Digging Deeper

Brian Friel’s ‘Volunteers’

‘The great dramatic subject of internment deserves a great play’: so the theatre critic of the Sunday Independent concluded his unsympathetic and symptomatic review of Brian Friel’s Volunteers which had its première in the Abbey Theatre in 1975. He had seen a desperate and ironic play about internees, but his language deflected him towards the grandiloquent abstraction. That phrase, ‘the great dramatic subject of internment’, is symptomatic of the pieties and patriotism implicit in another phrase, now heard less and less from Dublin but once almost de rigueur when speaking of the Catholic minority in Ulster, who were ‘our people in the North’. Both symptomatic phrases have indeed their essential truth, but that truth is devalued when they are bandied in a context where internment and the North have become a spectator sport.

Of course, the title of Friel’s play courts the stock response. Volunteers answer the call, rise to the self-sacrificing occasion and are noble in the cause, whether of Ireland or Ulster. The word has a sacral edge which blunts (nevertheless) to sanctimoniousness, and it is this potential sanctimoniousness that the play is intent on devastating. Misery and bravery can be ennobled from a distance—the armchair poets of the First World War are a good example—but one of the artistic imperatives is to say the truth as exactly as possible. The message implicit in Friel’s play is explicit in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’: ‘These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.’

Like Owen’s soldiers, and still more like his miners, Friel’s internees are dug in—on an archaeological site. For five months they have been on daily parole to assist the excavation of a Viking site that is soon to be buried under a multi-storey hotel. They have volunteered for the job, have been ostracized by their fellow internees for their collaboration and on this last day of the dig they learn that they are to be violently punished, probably killed, by their comrades back in the cells. They are trapped between political, economic and social realities and received ideas: victims, which is another word that Friel is intent on pursuing into accuracy. They come in under the indifferent eye of a warder, work their stint under the supervision of a petty bourgeois foreman and go out under the shadow of violent death. What happens in between is a masque of anarchy.

The action—or, more precisely, the interaction—centres on Keeney, a man who has put an antic disposition on, for Viking Ireland, like Denmark, is a prison. He is a Hamlet who is gay, not with tragic Yeatsian joy but as a means of deploying and maintaining his anger.

Volunteers to a large extent depends on the various plays within the play initiated by, directed by and starring Keeney, a shower-off and a letter-down, who uses as a starting-point for much of his improvisation the skeleton of a murdered Viking, exposed in situ, a bony structure that can be fleshed with any number of possible meanings: a symbol, in fact, as is the thirteenth-century jug lovingly restored by the site foreman.

A number of reviewers simply refused to accept the dramatic kind that Friel has broken into, a kind that involves an alienation effect but eschews didactic address. As a playwright he has always been obsessed by the conflict between public and private selves, by games and disguises. In Philadelphia Here I Come, he split his main character into two characters, Public and Private Gar O’Donnell, and vivified the perennial Irish father and son drama by this experimental, comic and enabling stroke. Double-talk and double-takes, time-shifts, supple dialogue and subtle exposures, these have been the life of his plays, but one occasionally sensed a tension between the vision and the form, as if a man whose proper idiom was free verse was being forced to realize himself in metrical stanzas.

In Volunteers he 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 from moment to moment on the stage is by turns ironic, vicious, farcical, pathetic. Friel would assent to the Yeatsian proposition that ‘we traffic in mockery’, although behind the mercurial histrionics of Keeney (marvellously played by Donal Donnelly) there looms the older saw that death is not mocked. The play is not a quarrel with others but a vehicle for Friel’s quarrel with himself, between his heart and his head, to put it at its simplest. It is more about values and attitudes within the Irish psyche than it is about the rights and wrongs of the political situation, and represents a further digging of the site cleared in his Freedom of the City.

Still people yearn for a reductio: what does he mean? He means, one presumes, to shock. He means that an expert, hurt and shocking laughter is the only adequate response to a calloused condition (perhaps one should adduce Sassoon instead of Owen) and that no ‘fake concern’ (the phrase is the Honest Ulstermans’) should be allowed to mask us from the facts of creeping indifference, degradation and violence. And he means to develop as a playwright and to create, despite resistance, the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.

The Times Literary Supplement, 1975