Brian Friel Plays 2

Like so many great dramatists from Shakespeare through Ibsen to O’Neill and Miller, whose later plays reveal both a surprising mature flowering and a shapely inclusion of youthful themes, Brian Friel’s latest work as represented in this volume is at once a new departure and a return to familiar ground. As he is ever the protean playwright, whose work shifts agilely from political to non-political themes, it is always dangerous to be categorical about phases of development in Friel’s drama. And yet 1986, when
Fathers
and
Sons
had its première, does seem to mark a new and exciting stage of transition. The achievement of
Translations
(1980), with its complex and many-layered linguistic, cultural and political themes, was behind him, so it was time, following the farcical and mischievous
Communication
Cord
(1982), to strike out in a new direction.

Not that the process is that simple or automatic. Friel was still closely involved with the Field Day Theatre Company, which he had co-founded in 1980, and was only gradually inching his way to the point where the new kind of play he was to write, best exemplified in
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
(1990), was to signal a return to the Abbey Theatre. As Friel himself put it in interview with Ciaran Carty: ‘A play offers you a shape and a form to accommodate your anxieties and disturbances in that period of life you happen to be passing through. But you outgrow that and you change and grope for a new shape and a new articulation of it.’ The artist writes as he must and not by prescription of any kind. The later 1980s thus saw Brian Friel moving away from the preoccupations
which had led to the writing of
Translations
and finding new release in
Fathers
and
Sons.
Close personal and family relationships were to become again his major theme, the crises that demand a re-evaluation of a man’s or a woman’s whole mode of being. For the most part the plays of this new phase thus find their centre more in individual trauma than in political crisis, although Friel was to write one other political play for Field Day, namely
Making
History
(1988).

In spite of this development towards a non-political drama, all five plays in this volume are in various ways history plays. They are occupied with time, memory and the imminence of death. Looked at in another way they are plays about collapse of various kinds, historical, social, moral, psychological. Offsetting collapse is transcendence, or the search for a mode of living with dignity which accords with an awareness of the insufficiency of late twentieth-century criteria of success. This opposing theme is spiritual, indeed religious, which appears with quite a positive emphasis in these later plays.

In all five plays, moreover, a powerful theatricalism operates. Friel writes classically, poetically, in images which crystallize meaning symbolically; invariably these images find reflection in Friel’s careful and specific stage directions. His decision to direct the premières of
Molly
Sweeney
(1994) and
Give
Me
Your
Answer,
Do!
(1997) himself may indicate a fear that directors were not always interpreting his work as he would wish. The texts must be seen as designed, lit and choreographed by the playwright. Like Beckett, Friel has a musical concept of dramatic form; all performance features from dialogue to dance are included in ‘scores’ which demand rigorous attention to pacing, intelligent recognition of pattern, shifts in mood, and establishment of atmosphere. The plays are like extended poems, and yet they are ‘actorly’. The roles provided are subtle and deep. The doctor
Shpigelsky, in Friel’s version of Turgenev’s
A
Month
in
the
Country
(1992), says, ‘If the mask fits, wear it,’ and this should alert the reader to the extent to which irony and sub-text govern the plays in general. The ‘private’ and ‘public’ personae are not so patently held apart in the later plays as in
Philadelphia,
Here
I
Come!
(1964). In this regard the later plays are more complex. Clearly, here, as always, Friel’s writing is understated but constantly performative; the masks in these plays seem less obvious since they are as likely to be imposed by others as voluntarily assumed by the individual. Nevertheless, the notion of the metaphorical mask is central to the explorations of identity conducted in
Making
History
and
Molly
Sweeney.
Masks and identities interact productively also in
Wonderful
Tennessee
(1993), where the characters seem morally disabled. Seeming is the name of the game; self-possession or repression is equally a brittle pose in these later plays. Of course, the famous dance in Act I of
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
provides stunning evidence of Friel’s theatrical power, but one should also be alert to its less flamboyant, more Chekhovian, and more diverse manifestations elsewhere.

Fathers
and
Sons
liberated Friel from writer’s block, which had troubled him following
The
Communication
Cord.
That play, perhaps, had drawn a line all too boldly underneath the sort of play
Translations
was, namely, an exploration at the deepest level of what Friel now mockingly referred to as national ‘pieties’. Yet his future theme had not yet disclosed itself. This was undoubtedly frustrating, for this was the time when Field Day was undertaking a massive cultural revolution. There was even talk of a large-scale anthology of Irish writing which would redraw the map of Irish intellectual history. Perhaps Friel was numbed by the appalling cycle of violence in Northern Ireland at this time. Perhaps he
deferred to the Field Day pamphlets which confronted that political situation. In any case,
Fathers
and
Sons
represents a joyous victory over silence at a difficult period. Although it was offered to Field Day for production it was beyond the resources of that company and was staged instead by the National Theatre, London.

Fathers
and
Sons,
a most adept transformation of Turgenev’s 1862 novel into a play text, refuelled Friel’s imagination. It sometimes happens that a writer can find in reworking or adapting another writer’s work that he/she is thereby gathering nuts for a lean period. We used, perhaps, to look askance at Shakespeare for turning so readily to Holinshed’s
Chronicles
or to Plutarch’s
Lives
or to the Italian novella for his source material, when we should instead have been taking note of how the dramatic process works: parasitically, one might say, and yet in complex and fructifying ways. Chekhov had already lent resonance to Friel’s work in
Aristocrats,
and he had made a version of
Three
Sisters
in 1981, but Turgenev was new territory, and the task of adapting a novel set him new problems, for he had not done this before. When a few years later he adapted Turgenev’s comedy
A
Month
in
the
Country,
Friel set out (in a preface) the notion that the relationship between Chekhov and Turgenev was ‘metabiotic’. Metabiosis he defined as ‘a mode of living in which one organism is dependent on another for the preparation of an environment in which it can live’. This is a far subtler metaphor than to say one author ‘paved the way’ for another. In effect, Turgenev prepared an environment in which Friel as Chekhovian artist could live or be reborn. Friel could treat Bazarov ironically. Bazarov is the single-minded activist whose untimely death puts into perspective the family values he so loftily scorned. When he falls in love and is scorned for his pains Bazarov clears a space for others to build more fruitful, less intellectual lives. Scene 4 in Act II of Friel’s version
has no correlation in Turgenev’s novel; it marks a fresh shoot, a stirring of something new in Friel’s own oeuvre. The scene depicts ‘an annual harvest dance in preparation’. Here, as elsewhere emphasized in Friel’s version of Turgenev’s text, dance becomes an image of order. Even Pavel claims he was ‘an excellent dancer once upon a time’. To Anna’s bleak question, referring to Bazarov’s absurd death, ‘How do you carry on?’, Friel’s imagery of harvest, dance and the double wedding in the offing creates an idea of order and resilience which challenges the disorder inherent in Bazarov’s ironic fall.
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
was soon to bring such imagery to fuller and more persuasive fruition.

Meanwhile,
Making
History
was to be Friel’s
swan-song
for Field Day. By this time Thomas Kilroy had joined the board of Field Day (the only southerner to become a member) and had supplied a challenging play,
Double
Cross
(1986), which Friel admired. The ambiguities of that piece, the emphasis on the role-playing that political involvement demands, and the sense that the roots of betrayal lie historically far back in the psyche must have made their mark on Friel when he decided to write a play about Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish relations. Kilroy had already written on this theme in
The
O’Neill
(1969, published 1995). In the climate of the Field Day pamphlets, the time was ripe for another, more self-conscious look at the O’Neill story. Both authors relied on Sean O’Faolain’s biography
The
O’Neill
(1942). But where Kilroy had shown the tragedy of a man divided between loyalty to the old, communal Gaelic world and commitment to the new, modern, European world, Friel focuses on the theatrical possibilities inherent in a man’s awareness that he is playing a role in what is about to become history. His play becomes virtually a Pirandellian situation, a debate on how the self, or identity, can be undermined once it is
mythologized. Historiography itself becomes deconstructed. It is rather like that moment in
Julius
Caesar
when, at the point of Caesar’s assassination, Cassius calls on his fellow conspirators ritualistically to bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood:

Cassius is aware they are ‘making history’. Friel, however, goes a step further in this process by adding the historian Lombard, who is constantly prepared to discuss with O’Neill the limits of the history he, Lombard, is in another sense ‘making’. By foregrounding this historian so conspicuously Friel sceptically questions history as a mode of knowing the world. (We are reminded of the ironic name given to the historian in
Aristocrats,
Dr Hoffnung, ever ‘hopeful’ of finding the complete truth.) Dramatically, O’Neill is paralysed by the awareness of how his freedom is subject to Lombard’s propagandist purposes, whereby O’Neill is to figure as hero of the counter-reformation. This becomes O’Neill’s ‘last battle’. He fears he will be embalmed in ‘a florid lie’. Here the effect is of a character in Pirandello quarrelling with the director and struggling against the prison-house of the text. Exploiting to the full this situation (the seeds of which lie as much in his own
Living
Quarters
[1977] as in the final pages of O’Faolain’s biography of O’Neill), Friel depicts the plight of his failed hero as classically tragic.

But there is another dimension to
Making
History
also. In a programme note Friel insisted that ‘history and fiction are related and comparable forms of discourse and that an historical text is a kind of literary artifact’. One important result of this conviction is the role accorded Mabel Bagenal in O’Neill’s story. In fact, Mabel ran away from
O’Neill, laid public complaint against him, and died in 1595, six years before the crucial date Friel supplies which coincides with the defeat at Kinsale. Friel makes her central to O’Neill’s whole tragedy. Indeed here, and in the plays which follow, woman is the measure of all things. Mabel is loyal, a value Friel prizes highly; she is wise and sees further than O’Neill himself into what she calls ‘the overall thing’ or the wider significance of the war against the English; she is the equivalent of a Muse figure whose power O’Neill as artist recognizes only too late and Lombard sees not at all. In a key scene (I.ii), Mabel and her sister Mary discuss herbs and transplanting in what becomes an allegory of the colonizer and colonized issue, or civilians versus barbarians. (Here one might well compare Seamus Deane’s Field Day pamphlet,
Civilians
and
Barbarians
[1983].) The discussion goes to the core of the play, in just the way Shakespeare’s scene in the garden in
Richard
II
(III.iv) makes pruning and garden
management
form the central metaphor for Richard’s downfall. Mabel believes in and has the courage to put into practice the idea of inter-marriage/cross-fertilization. She dares to marry outside the tribe which, as Jimmy Jack says in
Translations,
is a dangerous undertaking. This is why O’Neill insists that Lombard should place Mabel at the centre of his history of O’Neill: ‘That place is central to me.’ But in the myth Lombard is erecting Mabel is peripheral. Friel alone can reinstate her. In so doing he is certainly re-making history, but he is also producing a new myth, poetically conceived, for Anglo-Irish relations. Ten years after
Making
History
was premièred its imaginative impatience with monoliths may be seen as, in Friel’s term, metabiologically creating the environment for the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

Dancing
at
Lughnasa
marks a triumphant achievement by a writer at the height of his renewed powers. It has
proved to be Friel’s most successful play in many years, and has now been filmed. It is to a significant degree autobiographical, as Friel’s moving dedication concedes. The boy Michael may to a certain extent be taken as Brian Friel (who was not, however, born out of wedlock), aged seven in 1936. Like all great autobiographical plays, from Strindberg’s
The
Father
(1887) to O’Neill’s
Long
Day’s
Journey
into
Night
(1956), Friel’s
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
transcends the details of actual experience and creates an alternative or parallel world through the power of art. The claim Friel’s play has on our attention lies in its fusion of so much diverse material, mythic and sociological, so many themes, comic and tragic, so many subtle and moving characterizations, in a language lyrical to the point of poetic precision and yet simultaneously in denial of the power of language to delineate the contours of actual experience.