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
This page intentionally left blank
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

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

Plays of the 1970s 105

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

Lieutenant George Yolland 130

7 Memory and History 152

8 Negotiating the Present 177

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 facili-
tated 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 pro-
ductions 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 assist-
ant 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 unpub-
lished 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 fol-
lowing publishers for permission to quote from the plays: Faber and Faber
(London); Peter Fallon of The Gallery Press (Oldcastle, Co. Meath).
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction

Brian Friel is widely recognized as Ireland’s leading contemporary play-

wright, 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 world-
wide 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-of-
town 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
2 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 evi-
dence 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 super-
imposed. 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 exten-
sive 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 experi-
mental 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 per-
mission 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 ‘suc-
cessful’ 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 experimenta-
tion 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, talk-
ing 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 phenom-
enon, 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 deci-
sions 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 manu-
scripts – 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 proc-
ess 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 depo-
liticization, 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 draft-
ing, 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 jurisdic-
tion 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 seques-
tered 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 biographi-
cal 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
6 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 stag-
ing 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 Z̆iz̆ek to examine the operation of fantasy in Friel’s theatre, in par-
ticular 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 distinc-
tion 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 repre-
sentation 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 play-
wright 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, play-
acting, 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 follow-
ing 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 consider-
able, 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 eve-
rything 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 natu-
ral 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
10 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 rela-
tionship 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 rehears-
als 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 dismiss-
ing, 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
 The Early Plays 11

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 nine-
county 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
12 Brian Friel

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 alle-
gorical 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 knowl-
edge 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
 The Early Plays 13

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 posi-
tion in the offing.22

Although Walter promises his father that he will be offered the vice-prin-
cipalship 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 dis-
covers 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 oppo-
sition 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
14 Brian Friel

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 relation-
ship 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 prin-
cipal 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 rejec-
tion, Daniel turns to his other daughter and praises her ‘softness’, rhetori-
cally contrasting it to Fiona’s ‘hardness’. Rita Stone is absent throughout To
This Hard House, having emigrated to England years earlier to pursue a musi-
cal 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 meas-
ured 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 daughter-
in-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
 The Early Plays 15

education, available to the younger generation as it never was to their par-

ents. 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 ear-
lier 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 insist-
ence 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 nostal-
gia. Rather, his dramas direct a critique at the home culture for its failure to
provide a sustaining environment, for creating the conditions of dissatisfac-
tion 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
16 Brian Friel

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 experi-
enced 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.
 The Early Plays 17

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 cir-
cumstances 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 longest-
serving 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 eschew-
ing 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,
18 Brian Friel

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 desper-
ately 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 occa-
sions in Friel’s drama when a baby that does not long survive childbirth meta-
phorically 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.
 The Early Plays 19

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 “contain-
ment” 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 relation-
ship 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 repeat-
edly 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 char-
acters’ ultimate trajectory to England.
20 Brian Friel

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 unbecom-
ing. 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 intel-
lectual 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 contain-
ment 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
 The Early Plays 21

‘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 profes-
sions, 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 pursu-
ing. 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 daugh-
ters 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 confi-
dence in her own sense of self. What makes The Francophile a more satisfac-
tory 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 fam-
ily 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
22 Brian Friel

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 main-
land, 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 learn-
ing 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 articu-
late 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 profes-
sional 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
 The Early Plays 23

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 con-
versant 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 trajec-
tory 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
24 Brian Friel

examination and the ground is laid for the news that Chris has been aban-
doned 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 daugh-
ter. 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 char-
acter 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 unset-
tled 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 sar-
donic 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 ‘devel-
oped 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 occa-
sions 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
 The Early Plays 25

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 worth-
while, 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 tal-
ents. 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 sur-
viving 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
26 Brian Friel

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 can-
not 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 mater-
nal 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 main-
tained 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
 The Early Plays 27

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 con-
tradictions, 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 broth-
ers, 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 gen-
erations?’ (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
28 Brian Friel

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 loneli-
ness 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.
 The Early Plays 29

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 fam-
ily 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 pre-
cisely 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 wel-
come 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 stipulat-
ing 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
30 Brian Friel

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 strug-
gle 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 com-
plete. 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 begin-
nings. You are of the second kind, Columba.49

And so, as it turned out, was Brian Friel as he took on the vocation of full-
time 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 fail-
ure. 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 treat-
ment 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
 The Early Plays 31

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 thea-
tres, 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, trans-
lations 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 profes-
sionals. 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 ‘half-
decent’, the primacy of the verbal text is not being asserted in this declara-
tion 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 ines-
sential 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
 Friel and the Director 33

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 thou-
sand 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 under-
stated 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
34 Brian Friel

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 con-
centrate. 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, set-
tling 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 produc-
tions 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 idi-
omatic 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
 Friel and the Director 35

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 conserva-
tive English watering-hole, Tunbridge Wells? His career had been mainly con-
ducted 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 world-
wide 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 play-
production apart from an intuitive knowledge. […] So I packed my bags
36 Brian Friel

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 observ-
ing 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
 Friel and the Director 37

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 abil-
ity 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 vital-
ize 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 con-
ductor 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 crea-
tion 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 hap-
pen. 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 min-
utes, maybe five, and at those moments, perhaps at the play-within-the-
play scene or the closet scene or the nunnery scene, [Guthrie] radiated
38 Brian Friel

his infectious excitement so that the actors caught it, responded to it,
excited him in turn. Then, in those precious times of action and reac-
tion, 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 sig-
nificance 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 them-
selves, 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 didac-
tic (‘tendentious’) and a dogged, linear exposition. The play he was to pro-
duce in the wake of what he later termed ‘the Guthrie high’ he experienced
in Minneapolis was to be of a very different kind.19
 Friel and the Director 39

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 the-
atrical. ‘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 emi-
grate. 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 pos-
sible 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
40 Brian Friel

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 move-
ment 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 imme-
diate 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 lim-
ited, 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
 Friel and the Director 41

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 contem-
porary 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 com-
ments, 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 unsym-
pathetically 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 hold-
ing 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
42 Brian Friel

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 hap-
pier 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 produc-
tion 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 suf-
ficiently 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 direc-
tion 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 contempo-
rary 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
 Friel and the Director 43

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 atmos-
phere 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 cen-
sorious 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 immedi-
ate 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 practi-
cal 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
44 Brian Friel

I had to produce documentation I would be pleased to claim – to para-

phrase 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 col-
laboration, 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 pro-
tagonist, 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 rais-
ing 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
 Friel and the Director 45

world drama, in particular his skill at transforming a fixed conventional set-

ting 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 rap-
port 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 broth-
erly 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
46 Brian Friel

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 neces-
sary 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 play-
wright 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
 Friel and the Director 47

300 performances. One would guess little of this from the largely uncompre-
hending 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 metamorpho-
sis. 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 com-
pound 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 fol-
lowing 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
48 Brian Friel

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 rela-
tionship 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 demand-
ing 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 charac-
ter 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 chal-
lenged. It should be no surprise that The Loves of Cass McGuire was the Friel
 Friel and the Director 49

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 identi-
fied 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 run-
ning in New York. This meant that the cast was almost entirely American,
since Actors’ Equity was strict in the matter, and Hilton Edwards was audi-
tioning 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 sub-
ject 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 hap-
pened, as is clear both from their correspondence after the debacle37 and
50 Brian Friel

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 suf-
fered 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 com-
ment) 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 direc-
tor 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 tempera-
ment 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 beauti-
ful 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
 Friel and the Director 51

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 any-
thing 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 dif-
ficulty 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
52 Brian Friel

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 draw-
ing 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 gay-
ness; 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 coarsen-
ing 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 relation-
ship. 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.
 Friel and the Director 53

There is an ambivalence here on the score of the director’s Englishness. In

the Gate Theatre Festschrift’, Friel praised Edwards’s professionalism, partic-
ularly in regard to acting, for insisting that there is a ‘firm and final distinc-
tion 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 pro-
fessional 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 direc-
tor 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 per-
fect 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 realiza-
tion 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 per-
formance; Guthrie’s comments suggest that the gay sub-text was subtly con-
veyed. 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
54 Brian Friel

with Edwards and MacLiammóir. Set on an island off the west coast of
Ireland, there is one family remaining after the remarkable mass emigra-
tion 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 mid-
dle-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 hus-
band, 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 hetero-
sexual 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 gay-
ness 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 trou-
ble and there could be no excuses. “Rise above it!” was [Guthrie’s] famous
 Friel and the Director 55

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 gen-
erations 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 genera-
tion 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 loca-
tion 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
56 Brian Friel

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 alter-
natives, 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 consist-
ently 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
 Friel and the Director 57

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 land-
lord dressing down the peasant.’62
All of this and more lie behind the lineaments that Guthrie has contrib-
uted to the landlord Christopher Gore in The Home Place. There is consider-
able 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 the-
atrical 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’, some-
one 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 develop-
ment 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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
 Fantasy in Friel 59

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 Z̆iz̆ek does is even more thoroughly to challenge
the strict separation between fantasy and reality by showing the intercon-
nectedness 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 Z̆iz̆ek’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
Z̆iz̆ek as in Lacan, realism is not the Real. Rather, realism and fantasy inter-
act 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
60 Brian Friel

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 fantasiz-
ing. 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 articu-
lated 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
 Fantasy in Friel 61

his wife have seen to it that their son does not suffer from the same educa-
tional 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 fanta-
sies 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 insist-
ence 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 fan-
tasies. 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
62 Brian Friel

masculine roles (especially those between father and son) of S. B.’s kitchen.
Friel denied the illusion of realism represented by the traditional stage set-
ting of a house and instead introduced an overtly symbolic setting.
As Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek 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 cen-
turies 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 plan-
ning 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 busi-
ness”’ (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 pos-
sibilities 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 experi-
ences 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
 Fantasy in Friel 63

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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 con-
structs 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 accel-
eration 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 decla-
ration 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
64 Brian Friel

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 pro-
moting 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 long-
ing 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 monosylla-
bles, 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. Z̆iz̆ek 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-dol-
del-ah’ (56). The lack of content in these self-confessedly empty signifiers
proceeds from the fact that, as Z̆iz̆ek puts it, ‘what he is most afraid of is the
 Fantasy in Friel 65

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 Z̆iz̆ek, 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 con-
duct 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 par-
ents. As Z̆iz̆ek 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
66 Brian Friel

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 Z̆iz̆ek’s terms, what underlies
the compact between fantasy and reality and gives them their shared sym-
bolic 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 obses-
sive circling back to his parents’ marriage. This process culminates in impos-
sible 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 relat-
ing to Gar’s desire and what is impelling him to emigrate. The first, involv-
ing 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 memo-
rial 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 deliber-
ately 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
 Fantasy in Friel 67

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 after-
noon 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
68 Brian Friel

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 Z̆iz̆ek’s terms) Gar’s relent-
less 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 conversa-
tion.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
 Fantasy in Friel 69

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 maid-
enly 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 pros-
perous 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, Z̆iz̆ek argues that

the ultimate aim of psychoanalytic treatment is not for the analysand to

organize his [or her] confused life-experience into (another) coherent nar-
rative, 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
70 Brian Friel

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 narra-
tive. Instead, they leave open the gaps between its different elements in a
style that is deliberately fragmentary. Z̆iz̆ek goes on to argue that ‘even the
most harmonious work of art is a priori fragmentary’ and to praise the art-
ist 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 bear-
ing 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 home-
work). 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 establish-
ing 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 struc-
tural 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 classi-
cal repertoire is used to evoke the power of memory, the raucous thumpety-
thump 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 clas-
sical 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
 Fantasy in Friel 71

finally Cass sit in the winged chair and speak what Friel characterizes as
their ‘rhapsodies’ (9), elaborate verbal narratives that match a fantasy mar-
riage 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 dia-
logue 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 sug-
gests between the social reality of the outside world and the fantasies on
which that reality relies for its very existence. As Z̆iz̆ek 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.
72 Brian Friel

The methods of teaching – by repetition and memorization – and the sub-

jects 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 inap-
propriate 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 brothel-
keeper 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 com-
ments 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
 Fantasy in Friel 73

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 gos-
sip 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
74 Brian Friel

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 accom-
panied by one of the most loaded stage directions in a Friel play. She is sit-
ting 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 refer-
ences 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 fos-
silized, senile, paralysed and ‘monumental’ (11), a moving statue. And what
of her daughter? Anna McMullan notes that in Eden House Cass is rechris-
tened ‘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 cyni-
cal 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 follow-
ing 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 previ-
ous year in the Phoenix Park.29 Fintan O’Toole picked up on these associa-
tions 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 cel-
ebration of the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the play is, among
 Fantasy in Friel 75

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 sham-
rock 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 con-
certs 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 work-
ing 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 mortifica-
tion 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
76 Brian Friel

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
 Fantasy in Friel 77

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-and-
down 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 repro-
duces 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 appear-
ance 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 care-
fully 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 con-
flict 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
78 Brian Friel

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 chap-
ter.) 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 impend-
ing marriage of the youngest, Claire, the reason why the family have reas-
sembled in Ballybeg Hall. Willie is called upon to make the transportation
arrangements for the day but has pointedly not been invited to the wed-
ding. Joe Brennan’s other half, the character who has imbibed the mythol-
ogy 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 per-
ceives 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 fam-
ily, 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 interac-
tion with the world of the O’Donnells. At first these have a certain plau-
sibility and seem little more than socially conscious name-dropping, with
Casimir giving researcher Tom Hoffnung the ‘facts’. As the academic puts
 Fantasy in Friel 79

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 dispar-
ity 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
80 Brian Friel

only two occasions. One was to travel to Dublin to attend the Eucharistic
Congress in 1932 when John McCormack sang ‘Panis Angelicus’ to an audi-
ence 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 mythol-
ogy 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.
Z̆iz̆ek’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. Z̆iz̆ek 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 lat-
est 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 out-
stretched and beckoning’ (83); when ready to introduce the tape, he stands
 Fantasy in Friel 81

‘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 manner-
isms’. 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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 ideologi-
cal 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
82 Brian Friel

The Loves of Cass McGuire. In the face of the cultural and emotional depriva-
tion 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 manic-
depressive 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 accu-
rate 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. Z̆iz̆ek 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 fan-
tasy, 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
 Fantasy in Friel 83

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 con-
sidered 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 Z̆iz̆ek’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 influ-
ence.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 well-
made 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 engage-
ment 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 acci-
dent 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 environ-
ment’ 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 acknowl-
edgement 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 85

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 com-
ments 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 acknowledge-
ment 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 national-
ist 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 mid-
1970s 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 music-
hall 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 audi-
ence 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)
86 Brian Friel

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 play-
wright 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 memo-
rable 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 actor-
manager 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 con-
scious 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 jeal-
ousy, 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 real-
ism, 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 thea-
tre 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 87

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 set-
ting 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 func-
tions, 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 profes-
sional 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 doc-
tor and trades in her wimple so they can marry. At the start of Friel’s play,
88 Brian Friel

‘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 elabo-
rate 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 gro-
tesquely 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 experi-
encing 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 89

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 sensational-
ism 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 distrac-
tion 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 attend-
ance 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 proc-
ess 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 simi-
lar 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,
90 Brian Friel

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 refer-
ences 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 91

positive review of play and production, Alec Reid thought Cusack’s per-
formance 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 mov-
ing portrayals of his career. The ‘mask of bland simplicity and vagueness’
was turned towards the other characters; but in isolated and isolating close-
ups 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 half-
way 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
92 Brian Friel

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 dramatiza-
tion 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, how-
ever, 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 93

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 dif-
ficult 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 occa-
sion 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 con-
structed 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
94 Brian Friel

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, neo-
realist 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 achieve-
ment 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 compari-
son. 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, indi-
cating 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 95

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 contro-
versy 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 occu-
pied 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 increas-
ingly 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
96 Brian Friel

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 schol-
arly 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 similari-
ties between The Contractor and Volunteers is the presence of a ‘simple’ man
in their midst, someone who has suffered some kind of severe mental break-
down. 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 mean-
ingless 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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 97

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 equiva-
lent 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 habitu-
ally 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 con-
firmed 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 consecu-
tive 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
98 Brian Friel

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’ char-
acters 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 end-
lessly 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 politi-
cal 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,
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 99

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 develop-
ments 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
100 Brian Friel

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 sup-
plies 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 con-
cluding 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 explic-
itly charged with a named crime – as Keeney puts it, ‘to be strictly accurate,
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 101

George, they interned us because of “attitudes that might be inimical to

public security”’ (55). The workers have been no less ostracized by their fel-
low 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 lay-
ing 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 giv-
ing 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,
102 Brian Friel

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 nineteenth-
century 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 author-
ity 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 replac-
ing 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 some-
thing’ (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
 Friel and Contemporary British Drama 103

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 con-
sumption, 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 occasion-
ing 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 produc-
tions 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 rea-
son, 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
104 Brian Friel

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 archaeologi-
cal 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, pro-
vide 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 his-
tory 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 proc-
ess 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 appropri-
ate 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 imme-
diacy, was under pressure to deliver plays of a documentary verisimilitude,
even if the conventions its narrative drew on were close to those of melo-
drama: 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
106 Brian Friel

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 par-
ticular 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 govern-
ment’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 inter-
nal 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 inter-
changeable. 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
 The Politics of Space 107

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 drama-
turgic 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
108 Brian Friel

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 exam-
ined 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 theat-
ricalized 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 exte-
rior, 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 set-
ting 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 theatri-
cal 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.
 The Politics of Space 109

Nor is the interior the conventional rural cottage setting that the fishing
equipment stacked outside might suggest or the theatrical tradition pre-
scribe. For Manus Sweeney, the patriarch whose house it is, is described ‘sit-
ting 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 cot-
tage 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 off-
stage 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 min-
utes. 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
110 Brian Friel

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 quali-
ties 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 maim-
ing 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 let-
ter 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 real-
ized 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
 The Politics of Space 111

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 enjoy-
ing 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 depart-
ing 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’ terri-
tory.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
112 Brian Friel

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 emblem-
atic 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
 The Politics of Space 113

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 mirror-
reversal 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 ver-
sion 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 sur-
vive. 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
114 Brian Friel

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 broad-
casts 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 commu-
nity: the shooting dead by British Army soldiers of thirteen civilians, march-
ers 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 alterca-
tion, 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
 The Politics of Space 115

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 cover-
ing 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 com-
pleted play means that the play moves between two different time periods.
116 Brian Friel

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 complexi-
ties 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 tell-
ing 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 produc-
tion at the Abbey, the street fighting was represented not just by offstage
 The Politics of Space 117

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 dis-
criminating 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 ‘objec-
tive’ 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
118 Brian Friel

‘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 isola-
tion 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 trans-
gressed 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
 The Politics of Space 119

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 speed-
ily around the entire space, conducting his own inspection, and when he
comes to realize where they are, his response is expressed with wild, anar-
chic 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 transforma-
tion 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 quo-
tations 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)
120 Brian Friel

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 increas-
ing 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 throw-
ing stones and burning shops’ (138), and comes to associate the term with
Skinner. This process climaxes at the end of Act 1 with outright identifica-
tion: ‘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
 The Politics of Space 121

accusation, since the act breaks off at that point. It is returned to the audi-
ence 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 dif-
ferent 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 per-
formance 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.
122 Brian Friel

Sarah in Gentle Island and Lily in Freedom are both strong and central char-
acters; 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 inte-
rior 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
 The Politics of Space 123

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 bril-
liant 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 account-
able 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 wit-
ness. This narrator is a Pirandellian creation, a figure known as ‘Sir’ who
124 Brian Friel

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 play-
within-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 predeter-
mined 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, pro-
testing 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
 The Politics of Space 125

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 audi-
ence. 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 wit-
ness 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 theatri-
cal 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
126 Brian Friel

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 perma-
nently’.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 disem-
bodied 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.
 The Politics of Space 127

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 copi-
ous 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 ques-
tions 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 narra-
tive 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 remain-
ing 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 disor-
der and disorganization among the order of the tragedy’s space, independ-
ently 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 distinc-
tion 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
128 Brian Friel

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 light-
ing 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 impres-
sion 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 some-
thing 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 col-
lage of emotions and scenes and possibilities’.54 And he did so not by pursu-
ing a chronological plot or a naturalist narrative but by exploring what he
described as the ‘possibility’ of ‘formally enacting different scenes [through]
 The Politics of Space 129

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 geom-
etry 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 pro-
gressive 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
 Friel’s Translations 131

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 accompa-
nied 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 dif-
ficulty 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 prepara-
tion 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
132 Brian Friel

its inherent transparency? Or, as at least some of the remarks from the sympo-
sium 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 sym-
posium 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 ques-
tion, 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 map-
making 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
 Friel’s Translations 133

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 inter-
view, 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 produc-
tion 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 ques-
tion 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 hyper-
articulate 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 emo-
tional fullness. But even in the first two acts there are disturbing and seri-
ous 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 convic-
tion 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 tempt-
ing, in the case of Translations, to interpret that ‘lost or missing dimension’
134 Brian Friel

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 coun-
try 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 repeat-
edly 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 back-
stage 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.
 Friel’s Translations 135

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 miscom-
munication 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 inde-
pendence 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
136 Brian Friel

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 lime-
light 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
 Friel’s Translations 137

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 Anglo-
Irish 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 stud-
ying 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
138 Brian Friel

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 map-
making 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 possibil-
ity 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 guer-
rilla-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
 Friel’s Translations 139

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 impli-
cated, 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 appear-
ance 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 combina-
tion 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
140 Brian Friel

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 inter-
rogation 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
 Friel’s Translations 141

language he, his father and his brother are all well able to speak. By remov-
ing 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 through-
out. 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 fol-
lowing 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 politi-
cal 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
142 Brian Friel

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 intimi-
dation 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 con-
frontation 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 surround-
ing 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
 Friel’s Translations 143

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 confron-
tation 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 busi-
ness 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 per-
haps 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
144 Brian Friel

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 pre-
dictably 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 bar-
baric 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 possi-
bility 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
 Friel’s Translations 145

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 deter-
mine 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 prospec-
tive 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 suggest-
ing 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 iso-
lated 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
146 Brian Friel

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 shortcom-
ings of this depleted island community, its inner compromises and well-
kept 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 inti-
mate interlude in its first between the two young men. Physically, George
Yolland here presents a strong contrast to the way he appeared in the previ-
ous 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 over-
comes all that divides them, the two men simultaneously undergo a form
 Friel’s Translations 147

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 pos-
sibilities occasioning the fact of George’s disappearance: he had drunk too
much, he slipped and fell. Everything he proposes is designed to direct inter-
pretation 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 begin-
ning 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.
148 Brian Friel

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 possi-
bilities 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 encapsu-
lated! 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 mur-
dered. 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 occu-
pied 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 possibil-
ity 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 pre-
Troubles 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.
 Friel’s Translations 149

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 mount-
ing 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 circum-
stantial. 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
150 Brian Friel

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 introduc-
tion of internment was not to end with its abolition. Rather, it was to be
extended to mainland Britain when Westminster responded to the bomb-
ings 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
Z̆iz̆ek 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 Z̆iz̆ek suggests) is to establish a two-way process in which ‘our
 Friel’s Translations 151

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 Z̆iz̆ek 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 stag-
ing 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 inaugura-
tion 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 resent-
ments 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 histori-
cal 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 pre-
carious 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 subjec-
tive image of the past.
In ‘Self-Portrait’, Friel discusses an autobiographical memory of a particu-
lar 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 differ-
ent 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
 Memory and History 153

‘facts’ of what he reluctantly describes as ‘positivism’ and the ‘imagination’

associated with memory, similar to the absolute distinction Friel is formu-
lating 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 bod-
ies 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 com-
pletely 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 remi-
niscences. 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)
154 Brian Friel

Facts, he argues, do not have an independent existence outside a narrative

and, accordingly, every figuration is a narrative configuration or reconfigu-
ration. 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 recol-
lection, 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 considera-
tion 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 life-
long 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
 Memory and History 155

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 vil-
lage 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 teas-
ing 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 perfec-
tion 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 enti-
tled 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 sec-
ond 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 hus-
band 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 sus-
pect 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
156 Brian Friel

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 deci-
sion 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 dra-
matic 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 portray-
als 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 mono-
logue; 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
 Memory and History 157

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 dif-
ficult 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 char-
acter 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 moun-
tain’.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 possibil-
ity 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 pro-
duction 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
158 Brian Friel

audience with a beguiling mix of folklore, social observation and humour

in a rich Kerry dialect. Friel’s comment astutely rebuts the frequent mis-
judgement 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 for-
mal 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 natural-
ism 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 natu-
ralism 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 link-
age 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
 Memory and History 159

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, intro-
ducing, 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
160 Brian Friel

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 recount-
ing 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 nerv-
ous 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
 Memory and History 161

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-encounter-
ing 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 experi-
ence 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
162 Brian Friel

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 pre-
miering 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 impor-
tant 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
 Memory and History 163

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 great-
est 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 throw-
ing 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 consider-
able 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 com-
prehensive 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
164 Brian Friel

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, begin-
ning 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 continu-
ous 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
 Memory and History 165

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, selec-
tive and diverse historical narratives. It brings up the crucial role that mem-
ory 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 writ-
ing 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 audi-
ble 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 in-
betweenness that gives him greater insight into the complex political situa-
tion, 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
166 Brian Friel

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 acknowl-
edge 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 meet-
ing 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
 Memory and History 167

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 dimin-
ish her agency. They undercut the independence and courage of the char-
acter 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 tre-
mendous 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 ear-
lier, 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 deter-
mination 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
168 Brian Friel

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 preg-
nant 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 determina-
tion 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 expe-
rience 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
 Memory and History 169

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 indi-
vidual sections were male; and women writers scarcely featured. As Martine
Pelletier has argued, ‘the relegation of women to the margins of Irish liter-
ary 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 sev-
eral 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 inter-
view (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 mem-
ber) 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 expe-
rience 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
170 Brian Friel

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 eventu-
ally 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 school-
teaching 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
 Memory and History 171

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 articu-
lated by Paul Ricoeuer as ‘a phenomenology of memory’. It requires ‘the
172 Brian Friel

participation of subjects capable of designating themselves as being, to dif-

ferent 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 ques-
tion 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 narra-
tor 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 nar-
rator 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
 Memory and History 173

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 Kate-
dominated 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 infe-
riority’ (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
174 Brian Friel

that they all go to the harvest dance. Instead, Maggie speaks a long on-
stage 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 fan-
cies 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 pub-
lic, 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 periph-
ery’, 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 ask-
ing 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 pres-
ence 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.
 Memory and History 175

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 inimi-
cal 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 condi-
tion 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
176 Brian Friel

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 chal-
lenged 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, includ-
ing (let it be noted) Kate, who does not balk at supporting and acknowledg-
ing 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 produc-
tions 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 sup-
plied 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 chap-
ters, 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 per-
formances. 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
178 Brian Friel

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 estab-
lished, 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 spec-
tacles, 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 lin-
guistically 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.
 Negotiating the Present 179

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, scroung-
ing 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 anthro-
pological 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
180 Brian Friel

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 prop-
erties 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 surre-
alistic 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 dedica-
tion, 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 assign-
ments between lustful men and women whose designs will be thwarted by
an uncooperative universe. Tim naturally wants the cottage for an assigna-
tion 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 unan-
nounced presence of a third woman, already ensconced in the cottage and
the owner of the pink nightdress. Claire, a local young woman, has been
 Negotiating the Present 181

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 consterna-
tion. Grabbing them from the line, he recurrently stuffs them in his pocket
where they peek out to compromise him further. Claire functions as the mis-
chievous 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 advanta-
geous marriage and is putting the pressure on Tim to have her father sup-
port 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 recog-
nizes Senator Donovan from the fact that she and this married Irish politi-
cian 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 politi-
cians 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 dra-
matic 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
182 Brian Friel

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 refer-
ences 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 demon-
strates 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
 Negotiating the Present 183

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 tak-
ing 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 unprec-
edented 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 fol-
lowing exotic items: venison and apricot compote; honey gateau; brandied
peaches and Romanian truffles. As Terry ruefully remarks when the inven-
tory 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.
184 Brian Friel

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 depend-
ent 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 non-
stop 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
 Negotiating the Present 185

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 fol-
lowed 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 pop-
ular 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 contin-
ued 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?
186 Brian Friel

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 insuf-
ficiency. The opening lines make this clear with their insistent repetitions and
the fact that most of the lines spoken by the six characters are interchange-
able. 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 res-
pite 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 respond-
ing to Frank’s claim that ‘people stopped believing, didn’t they?’ (372).
 Negotiating the Present 187

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 peni-
tential practices of fasting and formal prayer. In 1984, Seamus Heaney pub-
lished 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 pil-
grims 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 dismem-
bered. 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 coun-
try. 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, virtu-
ally 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 musi-
cian 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
188 Brian Friel

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 shamefac-
edly that he is only crying wolf. The boatman bears the overtly mythologi-
cal 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 sto-
ries 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
 Negotiating the Present 189

briefly quotes are popular American show tunes from the 1930s. Many such
songs feature in Dancing at Lughnasa; but they would then have been con-
temporary, 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 conclud-
ing 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 mean-
ing. 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 bal-
ance 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
190 Brian Friel

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 mathemat-
ical 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 frag-
mented 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 writ-
ten 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
 Negotiating the Present 191

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 bleak-
ness 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 commer-
cial 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 writ-
ten 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
192 Brian Friel

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 inti-
mate 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 televi-
sion. 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 expe-
rience) 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.
 Negotiating the Present 193

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 con-
fident 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 descrip-
tion 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 nerv-
ousness 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 physi-
cal 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
194 Brian Friel

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 pub-
lished 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 set-
ting, 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 audi-
ence 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 uneasi-
ness, ‘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
 Negotiating the Present 195

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 hus-
band 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 set-
ting 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 fan-
tasy 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 back-
water 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 move-
ment 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)
196 Brian Friel

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 cover-
ing 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 post-
operational 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
 Negotiating the Present 197

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 dark-
ness 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 colo-
nial 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 audi-
ence, she offers a variation on this remark by firmly declaring ‘my border-
line 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 politi-
cal 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
198 Brian Friel

about a united Ireland, if that is their wish’.39 These political noises con-
tinued 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 evalua-
tion? 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 play-
wright. 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 textu-
ality 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
 Negotiating the Present 199

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 set-
ting 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 continu-
ing 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
200 Brian Friel

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 open-
ing 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 grand-
parents, 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 withhold-
ing, 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
 Negotiating the Present 201

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 liv-
ing, 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 encour-
ages 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 preten-
sions 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
202 Brian Friel

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 accom-
modation 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 mono-
logues 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, pro-
ducer Noel Pearson and director Sinéad O’Brien prepared a television docu-
mentary 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 fin-
ished 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 spe-
cifically 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
204 Brian Friel

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 delight-
ful 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 nineteenth-
century 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 meas-
ured 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
 Conclusion 205

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 gradu-
ate 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 emula-
tion 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 char-
acterizes 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 first-
choice 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.
206 Brian Friel

The drama of Performances is partly, then, the post-writing and so ulti-

mately 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 contempo-
rary, 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 pas-
sionate 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
 Conclusion 207

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
 Notes 209

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.
210 Notes

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).
 Notes 211

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 pro-
duction 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 writ-
ten 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 quota-
tions 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.
212 Notes

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 rewrit-
ing 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

1. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 21.
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.
3. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989),
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.
7. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 7.
8. Brian Friel, Wonderful Tennessee, Plays: Two (London: Faber and Faber, 1999),
p. 356.
9. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 25.
10. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 34. The following two quotations are from
the same paragraph.
11. Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p. 56.
12. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 11.
214 Notes

13. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 9.

14. Scott Boltwood, Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, pp. 56–8.
15. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 66.
16. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 16.
17. Seamus Deane, Introduction, Brian Friel, Plays: One, p. 14.
18. 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.
19. See Anna McMullan, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender,’ in The Cambridge
Companion to Brian Friel, p. 147.
20. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, pp. 10–11.
21. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, pp. 18–19.
22. 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.
23. Harry White, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, p. 11.
24. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 45.
25. 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).
26. William Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, Selected Poems, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr (London:
Penguin Books, 2005), p. 50.
27. W. B. Yeats, Selected Plays, ed. Richard Allen Cave (London: Penguin Books, 1997),
p. 28.
28. See Anna McMullan, ‘Performativity, Unruly Bodies and Gender’, p. 149.
29. 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.
30. Critical Moments: Fintan O’Toole on Modern Irish Theatre, eds Julia Furay and
Redmond O’Hanlon (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2003), pp. 231–2.
31. Brian Friel, Aristocrats, Plays: One, pp. 309–10. All future references are to this edi-
tion and will be incorporated in the text.
32. 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.
33. Seamus Deane, Introduction, Plays: One, p. 18.
34. 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).
35. Charles McGlinchey, The Last of the Name, edited and with an introduction by
Brian Friel (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1986).
36. 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

37. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 48.

38. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 52.
39. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 67.
40. 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.
41. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 45.

4 Brian Friel and Contemporary British Drama: The Missing

Dimension
1. By 1960, the Irish scene was being transformed by the emergence of a genera-
tion 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 edi-
tion (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 co-
operation with the RUC, in order to protect an agent for British military intel-
ligence. 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 con-
scripts’ 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 bomb-
ings) 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 217

40. Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Eavan Boland’, Murray, Brian Friel, p. 58.
41. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, first entry, dated 3 September 1973.
42. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, A, dated 23 October 1973.
43. 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.
44. 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.
45. The notice was quoted in the review of the Gate’s production of Volunteers in the
Financial Times, 2 November 1998.
46. Susannah Clapp, The Observer, 1 November 1998.
47. These are Friel’s own terms. See The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,069/1, C, 9
November 1973.
48. 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 cur-
rently 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 edi-
tion 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 associ-
ated 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 “out-
siders” […] 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 crude-
ness 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.
49. Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting
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 incorpo-
rated 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 edi-
tion 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 223

27. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,000/1. The entry is dated 7 March 1984.
28. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,000/1. The entry is dated 29 March 1984.
29. Personal interview with Noel Pearson, Dublin, 15 October 2010.
30. Martine Pelletier, ‘Translations, the Field Day Debate and the Re-imagining of Irish
Identity’, p. 76.
31. 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.
32. Thomas Kilroy, ‘Friendship’, Special Issue: Brian Friel, Irish University Review 29:1
(Spring/Summer 1999), p. 88.
33. Thomas Kilroy, ‘Friendship’, p. 88.
34. The Brian Friel Papers, MS L 41.
35. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,104/1. The entry is dated 18 May 1989.
36. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,104/1. The entry is dated 18 May 1989.
37. The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,041/1. The entry is dated 29 May 1989.
38. Frank McGuinness in the TV documentary, Brian Friel (Ferndale Films, 2000),
directed by Sinéad O’Brien, produced by Noel Pearson.
39. Helen Lojek, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa and the Unfinished Revolution’, in The
Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, p. 82.
40. 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.
41. 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.
42. Cited in Richard English, Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland
(London: Pan Books, 2006), p. 329.
43. Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900–2000 (London: Profile
Books, 2005), p. 364.
44. 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 documen-
tary, 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 edi-
tion and will be incorporated in the text.
6. The Brian Friel Papers, National Library of Ireland, MS 37,134/1. The origi-
nal 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 edi-
tion 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).
228 Bibliography

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).
Z̆iz̆ek, 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 com-
position; 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, Burke, Patrick, 51, 136, 192
43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 90, 103, 114, Byrne, Catherine, 192
123, 127, 168, 177, 191
Adams, Gerry, 197 Cairns, Tom, 123
The Almeida Theatre, London, 177, 192 Calvin, John, 96
Allgood, Molly, 206 Campbell, Douglas, 34
Anderson, Lindsay, 94, 98, 103 Carleton, William, 187
Andrews, J.H., 132–3, 137, 148, 162 Cave, Richard Allen, 123
A Paper Landscape, 132 Chekhov, Anton, 1, 15, 32, 33, 36, 48,
Arden, John, 84 56, 85, 121, 198, 204–5
Aristotle The Cherry Orchard, 47
De memoria et reminiscentia, 154 Three Sisters, 34, 56, 204
Astaire, Fred, 161 Uncle Vanya, 56, 204
Chesterton, G.K., 79
Balzac, Honoré de, 79 Chopin, Fryderyk, 70, 81–2, 126
Barnes, Ben, 127 Clapp, Susannah, 104
BBC Northern Ireland, 9, 10 Colgan, Michael, 156–7, 191, 204
Beckett, Samuel, 84, 118, 127, 141, Connolly, Sean, 162
190–1 Cooke, Liz, 103–4
Company, 194 Cosgrave, Liam, 98
Happy Days, 188–9 Craigie, Ingrid, 157
Waiting for Godot, 187–8, 190–1 Curtis Brown Agency, London, 42
Bedford, Patrick, 45, 46, 54 Curve Theatre, Leicester, 7
Behan, Brendan, 141 Cusack, Cyril, 90–1
The Quare Fellow, 84 De Certeau, Michel, 116–8, 120
The Bell, 9 De Valera, Eamon, 66, 175
Bell, Sam Hannah, 24 Deane, Seamus, 78, 169, 203
Benson, Ciarán, The Field Day Anthology of Irish
The Cultural Psychology of the Self, 190 Writing, 169, 182
Billington, Michael, 90 Diderot, Denis, 194
The Birmingham Shakespeare Festival, Donnelly, Donal, 45, 46, 51, 99
Alabama, 134 Dowling, Joe, 46, 81, 191
Blair, Tony, 115 Dowling, Vincent, 51
Blake, William, 73 Druid Theatre, Galway, 3, 131
Blakemore, Michael
Arguments with England, 36–7, 54–5 Eblana Theatre, Dublin, 8, 11
Boland, Eavan, 102, 114 Edwards, Hilton, 6, 40, 43–54, 70,
Boltwood, Scott, 66, 98, 112 204
Brian Friel, Ireland and the North, 6 English, Richard, 11
Boucicault, Dion,
The Shaughraun, 135 Faber and Faber, 9, 103
Brecht, Bertolt, 94 Fallon, Peter, 9
Brook, Peter, 33, 34 Faulkner, Brian, 148
Brown, Christy, 168 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, Longman, Stanley Vincent, 107
51, 54–7 Lyric Theatre, Belfast, 9, 11, 25
The Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, 34–8,
42, 45, 55, 201 Mac Anna, Tomás, 50, 74
Aiséirí, 74
Hampstead Theatre, London, 51 Mac Ardle, Dorothy, 175
Haughey, Charles J., 181–2, 184 MacLiammóir, Micheál, 40, 42–54, 204
Heaney, Seamus, 95, 101, 103, 139, 203 The Importance of Being Oscar, 45
‘Punishment’, 144 Madden, Aodhan, 105
Station Island, 187 Magill Summer School, Glenties, Co.
Heidegger, Martin, Donegal, 124
Being and Time, 160 Mamet, David, 206
Hippolytus, 121, 123 The Manhattan Theater Club, New York,
Holmes, Sean, 147–9 131–2
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 79 Mara, P.J., 184
Hume, John, 197 Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, 51
Hynes, Garry, 3, 131–3, 147 Martyn, Edward, 79
Mason, Patrick, 168, 205
Ibsen, Henrik, 60, 122, 135, 198 Marx, Karl, 95–6
Hedda Gabler, 123 Maxwell, D.E.S., 8
Ingram, Kate, 134, 145 McCabe, Eugene, 35
King of the Castle, 42
Janacek, Leos, 204–6 Swift, 42, 57
Intimate Letters, 204–6 McCann, Donal, 191–2
Johnston, Denis McCarter Theater Center, Princeton,
The Old Lady Says No!, 44, 45 131–3
Joyce, James, 139 McConachie, Bruce
American Theater in the Culture of the
Kavanagh, John, 81, 191 Cold War, 19
Kavanagh, Patrick, 187 McCormack, Count John, 79–80
Kearney, Richard, 190 McGlinchey, Charles
Kelly, Eamonn, 157–8 The Last of the Name, 79–80
Kern, Jerome, 159 McGrath, F.C., 179
Kiberd, Declan, 185 McGuinness, Frank, 54, 93, 109, 134,
Kilroy, Thomas, 2, 8, 46, 169–70 173
Double Cross, 162 McKenna, Siobhán, 50, 74
The O’Neill, 163 McKenna, T.P., 99, 192
The Seagull (after Chekhov), 56 McKeon, Belinda, 131–3
McMaster, Anew, 52, 86
Lacan, Jacques, 58–9 McMullan, Anna, 69, 74, 127
Ladd, Alan, 111 McPherson, Conor, 202
Lahr, John, 169 This Lime-Tree Bower, 202
Lambert, Mark, 191 Mendelssohn, Felix, 82
LeFèvre, Robin, 2, 51, 177 Merrick, David, 49
Lennon, John, 184 Miller, Arthur
Lennon, Peter, 52 Death of a Salesman, 24, 39
Leonard, Hugh, Milton, John,
Kill, 181 Paradise Lost, 189
Lewenstein, Oscar, 155 Mindszenty, Cardinal, 28
Lojek, Helen, 173, 176 Moiseiwitsch, Tanya, 34
234 Index

Molière Pearson, Noel, 168, 184–5, 203

The Miser, 34 Pelletier, Martine, 164, 169
Morash, Chris, 57 Pine Richard
Moore, George, 79 The Diviner, 179
Morgan, Dermot, 184 Pinter, Harold, 42, 86
Morrison, Conall, 116 The Lovers, 155
Mullen, Marie, 3 Pirandello, Luigi, 121, 124
Murphy, Tom, 131–2 The Plymouth Theatre, New York, 177
Murray, Christopher, 4, 190–1, 196
My Left Foot, 168 Queen’s University Brian Friel Theatre
and Centre for Theatre Research,
National Theatre, London, 123, 147 Belfast, 24
The National Theatre of Scotland, 177
The New Yorker, 2, 9, 35 Racine, Jean, 121
Norton, Jim, 99 Rattigan, Terence, 84
The Nun’s Story, 86 Rea, Stephen, 1, 103, 151, 162, 169,
177–8, 203
O’Brien, Eugene, 202 Reid, Alec, 91
O’Brien, Sinéad, 203 Richardson, Sir Ralph, 35
O’Casey, Sean, 90, 105, 122 Ricoeuer, Paul
Juno and the Paycock, 17, 141 Memory, History, Forgetting, 6, 152–4,
The Plough and the Stars, 142 159–161, 171–3
O’Connell, Daniel, 134 Robinson, Mary, 169
O’Connor, Frank, 3, 8, 47–8, 52 Roche, Anthony,
O’Connor, Patricia, 11 The Cambridge Companion to Brian
O’Faolain, Sean, Friel, 198
‘A Broken World’, 175 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 60
The Great O’Neill, 163–4, 166–8 Royal Court Theatre, London, 1, 80, 93,
O’Kane, Patrick, 104 98, 103, 114
O’Kelly, Fachtna, 103
The Old Vic Theatre, London, 34 Sacks, Oliver,
Olivier, Sir Laurence, 35, 36, 90 An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven
O’Malley, Mary, 9 Paradoxical Tales, 193
O’Rowe, Mark, 202 Schumann, Robert, 82
Osborne, John, 84–92 Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, Canada,
A Better Class of Person, 86 35
The Entertainer, 85–92 Shakespeare, William, 188
Look Back in Anger, 86 All’s Well That Ends Well, 36–7
O’Shea, Catherine ‘Kitty’, 100 Hamlet, 34, 41, 99
O’Sullivan, Philip, 124 King Lear, 12–4, 119, 194, 205
O’Toole, Fintan, 74–5, 197 Macbeth, 113, 133
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 33
Paisley, Reverend Ian, 115, 148 Othello, 86
Parker, Stewart, Shaw, George Bernard,
Pentecost, 162 Pygmalion, 195
Parnell, Charles Stuart, 100 Shiels, George, 11
Patterson, Henry, 184 Sihra, Melissa, 175
Ireland Since 1939: The Persistence of Sophocles,
Conflict, 148–50 Oedipus the King, 194
The Peacock Theatre, Dublin, 109 Spenser, Charles, 2
 Index 235

Stafford-Clark, Max, 56 Wagner, Richard, 121

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
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 Yeats, W.B. 1, 76, 79–80, 84, 181,

Thompson, Sam 199–200
Over the Bridge, 16, 18, 84 ‘Anima Hominis’, 199
Tóibín, Niall, 156 [with Lady Gregory] Cathleen in
Tomelty, Joseph, 11 Houlihan, 74, 109, 143
Turgenev, Ivan, 1, 32, 85 ‘The Choice’, 199, 206
Turner, Victor, 179 ‘Lapis Lazuli,’ 203
York, Will, 134
Ubersfeld, Anne, 106, 125, 127–9 Young, James, 24
Ulster Group Theatre, Belfast, 8, 10,
24–5 Z̆iz̆ek, Slavoj, 6, 58–9, 62–3, 66, 68–70,
Ulster Literary Theatre, 11 80–3
The Fragile Absolute, 150–1
Vanek, Joe, 168–9
Virgil
The Aeneid, 131