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’: ‘All things fall and are built again,/ And those that build them again are gay.’1 203

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In the decade or more after 1997’s Give Me Your Answer, Do! Friel pursued the ‘joyous aspiration’ to ‘try again’. He did so in a sustained interaction with the Gate Theatre and its director Michael Colgan, which complemented the early work at the Gate with MacLiammóir and Edwards. The period saw a renewed and deepened involvement with the work of Chekhov. There was another version of a major Chekhov play, Uncle Vanya, in 1998 and a delightful vaudeville, The Bear, in 2002. In 2001 Friel dramatized the affair between a middle-aged writer and a beautiful young woman from Chekhov’s short story, ‘The Lady With the Dog’, as The Yalta Game. The play is set in a café and shows the playwright’s mind at work with Dmitry gazing around the square and imagining biographies for the people he views. 2002’s Afterplay is halfway between a Chekhov version and a Friel original: set in a Moscow café, it imagines a chance meeting between two Chekhov characters from separate plays many years after the events in those plays have taken place. Sonya from Uncle Vanya is still hopelessly in love with the doctor while fully realizing that it will never be reciprocated. Andrey, the brother from Three Sisters, has become one of Friel’s male fantasists. Claiming that he is in Moscow to play the violin in an orchestra (he is carrying a violin case), he later admits he is a busker who has travelled there to visit his grown-up son in prison. Michael Colgan suggested to Friel that he base a play on the letters that Czech composer Leos Janacek exchanged with Kamila Stosslova during the writing of his String Quartet Number Two, Intimate Letters.2 This was staged at the Gate in 2003 as Performances. Two years later, a full-length original play, The Home Place, was staged there, with Tom Courtenay as the Anglo-Irish landlord Christopher Gore. The production transferred to London and went on to win the Evening Standard Best New Play of the Year Award for 2005. And in 2007 the Gate staged a first for Friel, a version of an Ibsen play, in his vivid reworking of Hedda Gabler. Of his engagement with Chekhov (in particular), Friel has written that he finds the late nineteenthcentury writer so sympathetic because the characters in his plays behave as if their old certainties were as sustaining as ever – even though they know in their hearts that their society is in melt-down and the future has neither a welcome nor even an accommodation for them. […] Or maybe they attract me because they seem to expect that their problems will disappear if they talk about them endlessly.3 These words of Friel, ostensibly about Chekhov, are even more directed to the Ireland of the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries, a measured consideration of his place in and dramatic engagement with it. Performances might best be described as ‘A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man’. Where Tom Connolly in Give Me Your Answer, Do! was a writer in his middle to late fifties, the Czech composer was 74 in 1928, the year he composed Intimate

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Letters. It was also the year of his death. When he discloses his age, he does so by way of addressing the question of whether he has the stamina necessary to complete the work: ‘will the seventy-four-year-old body have the stamina to keep up with this (head)? – to marshal this ferment?’4 Friel was 74 in 2003, the year of writing and having the play performed. But it soon becomes apparent as Performances unfolds that it is not set in the year of Janacek’s seventy-fourth birthday, 1928 but many years later. Its setting combines and interleaves two separate actions: the composer gathering with four musicians to work on a performance of the string quartet (and though given lines these four parts were and had to be played by professional musicians in Patrick Mason’s production); and Janacek’s meeting with a young woman who is engaged in researching and writing a Ph.D. on his work. In the course of her questions to him, the graduate student Anezka Ungrova soon discloses that the composer is long dead. Responding to her bibliographic annotations on the published work, Janacek growls: ‘I know when it was published, don’t I? Twenty years after I was buried, for God’s sake’ (7). The actor playing Janacek does not accordingly have to be 74, just as an actor of that age playing King Lear is unlikely to be able to carry out all the physical demands of the part. In fact, Friel suggests that the part is best ‘played by an actor in his fifties or energetic sixties’ (3). The word ‘After’ recurs in Friel’s writing of this period. Three of the Chekhov pieces were grouped for publication as ‘Three Plays After’; and the title Afterplay was appropriate in two senses: a play written in emulation of Anton Chekhov; and a play written historically a century later by an Irish playwright alert to the affinities between Russia and Ireland.5 The appropriate term for Performances might be ‘Afterlife’, best understood as the extended life of music or theatre after its original composition. Even more than the music that can be enjoyed through listening to recordings, the drama depends on theatre performance for the work of the playwright to continue to live. The setting therefore sees the four musicians, the first and second violins, the viola and cello, gathering to rehearse Intimate Letters. And the play at the end will move from spoken theatre to live music as the quartet perform the second last movement of the piece through to its end. Much of Performances is indebted to and reproduces the combination of good-humoured banter and serious professional concentration that characterizes the rehearsal process. In his 1993 diary, after finishing the writing of Wonderful Tennessee, Friel contemplates the ‘four empty months [which] stretch ahead’6 until the beginning of the play’s rehearsals at the Abbey. His entry of 15 July reflects back on those ‘months of ferment’ – ‘rehearsals, casting, opening’ as ‘exhausting’ but also exhilarating and pleasurable: ‘The whole experience of casting (for the first time in my life we got our firstchoice cast) and rehearsal (Patrick Mason was constantly agreeable, open, courteous) was happy.’7 But now that the experience has ended, Friel can only remark: ‘What is there to say?’ And then, on the same day, the first ‘stirring’ of a play about a blind woman whose sight is partially restored.

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The drama of Performances is partly, then, the post-writing and so ultimately posthumous productions of the work, through which their creator lives on and is renewed. The other half is a debate between the composer and the Ph.D. student who is working in the archive. From the references that all five of the younger people make, the setting is roughly contemporary, with not only the performances of the work but academic research into the written materials also continuing into the future. Anezka wants to probe more deeply into the ‘very special relationship’ (10) between Janacek and Kamila Stosslova, a young married woman with two children. She has not only her intuitions about the emotions that fuel Intimate Letters to go on but the letters themselves, or at least half of them: the hundreds of passionate letters the composer wrote to this Muse figure.8 Those that she wrote back were destroyed by Janacek at her insistence. As he remarks: ‘Forever vigilant of her good name. A slave to small-town tyrannies’ (18). Janacek does not, because he cannot, deny that such a relationship existed, though he is a deal less enraptured in his after-the-event comments than he was at the time. But (as discussed in the last chapter) he adapts the Yeats poem ‘The Choice’ as follows: ‘I never considered the life all that important. I gave myself to the perfection of the work. Did I make the wrong choice?’ (31). Less important here is the absolute equilibrium the writer has to negotiate between the life and the work, than the question of how the work survives the life. I was asked more than once in the composition of this book, especially when I said I was consulting the archive, whether I was writing a biography of Brian Friel. I replied I was not, but rather a critical/interpretative work enriched by the archive. In relation to this work, I have not sought nor been in a position to write a biography of Brian Friel. It will be many years before such a task is undertaken, if indeed it ever is. He clearly does not want it; and his diaries are graphically marked ‘not for consultation indefinitely’. When I think of the hundreds of passionate letters the playwright J. M. Synge wrote to his actress-fiancée Molly Allgood, I also recall how little they have helped or been drawn on by interpreters of the writing by which Synge is remembered. I have also qualified my response to interested inquirers by saying that I have written a biography of Brian Friel, at least insofar as what David Mamet has memorably termed ‘a life in the theatre’ is concerned. For the archive is a testimonial to the hours, days, weeks, months and finally years of Brian Friel’s life that have been spent in pursuing, tracking and finally capturing that most elusive quarry of all: a live play. The archive is also filled with the process of first production, the reviews of first nights, and letters to agents, publishers, friends who are engaged with him on the work. Janacek has spoken to Kamila Stosslova of many things, as his letters to her attest; but in addition to the fear of whether he still has the stamina he is also afflicted by ‘terror’, which he has never discussed with her: ‘I was terrified tackling that complex architecture again’ (21). The balance or

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choice, finally, is not between the life and the work. People live their lives as best they can: who is to judge, outside of their immediate circle? Writers write and artists create, and in that instance, as the late plays of Brian Friel have consistently explored, judgements and questions of value are very much to the fore. Finally, with the playwright Brian Friel, the work of the life is the life of the work.

Notes 1. Charles Spencer, reviewing productions of Translations and Making History, The Daily Telegraph, 21 November 2010. 2. Brian Friel, in the TV documentary, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson. 3. Thomas Kilroy, ‘The Early Plays’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 12. 4. Christopher Murray, ‘Friel’s “Emblems of Adversity” and the Yeatsian Example’, in Alan J. Peacock (ed.), The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), p. 83. 5. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,081/1. The entry is dated 5 May 1977. 6. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,093/1. The entry is dated 24 November 1981. 7. Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 165. 8. Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland, and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 145. 9. Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 150. 10. Mick Gordon, interview, material relating to the 2010 production of Translations at The Curve, Leicester. Accessed www.curveonline.co.uk, 24 November 2010.

1 Escaping Containment: The Early Plays of Brian Friel 1. Thomas Kilroy, ‘Friel’s Plays’, Brian Friel, The Enemy Within (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1979), p. 8. 2. O’Connor’s review, and Friel’s response, will be examined in the next chapter. 3. D. E. S. Maxwell, Brian Friel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973), p. 111. 4. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Graham Morison’ (1965), in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 10–13. 5. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Graham Morison’, p. 13. 6. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Graham Morison’, p. 8. 7. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Graham Morison’, p. 7. 8. Brian Friel, ‘An Observer in Minneapolis’ (1965), in Paul Delaney (ed.), Brian Friel in Conversation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 39. 9. Brian Friel, The Enemy Within (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1979), p. 12. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 10. Brian Friel, To This Hard House, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,140/1. All future references are to this typescript. 11. Brian Friel, A Sort of Freedom, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,139. All future references are to this typescript. 12. Brian Friel, The Francophile, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37.043/1, p. 1. The play was retitled A Doubtful Paradise by its first producers, but the original title is preferred and will be used throughout. All future references are to this typescript. 208

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13. See Sam Hanna Bell, The Theatre in Ulster: A Survey of the Dramatic Movement in Ulster from 1902 until the Present Day (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972), pp. 77–107. 14. Brian Friel, The Blind Mice, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,046/1. All future references are to this typescript. 15. Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 27. 16. Brian Friel in the TV documentary, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson. 17. Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006), p. 313. 18. See Sam Hanna Bell, The Theatre in Ulster, pp. 1–12. 19. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Desmond Rushe’ (1970), Murray, Brian Friel, p. 28. 20. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Peter Lennon’ (1964), Murray, Brian Friel, p. 1. 21. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 3, Scene 2, lines 63–4, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Arden, 1998), p. 649. These lines from King Lear, addressed to the king by Kent, are quoted on the opening page of the typescript of To This Hard House. 22. Brian Friel, To This Hard House, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,140/1. All future references are to the play’s typescript. 23. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One, p. 394. 24. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One, p. 446. 25. William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3, line 9, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, p. 663. 26. Brian Friel, A Sort of Freedom, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,139. All future references are to the play’s typescript. 27. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, Three Dublin Plays, introduction by Christopher Murray (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 93. 28. Sean O’Casey, Juno and the Paycock, Three Dublin Plays, p. 70. 29. ‘Summary’, A Sort of Freedom, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,139. 30. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One, p. 438. 31. Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), pp. viii–ix. 32. Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, p. 10. 33. Bruce McConachie, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, p. 18. 34. The entire line is in capitals in the script. 35. Sam Hanna Bell, The Theatre in Ulster, p. 72. 36. Brian Friel, Crystal and Fox (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1984), p. 13. 37. Brian Friel, Response to the Toast by Seamus Heaney, at the dinner in the Great Hall of Queen’s University, Belfast, to mark the naming and opening of the Brian Friel Theatre, Friday 20 February 2009. I am grateful to David Grant of Drama Studies at Queen’s for supplying me with a transcript of Friel’s address. Further quotations are from the same source. 38. Scott Boltwood argues that in this earliest phase of his career Friel ‘seemed poised to continue the more conventional Realist tradition of such Ulster playwrights as George Shiels and Joseph Tomelty, who wrote plays set in small Northern towns on either side of the border’. Boltwood, ‘“More real for Northern Irish Catholics than anybody else”: Brian Friel’s Earliest Plays’, Irish Theatre International 2:1 (August 2009), p. 6.

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39. Brian Friel, The Enemy Within, p. 15. 40. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One, p. 445. 41. On how Friel realizes Columba’s psychological conflict in spatial terms, see Richard Allen Cave, ‘Friel’s Dramaturgy: The Visual Dimension’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 132–3. 42. Brian Friel, The Blind Mice, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,046/1. All future references are to the play’s typescript. 43. In his discussion of The Blind Mice, Thomas Kilroy points out that the case of Cardinal Mindszenty had already been dramatized by Bridget Boland in The Prisoner (1954) and that the ‘London production came to Dublin with Alec Guinness in a bravura soutane and cape-swirling performance’. See Thomas Kilroy, ‘The Early Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 8. 44. This, according to Dancing at Lughnasa’s narrator Michael, is how his pious aunt Kate finally comes to reconcile herself to her priest brother’s apostasy. See Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 92. 45. Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, Plays: Two, p. 92. 46. ‘Early Play by Brian Friel/From a Correspondent/Belfast’, The (London) Times, 8 October 1964. The ‘early’ takes note of the fact that Philadelphia, Here I Come! had just been successfully produced in Dublin. 47. On this subject, see Niall McGrath, Spiritual Ciphers: Priest and Shaman Characters in Selected Drama by Brian Friel (Ballyclare, County Antrim: The Black Mountain Press, 2005). 48. Brian Friel, The Enemy Within, p. 24. 49. Brian Friel, The Enemy Within, p. 47. 50. Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Plays: One, p. 88. 51. Thomas Kilroy, ‘The Early Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 9. 52. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42.

2 Friel and the Director: Tyrone Guthrie and Hilton Edwards 1. Brian Friel, ‘Great Actors’, ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme (1999)’, in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York, 1999), p. 174. 2. Brian Friel, ‘Translation’, ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 180. 3. Brian Friel, ‘Directors’, ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 177. 4. Brian Friel, ‘Directors’, ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 178. 5. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’ (1972), Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42. 6. Brian Friel, ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, Holiday (May 1964), p. 92. 7. Brian Friel, ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, p. 89. 8. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42. 9. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42. 10. Michael Blakemore, Arguments With England: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2004), p. 206. The next two quotations are from the same account and page. 11. Herbert Whitaker, ‘Tyrone Guthrie at Work’, The Globe and Mail (11 May 1963), p. 6 (Magazine Section).

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12. Director’s Prompt Copy, Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, 1963 File, The Guthrie Theater Archive, Performing Arts Archives, Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 13. Brian Friel, ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, p. 94. 14. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’, Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 44–5. 15. Brian Friel, ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, p. 94. The next two quotations are also from this page. 16. Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa. Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), pp. 107–8. 17. Brian Friel, ‘An Observer in Minneapolis (1965)’, in Paul Delaney (ed.), Brian Friel In Conversation (Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 39. From a talk transmitted on the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service, 16 August 1965 (recorded 21 May 1965). 18. Brian Friel, ‘An Observer in Minneapolis’, Delaney, Brian Friel in Conversation, p. 39. 19. Letter from Brian Friel to director Joe Dowling and the company of the production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! mounted by Dowling when he became Artistic Director at the Guthrie Theater in 1996: ‘I am absolutely delighted that Philadelphia is being done at the Guthrie. The play would never have been written had I not been an apprentice there under the great Tyrone Guthrie. Indeed it was the first thing I wrote in a state of near-giddiness when I came back to Ireland, still on a Guthrie high.’ Friel’s letter is dated 14 June 1996. In his letter of 15 February 1996 to Friel announcing his appointment, Dowling – who had directed many of Friel’s plays in the 1970s and 1980s at the Abbey, the Gate and for Field Day – wrote: ‘I am proud to be the first Irish director of the Guthrie since Guthrie himself.’ The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,048/1. 20. Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 27. All future references to the play are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 21. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards (Dublin: New Island, 2002; Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994; London: Nick Hern Books, 1994), p. 275. 22. Brian Friel, ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, p. 96. 23. Letter from Tyrone Guthrie to Brian Friel, 7 October 1963; The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,048/1. Subsequent comments on the play are from the same letter. 24. Letter from Tyrone Guthrie to London impressario Oscar Lewenstein, who held the rights, 20 April 1964. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,048/1. 25. Interview with Sir Tyrone Guthrie, by William Glover, Associated Press Drama Writer, widely syndicated throughout US newspapers, 23 March 1969. 26. Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 71; Richard Pine, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: UCD Press, 1999), p. 98. 27. Brian Friel, in Enter Certain Players: Edwards–MacLiammóir and the Gate 1928–1978, ed. Peter Luke (Dublin: The Dolmen Press, 1978), pp. 21–2. All subsequent quotations are from this source and will not be individually footnoted. This essay was not reprinted in either the Murray or Delaney volumes. 28. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,047/1. 29. Author interview with Christopher Fitz-Simon, 28 March 2008. 30. Letter from Joe Dowling to Brian Friel. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,048/1.

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31. ‘Edwards the magician turns gentle play into rip-roaring revue’, Frank O’Connor at the Theatre Festival, Sunday Independent, 4 October 1964, p. 18. All further quotations by O’Connor are from this source and will not be individually cited. 32. Hilton Edwards, Letters to the Editor, Sunday Independent, 11 October 1964, p. 20. 33. Brian Friel, Letters to the Editor, Sunday Independent, 11 October 1964, p. 20. 34. Brian Friel, The Loves of Cass McGuire (Dublin: Gallery Books, 1984), p. 14. 35. Letter from Hilton Edwards to Brian Friel, 22 April 1965. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,053/1. 36. Patrick Burke, ‘Friel and Performance History’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 118. 37. Letter from Brian Friel to Hilton Edwards, 13 December 1966: ‘You are more than generous in accepting “blame” for what happened in America. I don’t think either of us should hastily assume any great responsibility.’ The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,062/2. 38. Letter from Brian Friel to Tomás Mac Anna, 11 February 1967. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37, 062/2. 39. Lewis Funke, ‘Interview with Brian Friel (1968)’, Delaney, Brian Friel in Conversation, p. 55. All subsequent quotations are from this source and will only be separately endnoted if from a different page. 40. Lewis Funke, ‘Interview with Brian Friel’, Delaney, Brian Friel in Conversation, p. 56. 41. Patrick Burke, ‘Friel and Performance History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 118. 42. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, p. 284. 43. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, p. 284. 44. In his autobiography, Vincent Dowling records his experience of working as a director with Friel on The Gentle Island: ‘“I spend a lot of time writing and rewriting my plays,” Brian Friel told me, “and I’m sure some people can improve them. But, you see, I want to see my play done, however imperfect it is, not someone else’s version of it.” That is not to say he didn’t listen to suggestions. He always listened to them, considered them, and mostly rejected them. I loved working with Brian. There are playwrights who see a script as a collaboration, and those who see the script as sacrosanct. Generally, the latter are better playwrights. […] I don’t always love my productions in retrospect, but this play is as satisfying and true to me today as it was all those years ago.’ Vincent Dowling, Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000), pp. 321–2. 45. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Peter Lennon (1964)’, Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 2–3. All future quotations from this interview will not be individually cited. 46. Brian Friel, Enter Certain Players: Edwards–MacLiammóir and the Gate 1928–1978, p. 22. 47. Brian Friel, ‘The Giant of Monaghan’, p. 94. 48. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, p. 219. 49. Letter from Tyrone Guthrie to Brian Friel, 11 October 1964. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,048/1.

Notes

213

50. Brian Friel, The Gentle Island (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Books, 1993), p. 25. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 51. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, p. 191. 52. Frank McGuinness, ‘Surviving the 1960s: Three Plays by Brian Friel 1968–1971’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 26. 53. Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir, p. 206. 54. Brian Friel, The Home Place (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 12. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 55. Alec Guinness, cited in Mike Wilcock, ‘Tyrone Guthrie – the Firework Prince’, Hamlet: The Shakespearean Director (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002), p. 144. 56. Mike Wilcock, Hamlet: The Shakespearean Director, p. 140. 57. Brian Friel, cited in Mike Wilcock, Hamlet: The Shakespearean Director, p. 149. 58. Director’s Prompt Copy, Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters, 1963 File, the Guthrie Theater Archive, Performing Arts Archives, Elmer L. Andersen Library. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, p. 59. See Richard Pine, ‘Friel’s Irish Russia’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 110. 60. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Paddy Agnew (1980)’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 84. 61. Thomas Kilroy, The Seagull: After Chekhov, with a new introduction by the author (Oldcastle, County Meath: Gallery Press, 1993), p. 8. 62. Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, p. 286. 63. Chris Morash, ‘Viewfinding’, Review of Brian Friel, The Home Place, Gate Theatre, Dublin, TLS, 25 February 2005, p. 20.

3 Fantasy in Friel ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 21. 1. Slavoj Z 2. Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Plays: One (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 27. All future references to the play are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. ˘iz˘ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 3. Slavoj Z p. 45. 4. Brian Friel, The Francophile, typescript, The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,140/1. 5. On the topic of the education of the younger generation in Friel’s Francophile, see Thomas Kilroy, ‘The Early Plays’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 8. 6. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One, p. 383. ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 7. 7. Slavoj Z 8. Brian Friel, Wonderful Tennessee, Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 356. ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 25. 9. Slavoj Z ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 34. The following two quotations are from 10. Slavoj Z the same paragraph. 11. Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 56. ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 11. 12. Slavoj Z

214 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

Notes

˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 9. Slavoj Z Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, pp. 56–8. ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 66. Slavoj Z ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 16. Slavoj Z Seamus Deane, Introduction, Brian Friel, Plays: One, p. 14. Brian Friel, The Loves of Cass McGuire (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1984), p. 15. All future references to the play are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. See Anna McMullan, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 147. ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, pp. 10–11. Slavoj Z ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, pp. 18–19. Slavoj Z Harry White, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), Irish University Review, Special Issue; Brian Friel, 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), p. 6. The argument is developed and extended in the chapter ‘Operas of the Irish Mind: Brian Friel and Music’, in Harry White, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 206–27. White’s book is dedicated to Friel. Harry White, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, p. 11. ˘iz˘ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 45. Slavoj Z For a detailed discussion of this, see Diarmaid Ferriter, Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London: Profile Books, 2009), pp. 323–4. Ferriter writes of such an incident where it would appear senior Christian Brothers ‘were aware of the gravity of sexual abuse’ but chose to move the alleged abuser ‘to another institution rather than [having him] brought before the court’ (p. 324). William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, Selected Poems, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 50. W. B. Yeats, Selected Plays, ed. Richard Allen Cave (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 28. See Anna McMullan, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender’, p. 149. For more on the pageant, the 1966 Commemoration and Brian Friel, see Anthony Roche, ‘Staging 1916 in 1966: Pastiche, Parody and Problems of Representation’, in Mary E. Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan (eds), 1916 to 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007), pp. 318–20. Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre, eds Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), pp. 231–2. Brian Friel, Aristocrats, Plays: One, pp. 309–10. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. Brian Friel, ‘Foundry House’, in The Diviner: The Best Stories of Brian Friel (Dublin: The O’Brien Press; London: Allison and Busby, 1983), p. 77. All future references to the story are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. Seamus Deane, Introduction, Plays: One, p. 18. The definitive work on this subject is W. J. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), revised as From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994). Charles McGlinchey, The Last of the Name, edited and with an introduction by Brian Friel (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1986). The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,081/2. The remark is included in a section headed ‘Final Notes’ and dated 7 September 1977.

Notes

215

˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 48. Slavoj Z ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 52. Slavoj Z ˘iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 67. Slavoj Z As one example of many that could be cited, see Scott Boltwood in Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, p. 138: ‘Judge O’Donnell’s death in Aristocrats liberates his children from the inhibitions forced upon each member of the family […] and the lifting of the burden of the past, embodied in the decaying manor, from all four siblings.’ Harry White writes of the ‘fabric of crippling illusions which encumbers the household’ in Music and the Irish Literary Imagination, p. 213. ˘iz˘ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 45. 41. Slavoj Z

37. 38. 39. 40.

4 Brian Friel and Contemporary British Drama: The Missing Dimension 1. By 1960, the Irish scene was being transformed by the emergence of a generation of outstanding contemporary playwrights: Tom Murphy, John B. Keane and Hugh Leonard in addition to Friel. 2. The longer-term effects were considerable, as Beckett’s plays circulated and were produced in English. See Anthony Roche, Contemporary Irish Drama, second edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Desmond Rushe’ (1970), in Christopher Murray (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 31. 4. Nicholas Grene, ‘Irish Drama and the Occlusion of Influence’, in Princeton University Library Chronicle LXVIII: 1/2 (Autumn 2006–Winter 2007), p. 509. 5. Nicholas Grene, ‘Irish Drama and the Occlusion of Influence’, p. 505. 6. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Des Hickey and Gus Smith’ (1972), Murray, Brian Friel, p. 48. 7. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Graham Morrison’ (1965), Murray, Brian Friel, p. 5. 8. John Osborne, The Entertainer (London: Faber and Faber, 1957, 1995), p. 75. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 9. Harold Pinter, ‘Mac’, in Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2005 (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), pp. 27–8. 10. Pinter, ‘Mac’, p. 33. 11. Brian Friel, Crystal and Fox (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1970, 1984), p. 13. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 12. Frank McGuinness, ‘Surviving the 1960s: Three Plays by Brian Friel 1968–1971’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 19. 13. Cited in Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 92–3. 14. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42. 15. Crystal and Fox (Radio Telefis Eireann, 1977); director: Noel O Briain; screenplay: Brian Friel; starring Cyril Cusack, Maureen Toal, Cecil Sheridan. 16. Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), p. 108. 17. Brian Friel, Faith Healer, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 355. 18. Gus Smith, review of Crystal and Fox, The Irish Press, 13 November 1968.

216

Notes

19. Alec Reid, review of Crystal and Fox, Social and Personal, December 1968. 20. ‘In the South, in 1976, the Gardaí deliberately suppressed vital evidence, in cooperation with the RUC, in order to protect an agent for British military intelligence. Throughout the 1970s, allegations of Gardaí and British security force collusion were rife.’ Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2005), pp. 632–3. 21. Frank McGuinness, ‘Surviving the 1960s’, p. 28. 22. Nicholas Grene, ‘Irish Drama and the Occlusion of Influence’, p. 507. 23. A letter from Warren Brown, Friel’s UK agent, to Audrey Wood, Friel’s US agent, cites the playwright to this effect. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,070/1. 24. Brian Friel, Volunteers (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1989), p. 9. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 25. David Storey, The Contractor, in David Storey, Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1992), p. 67. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 26. There is a valuable and detailed discussion of this scene in Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945, p. 196. 27. See Ruth Niel, ‘Non-Realistic Techniques in the Plays of Brian Friel: The Debt to International Drama’, in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok (eds), Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World: Volume 2, Comparison and Impact (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1987), pp. 349–59; and Stephen Watt, ‘Friel and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Play’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, pp. 33–4. A revised version appears in Stephen Watt, Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 72. 28. Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging Deeper’, Times Literary Supplement, January–March 1975, p. 306; reprinted in Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 214–20. 29. Nicholas Grene has pointed to ‘an equivalent picked-on victim among the conscripts’ in Arnold Wesker’s 1962 play, Chips With Everything, who is named Smiler. Nicholas Grene, ‘Irish Drama and the Occlusion of Influence’, p. 507. 30. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, B, dated 28 October 1973. 31. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, E, dated 13 May 1974. 32. ‘In December 1972, the Fianna Fáil government (in the wake of the Dublin bombings) amended “the Offences Against the State Act” to allow “the indictment by a senior police officer of those suspected to be terrorists.”’ Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2006), p. 269. 33. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000, p. 727. 34. Scott Boltwood has commented astutely on this aspect of the play. See Brian Friel, Ireland and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 97–102. 35. Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, pp. 98–9. 36. This remark was made by the Irish playwright Hugh Leonard in the early 1970s when asked why a second series of his comic playlets for the BBC, Tales of the Lazy Acre, was filmed but never screened. 37. See casting notes in The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1. 38. The very last line is, of course, quoting what Horatio says at the end of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Many of the play’s commentators, from Seamus Heaney’s TLS review on, have discussed the thematic relevance of the Hamlet references to Volunteers. 39. Seamus Heaney, ‘Digging Deeper’, p. 414.

Notes 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

217

Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Eavan Boland’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 58. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, first entry, dated 3 September 1973. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, A, dated 23 October 1973. Patrick Burke, ‘“Them Class of People’s a Very Poor Judge of Character”: Friel and the South’, Irish University Review, Special Issue: Brian Friel, ed. Anthony Roche, 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), p. 47; and Stephen Watt, ‘Friel and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Play’, pp. 35–6. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Fachtna O’Kelly (1975)’, Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 61–2. The provenance of O’Kelly’s piece in The Irish Press, 28 March 1975, is omitted by Murray but given by Paul Delaney in his reprinting of the piece. See Fachtna O’Kelly, ‘Can the Critics Kill a Play?’ (1975), in Paul Delaney (ed.), Brian Friel in Conversation (Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 118. The notice was quoted in the review of the Gate’s production of Volunteers in the Financial Times, 2 November 1998. Susannah Clapp, The Observer, 1 November 1998. These are Friel’s own terms. See The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, C, 9 November 1973. Mick Gordon, Director’s Note, November 1998. Gordon was also the Artistic Director of London’s Gate Theatre at the time, so the decision to stage Volunteers was clearly his.

5 The Politics of Space: Renegotiating Relationships in Friel’s Plays of the 1970s 1. See ‘The Romeo and Juliet Typos’, in Chapter 8, ‘Playing the North’, in Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 192–9. 2. Aodhan Madden, ‘Brian Friel’s Other Island’, Sunday Press, 28 November 1971. See Brian Friel in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 110. 3. Aodhan Madden, ‘Brian Friel’s Other Island’, p. 110. 4. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Laurence Finnegan’ (1986), in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 125. 5. Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 94. The chapter is entitled ‘Theatre and Space’. 6. Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, p. 112. 7. Brian Friel, Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 204. The Mundy Scheme has not been republished and is currently unavailable. 8. Scott Boltwood, ‘“More Real for Northern Irish Catholics than Anybody Else”: Brian Friel’s Earliest Plays’, Irish Theatre International 2:1 (August 2009), p. 9. 9. Scott Boltwood, ‘Brian Friel’s Earliest Plays’, p. 10. 10. Stanley Vincent Longman, ‘Fixed, Floating and Fluid Stages’, in James Redmond (ed.), The Theatrical Space: Themes on Drama 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 152. I am grateful to Dr Ian M. Walsh for bringing this article to my attention.

218

Notes

11. Stanley Vincent Longman, ‘Fixed, Floating and Fluid Stages’, p. 152. 12. Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 27. 13. Stanley Vincent Longman, ‘Fixed, Fluid and Floating Stages’, p. 152. 14. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One, p. 424. 15. Stanley Vincent Longman, ‘Fixed, Floating and Fluid Stages’, p. 159. 16. Brian Friel, The Gentle Island (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1993), p. 11. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 17. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,063/1. The note is dated 28 September 1970. 18. Frank McGuinness, ‘Surviving the 1960s: Three Plays by Brian Friel 1968–1971’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 25. 19. Letter of 10 October 1971 from Brian Friel to Vincent Dowling. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,064/1. 20. Letter of 10 October 1971 from Brian Friel to Vincent Dowling. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,064/1. 21. For a fascinating account of how the play draws on the context of the American western, see Helen Lojek, ‘Brian Friel’s Gentle Island of Lamentation’, Special Issue: Brian Friel, Irish University Review 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), p. 50. 22. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37, 0631. 23. See Frank McGuinness, ‘Surviving the 1960s: Three Plays by Brian Friel 1968–1971’, p. 26: ‘Recognition dawns that this is no disease, this is no alien love. It is native to this place and therefore natural.’ 24. Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City, Plays: One, p. 111. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 25. It should be noted, however, that the Guildhall was the – never-reached – planned destination of the Civil Rights marchers on Bloody Sunday. 26. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Eavan Boland’ (1973), in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 57. 27. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,066/1. 28. No publisher is listed. The date of publication is given as 18 April 1972. A copy of the Report of the Tribunal is contained in the Friel Papers. 29. When Tony Blair agreed to the Saville Inquiry in 1998, he was warned by David Trimble, the then-head of the Ulster Unionist Party, that ‘any conclusion that departed “one millimetre” from the earlier 1972 Widgery report into the killings would lead to “soldiers in the dock”’. The Guardian, 11 June 2010, front page, ‘38 years on, Bloody Sunday killings to be ruled unlawful’. TV news reports on Tuesday 16 June 2010, the day the Saville Inquiry was published, showed how, as the relatives of the dead marchers stood on the Guildhall steps and listened to Prime Minister David Cameron’s broadcast, they applauded his unequivocal statement that all of the murdered marchers were innocent. One of the relatives tore up a copy of Widgery’s report. 30. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 116. The chapter is entitled ‘Spatial Stories’. 31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117. 32. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 122. 33. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 117. 34. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 123.

Notes

219

35. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 130. 36. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 130. 37. Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 19. 38. Stephen Watt, ‘Friel and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Play’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 38. 39. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 122. 40. On the play’s Brechtian dimension, see Stephen Watt, ‘Friel and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Play’, pp. 33–4; and Ruth Neil, ‘Non-Realistic Techniques in the Plays of Brian Friel: The Debt to International Drama’, in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok (eds), Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, Volume 2: Comparison and Impact (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987), pp. 349–59. 41. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 125. 42. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,081/1. The note is dated 5 May 1977. 43. Brian Friel, Living Quarters, Plays: One, p. 174. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 44. Richard Allen Cave, ‘Friel’s Dramaturgy: The Visual Dimension’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 135. 45. Richard Allen Cave, ‘Friel’s Dramaturgy: The Visual Dimension’, p. 135. 46. The Patrick MacGill Summer School, usually dedicated to political themes, was in 2009 dedicated to ‘The Life and Work of Brian Friel’, in anticipation of Friel’s eightieth birthday. It comprised lectures by academics and theatre artists associated with Friel and also featured productions, films and staged readings of many of the plays. The MacGill Summer School is held every July in Glenties, County Donegal, the home place of the playwright’s mother, under the directorship of Joe Mulholland. 47. Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, p. 114. The next two quotations are from the same page. The chapter is entitled ‘Theatre and Space’. 48. Brian Friel, Aristocrats, Plays: One, p. 282. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 49. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,081/2. It is taken from a section headed ‘Final Notes’ and dated 7 September 1977. 50. Anna McMullan, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender in Brian Friel’s Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 142. 51. Anna McMullan, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender in Brian Friel’s Drama’, p. 150. 52. Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, p. 118. 53. Conor McCarthy notes that ‘the [Butler] family consists of “insiders” and “outsiders” […] as well as being “outside” the community itself’. He has a detailed analysis of space in Living Quarters, which extends to consideration of Frank’s prominent placing in the Irish Army: ‘An army is an organization whose function is the control of space, of land and territory. […] It is significant, therefore, that Frank Butler’s service has been in the Middle East, and not on the Border, which can only be a few miles from Ballybeg.’ See Conor McCarthy, ‘Brian Friel: Politics, Authority and Geography’, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 63. 54. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,081/1. 55. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,081/2. 56. Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, p. 118.

220

Notes

6 Friel’s Translations: An Inquiry into the Disappearance of Lieutenant George Yolland 1. Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 178. 2. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, p. 7. 3. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, p. 9. 4. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, p. 11. 5. Belinda McKeon, ‘The Language Barrier’, The Irish Times, 4 January 2007. 6. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 195. 7. Nicholas Grene, The Politics of Irish Drama, p. 215. 8. Belinda McKeon, ‘The Language Barrier’, The Irish Times, 4 January 2007. 9. See the entry for 15 May 1979 in ‘Extracts from a Sporadic Diary (1979): Translations’, in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 74. 10. Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, ‘Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History’, in ‘The Forum Issue’ of the Irish journal, The Crane Bag (1983), collected as The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, Volume Two (1982–1985), eds Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1987), p. 120. These comments are reproduced and expanded in his article: J. H. Andrews, ‘Notes for a Future Edition of Brian Friel’s Translations’, The Irish Review 13:1 (Winter 1992), pp. 93–106. Murray only prints Friel’s reply, as ‘Making a Reply to the Criticisms of Translations by J. H. Andrews (1983)’, Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 116–19. 11. Friel, Crane Bag, pp. 122, 123; Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 116, 118. 12. Friel, Crane Bag, pp. 123, 124; Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 118, 119. 13. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Laurence Finnegan (1986)’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 125. 14. Brian Friel, Translations, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 401. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 15. Anthony Roche, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 2. 16. Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 13; Richard Pine, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: UCD Press, 1999), p. 40. 17. Described as ‘the uncrowned King of Ireland’, Daniel O’Connell was an MP whose primary achievement was the granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, four years before the action of Translations. 18. On this point, see Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 154–8. 19. Frank McGuinness, in the television documentary, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson. 20. Selected Plays of Dion Boucicault, chosen and with an introduction by Andrew Parkin (Gerrards Cross, Bucks: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987), p. 261. All future references to The Shaughraun are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 21. For a detailed account of this, see Ben Levitas, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

Notes

221

22. Patrick Burke, ‘Friel and Performance History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 124. 23. Brian Friel, The Enemy Within (Dublin: Gallery Books, 1979), p. 71. 24. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,044/1. 25. Friel describes Colonel T. F. Colby as ‘the prime mover in the ordnance survey of this island’ (Murray, Brian Friel, p. 117); his key collaborator was Lieutenant Thomas Aiskew Larcom. They are much discussed by J. H. Andrews in A Paper Landscape. Scott Boltwood examines what Friel has made of both historical figures in Translations in Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, pp. 159–61. 26. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,085/1. This occurs in a ‘Resumé’ dated 9 September 1979. 27. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,085/1. 28. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,085/1. 29. Seamus Heaney, ‘Punishment’, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 38. 30. All of the key women in the play bear a political/allegorical interpretation. 31. Brian Friel, The Home Place (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 57. 32. Anna McMullan notes that the ‘peasant characters who appear only briefly are difficult not to stereotype’ before going on to speculate that ‘perhaps the crudeness of this scene echoes the stark legacies of the historical forces represented by these figures’. See Anna McMullan, ‘The Home Place: Unhomely Inheritances’, Irish Theatre International 2:1 (August 2009), p. 64. 33. Sean O’Casey, The Plough and the Stars, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 241. 34. Seamus Heaney, North, pp. 37–8. 35. Brian Friel, The Gentle Island, p. 72. 36. Brian Friel, The Gentle Island, p. 63. 37. A radical directorial interpretation would be for not only Sarah and Owen but all of the Ballybeg community – Bridget, Doalty, the Donnelly twins, etc. – to be glimpsed in the shadows of the love scene, as watching and witnessing it, with Sarah to the front as their representative or delegate. 38. Sean Holmes to author, e-mail, 29 November 2007. 39. Sean Holmes to author, e-mail, 2 December 2007. 40. Brian Friel, John Andrews and Kevin Barry, ‘Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History’, The Crane Bag (1983), p. 120. 41. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2006), p. 217. 42. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 220. 43. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 221. 44. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 221. 45. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 221. 46. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 221. 47. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 250. 48. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Fintan O’Toole (1982)’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 110. ˘iz˘ek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting 49. Slavoj Z For? (London and New York: Verso, 2000), pp. 90–1. 50. Friel’s dedication to the printed text of Dancing at Lughnasa. See Brian Friel, Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 1. 51. See Christopher Morash, ‘A Night at the Theatre 7: Translations, Guildhall, Derry, 23 September 1980’, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 233–41.

222

Notes

7 Memory and History 1. Brian Friel, Philadelphia. Here I Come!, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 82. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 2. Paul Ricouer, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 15. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 3. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’ (1972), in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 39. 4. Brian Friel, Aristocrats, Plays: One, p. 308. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 5. Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 7. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 6. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985), p. 199. 7. Brian Friel, Faith Healer, Plays: One, pp. 337, 344, 362. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 8. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 36,075/6. The entry is dated 3 July 1976. 9. Nicholas Grene, ‘Faith Healer in New York and Dublin’, in John P. Harrington (ed.), Irish Theater in America: Essays on the Irish Theatrical Diaspora (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009), p. 140. 10. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,075/1. 11. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,075/1. The note is dated 29 May 1975. 12. Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 58. 13. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,075/1. The note is dated 29 May 1975. 14. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,075/1. 15. Seamus Heaney, ‘Punishment’, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 38. 16. Sean Connolly, ‘Translating History: Brian Friel and the Irish Past’, in Alan J. Peacock (ed.), The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), pp. 149–63. 17. Brian Friel, Programme Note, Making History, September 1988. Cited in Sean Connolly, ‘Brian Friel and the Irish Past’, p. 159. 18. Sean O’Faolain, The Great O’Neill: A Biography of Hugh O’Neill Earl of Tyrone 1550–1616 (Cork and Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1970; original edition 1942), p. vi. 19. Brian Friel, Making History, Plays: Two, p. 252. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 20. Martine Pelletier, ‘Translations, the Field Day Debate and the Re-imagining of Irish Identity’, in Anthony Roche (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 76. 21. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,000/1. The entry is dated 26 January 1984. 22. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,000/1. The entry is dated 7 December 1983. 23. Sean O’Faolain, The Great O’Neill, p. vi. 24. See, for example, Sean O’Faolain, The Great O’Neill, pp. 116 and 120. 25. Sean O’Faolain, The Great O’Neill, pp. 120–1. The following quotations are all from these pages and will not be individually cited. 26. Sean O’Faolain, The Great O’Neill, p. 119.

Notes 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

223

The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,000/1. The entry is dated 7 March 1984. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,000/1. The entry is dated 29 March 1984. Personal interview with Noel Pearson, Dublin, 15 October 2010. Martine Pelletier, ‘Translations, the Field Day Debate and the Re-imagining of Irish Identity’, p. 76. John Lahr, ‘In Dancing at Lughnasa, Due on Broadway this Month, Brian Friel Celebrates Life’s Pagan Joys’; reprinted in Paul Delaney (ed.), Brian Friel in Conversation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 214. Thomas Kilroy, ‘Friendship’, Special Issue: Brian Friel, Irish University Review 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), p. 88. Thomas Kilroy, ‘Friendship’, p. 88. The Brian Friel Papers, MS L 41. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,104/1. The entry is dated 18 May 1989. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,104/1. The entry is dated 18 May 1989. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,041/1. The entry is dated 29 May 1989. Frank McGuinness in the TV documentary, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson. Helen Lojek, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa and the Unfinished Revolution’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 82. The priest is directly represented, and played by John Kavanagh, in the 1998 film of Dancing at Lughnasa, scripted by Frank McGuinness, directed by Pat O’Connor and produced by Noel Pearson. Melissa Sihra, ‘Introduction: Figures at the Window’, in Melissa Sihra (ed.), Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2. Cited in Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Pan Books, 2006), p. 329. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2005), p. 364. Helen Lojek, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa and the Unfinished Revolution’, p. 86.

8 Negotiating the Present 1. Scott Boltwood points out that ‘whereas Dancing at Lughnasa enjoyed an initial run of fifty-seven performances on the Abbey stage, Wonderful Tennessee held the boards for eighty-one’. See Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 176. 2. According to London theatre critic Michael Coveney, the ‘messy’ production by Friel at the Abbey was ‘knocked into considerable shape’ in the 1994 Hampstead production. He says this in the section on Wonderful Tennessee in the TV documentary, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson. 3. Brian Friel, Wonderful Tennessee, Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 395. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 4. See, for example, the section on ‘Drama as Ritual’ in Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 25–38; Richard Pine, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999), pp. 56–66. ‘Dionysus in Ballybeg’ is the title of the chapter on Dancing at Lughnasa in F. C. McGrath, Brian Friel’s (Post) Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion and Politics (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999), pp. 234–47.

224

Notes

5. Brian Friel, Molly Sweeney, Plays: Two, p. 460. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 6. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,134/1. The original entry on the Assessor is dated 21 June 1995. The final note was added on 12 February 1996. 7. Brian Friel, The Communication Cord (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1989), p. 11. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 8. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,093/1. The note is dated 24 November 1981. 9. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,093/1. The note is dated 30 November/1 December 1981. 10. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2006), p. 276. 11. Sebastian Barry wrote a ‘Haughey’ play in 2002 entitled Hinterland. Colm Tóibín’s account of the play gives the best and most succinct account of the details of Haughey’s career. See Christina Hunt Mahony (ed.), Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Dublin: Carysfort Press), pp. 198–208. 12. Letter from Brian Friel to Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey, dated 9 April 1988. See The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,134/1. 13. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/2. A note from 13 July 1990 ‘recalled’ on 11 August. 14. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/2. The note is dated 11 December 1991. 15. Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 277. 16. Declan Kiberd, ‘The Celtic Tiger – A Cultural History’, in The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 278. 17. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/2. 18. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/2. The note is dated 31 July 1991. 19. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/2. The note is dated 31 August 1991. 20. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, The Complete Dramatic Works (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 150, for example. 21. Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, p. 138. 22. For how the pilgrims devise and enact their own ritual practices, see Csilla Bertha, ‘Six Characters in Search of a Faith: The Mythic and the Mundane in Wonderful Tennessee’, in Irish University Review, Special Issue: Brian Friel, 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), pp. 119–35; and Richard Allen Cave, ‘Questing for Ritual and Ceremony in a Godforsaken World: Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee’, in Donald E. Morse, Csilla Bertha and Maria Kurdi (eds), Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry: ‘The Work Has Value’ (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006), pp. 181–204. 23. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/2. The entry is dated 31 January 1991. 24. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,123/3. The entry is dated 7 June 1991. 25. Ciarán Benson, The Cultural Psychology of the Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 219. 26. Richard Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 63. 27. Christopher Murray, ‘Introduction’, Brian Friel, Plays: Two, p. xix. 28. Christopher Murray, ‘Introduction’, p. xx. 29. Christopher Murray published an edited version of the diary Brian Friel kept while working on the play. See Brian Friel, ‘Extracts from a Sporadic Diary (1992–94): Molly Sweeney’, in Murray, Brian Friel, pp. 153–65. All future references are to this edition, unless otherwise noted, and will not be individually cited. Rather, they will be referenced within the text by the date of the diary entry.

Notes

225

30. Brian Friel, Molly Sweeney, Plays: Two, p. 480. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 31. Catherine Byrne, in the TV documentary, Brian Friel (2000). His quoted reply was: ‘I’ve written the script; you’re the actress; you act blind.’ 32. T. P. McKenna, personal interview, Dublin, 2004. 33. Patrick Burke, ‘Friel and Performance History’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 118. 34. Oliver Sacks, ‘To See and Not See’, in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (London: Picador, 1995), p. 134. It was originally published as an article in The New Yorker on 10 May 1993; a copy is in the Friel papers. 35. Samuel Beckett, Company (London: John Calder, 1980), p. 7. 36. Oliver Sacks, ‘To See and Not See’, p. 119. 37. Fintan O’Toole, ‘The End of the World’. Programme note for the Gate production of Molly Sweeney at the Almeida Theatre, London, October 1994. 38. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,128/3. 39. See Henry Patterson, Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, p. 325. 40. Brian Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do! (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1997), p. 16. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text. 41. W. B. Yeats, ‘The Choice’, The Variorum Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 495. 42. W. B. Yeats, ‘Anima Mundi’, Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959), p. 342. The next two quotations are from the same passage and page. 43. For how Anne Devlin responds to Friel’s play in her 1996 work After Easter, for example, see Catriona Clutterbuck, ‘Lughnasa after Easter: Treatments of Narrative Imperialism in Friel and Devlin’, Irish University Review, Special Issue: Brian Friel, pp. 101–18. 44. Conor McPherson, ‘Will the Morning After Stop Us Talking to Ourselves?’, The Irish Times, 3 May 2008.

Conclusion 1. Brian Friel, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), produced by Noel Pearson, directed by Sinéad O’Brien. 2. This debt is recorded and acknowledged by Friel in the published version of the play. 3. Brian Friel, ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme’ (1999), in Christopher Murray (ed.), Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 179. 4. Brian Friel, Performances (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 2003; London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p. 22. All future references are to the latter edition and will be incorporated in the text. 5. On this subject, see Richard Pine, ‘Friel’s Irish Russia’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 104–16. 6. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,128/8. The entry is dated 4 January 1993. 7. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,128/8. The entry is dated 15 July 1993. 8. See Harry White, ‘Brian Friel and Music’, Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 223.

Bibliography Published Works Andrews, J. H., Kevin Barry and Brian Friel, ‘Translations and A Paper Landscape: Between Fiction and History’, in The Crane Bag vii (1983): 20–22. Andrews, J. H., ‘Notes for a Future Edition of Brian Friel’s Translations’, in The Irish Review 13 (Winter 1992): 93–108. Beckett, Samuel, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990). Bell, Sam Hanna, The Theatre in Ulster: A Survey of the Dramatic Movement in Ulster from 1902 until the Present Day (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972). Benson, Ciarán, The Cultural Psychology of the Self: Place, Morality and Art in Human Worlds (London: Routledge, 2001). Bertha, Csilla, ‘Six Characters in Search of a Faith: The Mythic and the Mundane in Wonderful Tennessee’, in Irish University Review 29:1: 119–35. Billington, Michael, State of the Nation: British Theatre Since 1945 (London: Faber and Faber, 2007). Blake, William, Selected Poems, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr (London: Penguin Books, 2005). Blakemore, Michael, Arguments with England: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2004). Boltwood, Scott, Brian Friel, Ireland, and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ———‘“More real for Northern Irish Catholics than anybody else”: Brian Friel’s Earliest Plays’, in Irish Theatre International 2:1 (August 2009), Special Brian Friel Issue, ed. Paul Murphy: 4–15. Boucicault, Dion, Selected Plays, ed. Andrew Parkin (Gerrards Cross, Bucks.: Colin Smythe; Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1987). Burke, Patrick, ‘Friel and the South’, in Irish University Review 29:1: 42–7. ———‘Friel and Performance History’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 117–28. Cave, Richard Allen, ‘Questing for Ritual and Ceremony in a Godforsaken World; Dancing at Lughnasa and Wonderful Tennessee’, in Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry: ‘The Work Has Value’: 180–204. ———‘Friel’s Dramaturgy: The Visual Dimension’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 129–41. Clutterbuck, Catriona, ‘Lughnasa after Easter: Treatments of Narrative Imperialism in Friel and Devlin,’ in Irish University Review 29:1: 101–18. Connolly, Sean, ‘Translating History: Brian Friel and the Irish Past’, in The Achievement of Brian Friel: 149–63. De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Delaney, Paul (ed.), Brian Friel in Conversation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000). Dowling, Vincent, Astride the Moon: A Theatrical Life (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 2000). English, Richard, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006). 226

Bibliography 227 Ferriter, Diarmaid, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile Books, 2005). ———Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland (London: Profile Books, 2009). Fitz-Simon, Christopher, The Boys: A Biography of Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards (Dublin: New Island, 2002; Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1994; London: Nick Hern Books, 1994). Friel, Brian, Communication Cord (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1989). ———Crystal and Fox (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1984). ———The Diviner: The Best Stories of Brian Friel (Dublin: The O’Brien Press; London: Allison and Busby, 1983). ———The Enemy Within (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1979). ———The Gentle Island (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1993). ———Give Me Your Answer, Do! (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1997). ———The Home Place (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). ———Lovers (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1984). ———The Loves of Cass McGuire (Dublin: The Gallery Press, 1984). ———Making History (London: Faber and Faber, 1989). ———The Mundy Scheme (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970). ———Performances (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). ———Plays: One (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1996); contains Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Freedom of the City, Living Quarters, Aristocrats, Faith Healer, Translations. ———Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999); contains Dancing at Lughnasa, Fathers and Sons, Making History, Wonderful Tennessee, Molly Sweeney. ———Volunteers (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1989). Gilbert, Helen, and Joanna Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996). Grene, Nicholas, The Politics of Irish Drama: Plays in Context from Boucicault to Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). ———‘Irish Drama and the Occlusion of Influence’, in Princeton University Library Chronicle LXVIII: 1 and 2 (Autumn 2006–Winter 2007): 503–15. ———‘Faith Healer in New York and Dublin’, in John Harrington (ed.), Irish Theater in America: Essays on the Irish Theatrical Diaspora (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2009): 138–46. Heaney, Seamus, North (London: Faber and Faber, 1976). ———Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1980). Innes, Christopher, Modern British Drama: The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Kearney, Richard, Postnationalist Ireland: Politics, Culture, Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997). Kiberd, Declan, The Irish Writer and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Kilroy, Thomas, The Seagull: After Chekhov (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1993). ———‘Friendship’, in Irish University Review 29:1: 83–9. ———‘The Early Plays’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 6–17. Levitas, Ben, The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism 1890–1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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Lojek, Helen, ‘Brian Friel’s Gentle Island of Lamentation’, in Irish University Review 29:1: 48–59. ———‘Dancing at Lughnasa and the Unfinished Revolution’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 78–90. Longman, Stanley Vincent, ‘Fixed, Floating and Fluid stages’, in The Theatrical Space: Themes in Drama 9, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Luke, Peter (ed.), Enter Certain Players: Edwards-MacLiammóir and the Gate 1928–1978 (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1978). Mahony, Christina Hunt (ed.), Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006). Maxwell, D. E. S., Brian Friel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973). McConachie, Bruce, American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War: Producing and Contesting Containment, 1947–1962 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003). McCarthy, Conor, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000). McCormack, W. J., Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). McGlinchey, Charles, The Last of the Name, ed. and with an introduction by Brian Friel (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1986). McGrath, F. C., Brian Friel’s (Post)Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion and Politics (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999). McGrath, Niall, Spiritual Ciphers: Priest and Shaman Characters in Selected Drama by Brian Friel (Ballyclare, County Antrim: The Black Mountain Press, 2005). McGuinness, Frank, ‘Surviving the 1960s: Three Plays by Brian Friel’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 18–29. McMullan, Anna, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender in Brian Friel’s Drama’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 142–53. Morash, Christopher, A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Morse, Donald E., Csilla Bertha and Maria Kurdi (eds), Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry: “The Work Has Value” (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2006). Murphy, Paul (ed.), Irish Theatre International 2:1 (2009), Special Issue: Brian Friel. Murray, Christopher, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997). ———(ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999). Niel, Ruth, ‘Non-Realistic Techniques in the Plays of Brian Friel: The Debt to International Drama’, in Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World; Volume 2: Comparison and Impact (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1987). Osborne, John, The Entertainer (London: Faber and Faber, 1995). O’Casey, Sean, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1998). O’Faolain, Sean, The Great O’Neill: A Biography of Hugh O’Neill Earl of Tyrone 1550–1616 (Cork: Mercier Press, 1970). O’Toole, Fintan, ‘The End of the World,’ in the programme for the Gate production of Molly Sweeney at the Almieda Theatre, London, October 1994. ———Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre, eds Julia Furay and Redmond O’Hanlon (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003). Patterson, Henry, Ireland since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2006).

Bibliography 229 Peacock, Alan J. (ed.), The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993). Pelletier, Martine, ‘Translations, the Field Day Debate and the Re-Imagining of Irish Identity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 66–77. Pine, Richard, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (London: Routledge, 1990). ———The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1999). ———‘Friel’s Irish Russia’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 104–16. Pinter, Harold, Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948–2005 (London: Faber and Faber, 2005). Ricouer, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). Roche, Anthony, ‘Staging 1916 in 1966: Pastiche, Parody and Problems of Representation’, in Mary E. Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan (eds), 1916 to 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007). ———Contemporary Irish Drama, second edition (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Roche, Anthony (ed.), Irish University Review 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), Special Issue: Brian Friel. ———The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Sacks, Oliver, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (London: Picador, 1995). Shakespeare, William, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, Surrey: Arden, 1998). Sihra, Melissa (ed.), Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). States, Bert O., Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985). Storey, David, Plays: One (London: Methuen, 1992). Ubersfeld, Anne, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Watt, Stephen, ‘Friel and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Play’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel: 30–40. White, Harry, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, in Irish University Review 29:1: 6–15. ———Music and the Irish Literary Imagination (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Wilcock, Mike, Hamlet: The Shakespearean Director (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2002). Yeats, W. B., Selected Plays, ed. Richard Allen Cave (London: Penguin Books, 1997). ———The Variorum Poems of W. B. Yeats, eds Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1957). ———Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1959). Z˘iz˘ek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso: 1989). ———The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997). ———The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London and New York: Verso, 2000).

Film Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), screenplay by Frank McGuinness from the play by Brian Friel, directed by Pat O’Connor, produced by Noel Pearson, starring Meryl Streep,

230

Bibliography

Michael Gambon, Catherine McCormack, Kathy Burke, Bríd Brennan, Sophie Thompson and Rhys Ifans.

TV Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000), script by Thomas Kilroy, directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson.

Manuscripts Consulted The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, Dublin. The original 130 boxes covered the years 1959 to 1999; they have since been augmented by the material from 2000 to 2008. Collectively, the Papers cover the writing of 24 original stage plays and seven versions/translations, radio plays, film scripts, and his early days as a short-story writer. They include the manuscripts of the plays; notes on their composition; documents concerning the establishment and administration of the Field Day Theatre Company; correspondence with actors, directors, producers, agents, writers, academics and others; theses on Friel and his work. The Guthrie Theater Archive, Performing Arts Archive, Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

Index Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1, 8, 32, 35, 38, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 90, 103, 114, 123, 127, 168, 177, 191 Adams, Gerry, 197 The Almeida Theatre, London, 177, 192 Allgood, Molly, 206 Anderson, Lindsay, 94, 98, 103 Andrews, J.H., 132–3, 137, 148, 162 A Paper Landscape, 132 Arden, John, 84 Aristotle De memoria et reminiscentia, 154 Astaire, Fred, 161 Balzac, Honoré de, 79 Barnes, Ben, 127 BBC Northern Ireland, 9, 10 Beckett, Samuel, 84, 118, 127, 141, 190–1 Company, 194 Happy Days, 188–9 Waiting for Godot, 187–8, 190–1 Bedford, Patrick, 45, 46, 54 Behan, Brendan, 141 The Quare Fellow, 84 The Bell, 9 Bell, Sam Hannah, 24 Benson, Ciarán, The Cultural Psychology of the Self, 190 Billington, Michael, 90 The Birmingham Shakespeare Festival, Alabama, 134 Blair, Tony, 115 Blake, William, 73 Blakemore, Michael Arguments with England, 36–7, 54–5 Boland, Eavan, 102, 114 Boltwood, Scott, 66, 98, 112 Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, 6 Boucicault, Dion, The Shaughraun, 135 Brecht, Bertolt, 94 Brook, Peter, 33, 34 Brown, Christy, 168

Burke, Patrick, 51, 136, 192 Byrne, Catherine, 192 Cairns, Tom, 123 Calvin, John, 96 Campbell, Douglas, 34 Carleton, William, 187 Cave, Richard Allen, 123 Chekhov, Anton, 1, 15, 32, 33, 36, 48, 56, 85, 121, 198, 204–5 The Cherry Orchard, 47 Three Sisters, 34, 56, 204 Uncle Vanya, 56, 204 Chesterton, G.K., 79 Chopin, Fryderyk, 70, 81–2, 126 Clapp, Susannah, 104 Colgan, Michael, 156–7, 191, 204 Connolly, Sean, 162 Cooke, Liz, 103–4 Cosgrave, Liam, 98 Craigie, Ingrid, 157 Curtis Brown Agency, London, 42 Curve Theatre, Leicester, 7 Cusack, Cyril, 90–1 De Certeau, Michel, 116–8, 120 De Valera, Eamon, 66, 175 Deane, Seamus, 78, 169, 203 The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 169, 182 Diderot, Denis, 194 Donnelly, Donal, 45, 46, 51, 99 Dowling, Joe, 46, 81, 191 Dowling, Vincent, 51 Druid Theatre, Galway, 3, 131 Eblana Theatre, Dublin, 8, 11 Edwards, Hilton, 6, 40, 43–54, 70, 204 English, Richard, 11 Faber and Faber, 9, 103 Fallon, Peter, 9 Faulkner, Brian, 148 Ferriter, Diarmaid, 97, 175 231

232

Index

Field Day Theatre Company, 1, 2, 6, 56, 151, 155, 162, 169–70, 177 Fiennes, Ralph, 156–7 Finney, Albert, 103 Fitz-Simon, Christopher, 40, 43, 51, 53 Friel, Anne, 201 Friel, Brian PLAYS Afterplay, 56, 204 Aristocrats, 2, 4, 6, 22, 46, 58–9, 71,76–83, 106, 121, 125–9, 153, 178–9, 190, 198 The Blind Mice, 8, 9, 11, 28–31, 175 The Communication Cord, 4, 5, 6, 46, 162, 177–83, 186, 201 Crystal and Fox, 6, 24, 44, 50, 85–93 Dancing at Lughnasa, 1, 2, 5, 6, 19, 24, 38, 93, 111–2, 116, 151–4, 158, 163, 168–79, 182–3, 185, 189, 202 The Enemy Within, 8, 9, 10, 25–8, 35, 38, 107, 136–8, 145 Faith Healer, 4, 6, 88, 106, 153–62, 185, 202 The Francophile (This Doubtful Paradise), 8, 9, 10, 20–5, 58–61, 80 The Freedom of the City, 1, 4, 7, 102–3, 105, 108, 114–22, 150–1, 158, 178 The Gentle Island, 14, 51–4, 105–14, 122, 145–6 Give Me Your Answer, Do!, 50, 64, 177, 179, 192, 198–202, 204 The Home Place, 2, 46, 54–7, 121–5, 142, 198, 204 Living Quarters, 29, 46, 105, 108, 121–5, 127–8 Lovers, 1, 44, 50, 92, 108, 116, 155, 158 The Loves of Cass McGuire, 1, 3, 6, 46, 48–51, 58, 68–76, 82, 87, 107–8, 121, 143, 202 Making History, 2, 6, 27, 151–5, 162–9, 171, 180, 182 Molly Sweeney, 34, 50, 177, 179, 191–8, 202 The Mundy Scheme, 5, 51–2, 106–8, 121 Performances, 198–9, 204–6 Philadelphia, Here I Come!, 1–12, 24, 36, 39–49, 53, 58–9, 61–9, 76–7, 80,

86–7, 92, 99, 101, 107–8, 110, 122, 137, 152–4, 181–2, 185 Translations, 1, 2, 6, 7, 13, 18, 25–6, 61, 93, 107, 130–51, 162, 169, 177–8, 185 Volunteers, 85, 93–105, 121–2 Wonderful Tennessee, 2, 62, 177–8, 183–91, 196, 201, 205 RADIO PLAYS A Sort of Freedom, 9, 10, 15–9 To This Hard House, 9, 10, 12–5, 20–2 TRANSLATIONS/ADAPTATIONS The Bear (Anton Chekhov), 204 Three Sisters (Anton Chekhov), 56, 121, 162 Uncle Vanya (Anton Chekhov), 56, 204 Hedda Gabler (Henrik Ibsen), 204 The Yalta Game (Anton Chekhov), 56, 204 Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev), 163, 169 A Month in the Country (Ivan Turgenev), 191–2 SHORT STORIES ‘Foundry House’, 76–8, 80–1 The Gold in the Sea, 3, 9 The Saucer of Larks, 8 Freud, Sigmund, 59, 66 The Gallery Press, 9 The Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, 185 The Gate Theatre, Dublin, 1, 2, 6, 8, 32, 40, 43–53, 156–7, 177, 191–2, 204 The Gate Theatre, London, 103–4 Gielgud, Sir John, 35 Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, 130–1 Gordon, Mick, 7, 103–4 Gordon, Ruth, 49, 51 Greene, Graham, 2 Gregory, Lady, 1, 79, 84 [with W.B. Yeats] Cathleen ni Houlihan, 74, 109, 143 Grene, Nicholas, 84–5, 93, 157 The Politics of Irish Drama, 131–2 Grizzard, George, 34 Grotowski, Jerzy, 33 Guinness, Alec, 55 Guthrie, Lady Judy, 36

Index 233 Guthrie, Sir Tyrone, 3, 6, 31, 34–43, 48, 51, 54–7 The Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, 34–8, 42, 45, 55, 201 Hampstead Theatre, London, 51 Haughey, Charles J., 181–2, 184 Heaney, Seamus, 95, 101, 103, 139, 203 ‘Punishment’, 144 Station Island, 187 Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 160 Hippolytus, 121, 123 Holmes, Sean, 147–9 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 79 Hume, John, 197 Hynes, Garry, 3, 131–3, 147 Ibsen, Henrik, 60, 122, 135, 198 Hedda Gabler, 123 Ingram, Kate, 134, 145 Janacek, Leos, 204–6 Intimate Letters, 204–6 Johnston, Denis The Old Lady Says No!, 44, 45 Joyce, James, 139 Kavanagh, John, 81, 191 Kavanagh, Patrick, 187 Kearney, Richard, 190 Kelly, Eamonn, 157–8 Kern, Jerome, 159 Kiberd, Declan, 185 Kilroy, Thomas, 2, 8, 46, 169–70 Double Cross, 162 The O’Neill, 163 The Seagull (after Chekhov), 56 Lacan, Jacques, 58–9 Ladd, Alan, 111 Lahr, John, 169 Lambert, Mark, 191 LeFèvre, Robin, 2, 51, 177 Lennon, John, 184 Lennon, Peter, 52 Leonard, Hugh, Kill, 181 Lewenstein, Oscar, 155 Lojek, Helen, 173, 176

Longman, Stanley Vincent, 107 Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 9, 11, 25 Mac Anna, Tomás, 50, 74 Aiséirí, 74 Mac Ardle, Dorothy, 175 MacLiammóir, Micheál, 40, 42–54, 204 The Importance of Being Oscar, 45 Madden, Aodhan, 105 Magill Summer School, Glenties, Co. Donegal, 124 Mamet, David, 206 The Manhattan Theater Club, New York, 131–2 Mara, P.J., 184 Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 51 Martyn, Edward, 79 Mason, Patrick, 168, 205 Marx, Karl, 95–6 Maxwell, D.E.S., 8 McCabe, Eugene, 35 King of the Castle, 42 Swift, 42, 57 McCann, Donal, 191–2 McCarter Theater Center, Princeton, 131–3 McConachie, Bruce American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War, 19 McCormack, Count John, 79–80 McGlinchey, Charles The Last of the Name, 79–80 McGrath, F.C., 179 McGuinness, Frank, 54, 93, 109, 134, 173 McKenna, Siobhán, 50, 74 McKenna, T.P., 99, 192 McKeon, Belinda, 131–3 McMaster, Anew, 52, 86 McMullan, Anna, 69, 74, 127 McPherson, Conor, 202 This Lime-Tree Bower, 202 Mendelssohn, Felix, 82 Merrick, David, 49 Miller, Arthur Death of a Salesman, 24, 39 Milton, John, Paradise Lost, 189 Mindszenty, Cardinal, 28 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya, 34

234

Index

Molière The Miser, 34 Morash, Chris, 57 Moore, George, 79 Morgan, Dermot, 184 Morrison, Conall, 116 Mullen, Marie, 3 Murphy, Tom, 131–2 Murray, Christopher, 4, 190–1, 196 My Left Foot, 168 National Theatre, London, 123, 147 The National Theatre of Scotland, 177 The New Yorker, 2, 9, 35 Norton, Jim, 99 The Nun’s Story, 86 O’Brien, Eugene, 202 O’Brien, Sinéad, 203 O’Casey, Sean, 90, 105, 122 Juno and the Paycock, 17, 141 The Plough and the Stars, 142 O’Connell, Daniel, 134 O’Connor, Frank, 3, 8, 47–8, 52 O’Connor, Patricia, 11 O’Faolain, Sean, ‘A Broken World’, 175 The Great O’Neill, 163–4, 166–8 O’Kane, Patrick, 104 O’Kelly, Fachtna, 103 The Old Vic Theatre, London, 34 Olivier, Sir Laurence, 35, 36, 90 O’Malley, Mary, 9 O’Rowe, Mark, 202 Osborne, John, 84–92 A Better Class of Person, 86 The Entertainer, 85–92 Look Back in Anger, 86 O’Shea, Catherine ‘Kitty’, 100 O’Sullivan, Philip, 124 O’Toole, Fintan, 74–5, 197 Paisley, Reverend Ian, 115, 148 Parker, Stewart, Pentecost, 162 Parnell, Charles Stuart, 100 Patterson, Henry, 184 Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Conflict, 148–50 The Peacock Theatre, Dublin, 109

Pearson, Noel, 168, 184–5, 203 Pelletier, Martine, 164, 169 Pine Richard The Diviner, 179 Pinter, Harold, 42, 86 The Lovers, 155 Pirandello, Luigi, 121, 124 The Plymouth Theatre, New York, 177 Queen’s University Brian Friel Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research, Belfast, 24 Racine, Jean, 121 Rattigan, Terence, 84 Rea, Stephen, 1, 103, 151, 162, 169, 177–8, 203 Reid, Alec, 91 Richardson, Sir Ralph, 35 Ricoeuer, Paul Memory, History, Forgetting, 6, 152–4, 159–161, 171–3 Robinson, Mary, 169 Roche, Anthony, The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, 198 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 60 Royal Court Theatre, London, 1, 80, 93, 98, 103, 114 Sacks, Oliver, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, 193 Schumann, Robert, 82 Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Canada, 35 Shakespeare, William, 188 All’s Well That Ends Well, 36–7 Hamlet, 34, 41, 99 King Lear, 12–4, 119, 194, 205 Macbeth, 113, 133 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 33 Othello, 86 Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion, 195 Shiels, George, 11 Sihra, Melissa, 175 Sophocles, Oedipus the King, 194 Spenser, Charles, 2

Index 235 Stafford-Clark, Max, 56 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 33 States, Bert O., 154 Steiner, George, 137 Storey, David The Contractor, 85 Stosslova, Kamila, 204–206 Intimate Letters, 204–6 Strindberg, August, 112 Synge, J.M., 1, 84, 90, 136, 206 The Playboy of the Western World, 64

Wagner, Richard, 121 Tristan und Isolde, 58, 70–1 Walsh, Elisabeth Dermot, 127 Watt, Stephen, 119 Wesker, Arnold, 84–5 Whitaker, Herbert, 35 White, Harry, 70–1 Widgery, Lord, 4, 115, 117, 120 Wilcock, Mike, 55–6 Wilde, Oscar, 131 Wordsworth, William, 199

Tandy, Jessica, 34 Thompson, Sam Over the Bridge, 16, 18, 84 Tóibín, Niall, 156 Tomelty, Joseph, 11 Turgenev, Ivan, 1, 32, 85 Turner, Victor, 179

Yeats, W.B. 1, 76, 79–80, 84, 181, 199–200 ‘Anima Hominis’, 199 [with Lady Gregory] Cathleen in Houlihan, 74, 109, 143 ‘The Choice’, 199, 206 ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ 203 York, Will, 134 Young, James, 24

Ubersfeld, Anne, 106, 125, 127–9 Ulster Group Theatre, Belfast, 8, 10, 24–5 Ulster Literary Theatre, 11 Vanek, Joe, 168–9 Virgil The Aeneid, 131

˘ i˘zek, Slavoj, 6, 58–9, 62–3, 66, 68–70, Z 80–3 The Fragile Absolute, 150–1