Brian Friel was born in 1929 in Killyclogher, near the town of Omagh, County Tyrone, in the newly established province of Northern Ireland. His father’s father and his mother’s mother couldn’t read, and all his grandparents were Irish-speakers. Compared to many of his contemporaries, he is very closely connected to a much older, pre-literate peasant culture. On the other hand, his father Patrick – ‘a quiet and reserved man’, according to Friel – was a teacher and headmaster, full of the respect for learning and education commonly found in subordinated cultures. Young Brian attended Culmore Primary – his father’s school – and fondly remembers his father teaching the school choir a song: ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, by Tom Moore: ‘… we won a cup at the Omagh Feis [festival] and he was inordinately proud of us – and of himself. And for months afterwards he would line us up and start us off singing that Moore song. Then he would leave the classroom and cross the school yard and go to the far side of the country road and just stand there – listening to us singing in harmony in the distance. And although I couldn’t see him standing there, I knew that we transported him.’
In 1964 he recalled for the BBC, being reduced to tears by his teacher-father’s rage over his son’s problems with algebra. It was the sound of Presbyterian chapel hymn-singing from the church next door that seems to have consoled him in his misery: ‘… although it may not have been the height of mystical experience, I can heartily recommend hymn-singing to all those who labour and are burdened.’ His mother’s influence was no less strong – ‘a dominant vivacious presence’. Her family came from Glenties, in County Donegal, in what, in 1920, had become the Irish Republic. Moreover, he had six aunties, whom he knew well, women who clearly influenced both man and writer. Just before the Second World War, two of them had suddenly moved away from the family home in County Donegal, and later died in poverty-stricken exile in London. This sad fact became the seed from which grew perhaps his most famous play Dancing at Lughnasa.
The Friels were Catholics, which now placed them on the fringes of Northern Ireland society. In the south, in the Irish Free State, for all the felt mistrust of Protestantism, there was still a degree of respect for that minority belief. The Free State, for instance, supported both Catholic and Protestant schools. Not so in Northern Ireland, where to be Catholic was to be excluded, either by direct ostracism or by structural means such as vote rigging. The suspicion in which the Catholic community was held was extreme – ‘traitors’, either actual or potential. As a child, Friel remembers:
there were certain areas one didn’t go into. I remember bringing shoes to the shoemaker’s shop at the end of the street. This was a terrifying experience, because if the Protestant boys caught you in this kind of no-man’s-land, they’d kill you. I have vivid memories when I was twelve or so of standing at my own front door and hoping the coast would be clear so I could dive over to the shop; and then, when I’d left the shoes in, waiting to see was the coast clear again. If you were caught you were finished. It was absolutely terrifying. That sort of thing leaves scars for the rest of one’s life.
Friel also recalled stealing red glass reflectors from air-raid shelters: ‘I think we were vandals. I know we had no civic sense whatever … we were just thieving little street urchins, and the only therapy we needed was a kick in the pants.’
In his 1972 Self-Portrait Friel reflected on what he described as the ‘bizarre’ process of his education:
For about fifteen years I was taught by a succession of men who force-fed me with information, who cajoled me, beat me, threatened me, coaxed me to swallow their puny little pies of knowledge and attitudes … the little grudge I bear is directed against those men who taught me the literature of Rome and Greece and England and Ireland as if they were intricate pieces of machinery, created for no reason and designed for no purpose. They were called out of the air, these contrivances, and planked in front of us, and for years we tinkered with them, pulling them apart, putting them together again, translating, scanning, conjugating, never once suspecting that these texts were the testimony of sad, happy, assured, confused people like ourselves.
Perhaps it is unsurprising that when he himself takes up his father’s profession, Friel chooses to teach Maths rather than English! Yet it is also true that Friel’s whole writing career can be seen as a project precisely to speak for and through the ‘sad, happy, assured, confused people’ amongst whom he has lived. So much of Brian Friel’s childhood experience seems to ripple out into his art – the strong, beloved authoritarian father, the imminent danger posed by sectarian division, the quietly rebellious refusal to conform to a ‘nice’ stereotype, the consoling powers of music …
Inevitably, the sectarian atmosphere served to increase the Catholic community’s flight towards nationalism and allegiance to the Free State, later the Republic of Ireland. Friel’s father was a committed nationalist, member of the Nationalist Party and a councillor for the Catholic Bogside and Creggan districts of Derry City, where the family had moved in 1939. Known to the Protestant Northern Irish as Londonderry, this piece of politically inspired city-renaming clearly sensitized Friel early to the way Irish names reflect history as much as geography. Indeed, his own name poignantly symbolizes the issue. His birth certificate has him as Bernard Friel because the Protestant authorities in the newly established Northern Ireland province were not-so-subtly keen to eradicate traditional Irish names. Brian Friel, however, went on to St Columb’s school in Derry. (The school also educated Seamus Heaney, perhaps the best-known Irish poet of the post-war world, and John Hume, a leading activist in the later Civil Rights movement in Ulster, and later a prominent Nationalist politician.)
From his Derry life there seems to have grown a strong sense of local attachment that also sings on in his work. Speaking of Derry, Friel recalls that ‘every going away was a wrench and every return a fulfilment’, but goes on to pinpoint the contradictions that in some senses he identifies for all Ireland and on whose horns the whole nation sits: ‘The inquisitiveness of villagers; the complacency of a market town. In one sense it’s an easy atmosphere to live in, and in another sense it imposes its own rigid rules of conduct because respectability here is equated with virtue, and the trouble is that respectability is not an absolute standard, but dependent on what people respect here and now.’
It is a sign of the absolute centrality of Catholic religious culture that so many young men of Friel’s generation and earlier seemed almost automatically to train for the priesthood. For the vast majority of these young men, St Patrick’s seminary at Maynooth outside Dublin was the training ground and, aged sixteen, it was here that Brian Friel came. The experience was not a happy one – ‘an awful experience, it nearly drove me cracked. It is one thing I want to forget.’ Friel does not speak publicly about this time. Whatever the precise triggers that brought about disillusion, it is reasonable to speculate that a mind as questing and as willing to entertain uncertainties would not have found a regime of unquestioning faith either easy or congenial. At the very least the warmth and female companionship of his aunts and sisters would have seemed achingly absent in the austerity of the all-male priest college. He told one interviewer: ‘It’s a very disturbing thing to happen to anyone. I don’t know if one ever recovers totally from an immense experience of this nature … I wasn’t very happy at the time, but I was sixteen or seventeen and these are carefree years. If one has to have a “tragedy” in one’s life, they are the best years to have it in.’
His education now continued, following in his father’s footsteps to St Joseph’s and St Mary’s Teacher Training College, to do a one-year course: ‘… another blunt instrument. It was a crude place.’
Whatever the difficulties, Friel’s path was conventional enough for the academic child of a teacher and a civil servant. He began teaching in schools run by an influential religious order called the Christian Brothers, originally set up to educate talented boys of limited means. Their educational philosophy was always conservative and traditional. In the Self-Portrait he reflects on his teaching years with some regret: ‘… what I was doing was putting boys in for maths exams and getting them through. In fact I fancied myself as a teacher because I worked hard at teaching the tricks and the poodle dogs became excellent performers. And I regret, too, that I used a strap. Indeed, I regret this most of all.’ Later, Friel moved on to more congenial work in a primary school: ‘It was a kind of epiphany, you know. It was something different. It wasn’t the kind of Christian Brothers stuff.’ It was during this ten-year period that Brian Friel began to produce creative writing.
Some writers feed voraciously from their own biography and experience. Others follow the American writer Gore Vidal’s advice to ‘write what you imagine, not what you know about …’ Usually the best writers strike a balance between the two, taking the raw material of experience and transforming it through imagination into art; this seems particularly true for Friel. Dramatists also act like magnets for the ideas and passions that are vibrant in any moment in history. They focus them and give them tangible form so that audiences can better understand and work with them in their own lives. In Friel’s case, as he begins his creative life in the late 1940s, he symbolizes and expresses a range of historical, political and social matters – largely to do with Ireland.
Geographically, he starts adult life living in a county and a city that are contradictory – more Catholic than Protestant, but ruled by Protestants. At the stroke of a pen on a treaty in London, he finds himself ‘British’, while his mother’s family and friends a few miles away are now, constitutionally, ‘Irish’. His family has Nationalist affiliations and his father takes them into public life as a town councillor. Like so many Irish people, Northern or Southern, Brian Friel is aware of the two great national forces to the east and west of his country, stretching and pulling him away from his roots: America, the most potent pole of attraction down the centuries for Irish citizens determined to survive, or to drag themselves from poverty to prosperity; Britain, the other economic safe haven but also, until the twentieth century, the political master, the cultural big brother, imposing its language and world view.
Personally, this Brian Friel is an intelligent, creative young man who begins to see the contradictions between Irish society’s innate conservatism and the first intimations of a rapidly changing world. He is also aware of the damage in these. He teaches to earn a living, and though he enjoys it well enough, his real creativity is poured into the writing of short stories. A career begins.
Friel’s work began and blossomed in a country and a culture that often seemed rigid, undynamic and futureless. The fraught colonial relationship with England had left a complex legacy for the 1950s. In the Republic, a peasant, largely agrarian culture combined with the Catholic Church’s dominant position in public life to maintain a stifling conservatism. Writing in 1972, Friel characterized ‘the two allegiances that have bound the Irish imagination – loyalty to the most authoritarian church in the world and devotion to a romantic ideal we call Kathleen … Faith and fatherland.’ Yet this was now the world of nuclear weapons, accelerating technology and a resurgent Europe. In Friel’s Northern Ireland/Ulster, its dominant Protestant religious culture differed largely in that industrialisation had taken a firmer hold than in the agrarian South. It was certainly as culturally conservative, perhaps more so, than the South. The communication channels between England and Northern Ireland should have ensured a quicker transition into post-war society. In practice, the defensiveness of that culture in regard to the South meant that change was not on the social agenda, from whatever source it came. In the South the gaze of writers and artists, anticipators and seismographers of cultural change, was habitually more focused on Europe than in the notionally more ‘modern’, industrialized North. Writers like Friel found themselves trapped in a kind of cultural no-man’s-land – exiled from both communities by their creativity and their sensitivity to the profound psychological and social damage caused by patterns of living and feeling that failed to match up to the contemporary world.
Born in Omagh, raised in Derry, hemmed in by Northern Irish political realities, the writer Friel invented a location as the setting for much of his imaginative writing. However, Ballybeg, as he named it, is nominally in County Donegal, the part of the Irish Republic that is due west of Northern Ireland and therefore as much a part of ‘the North’ as, say, Belfast. Ballybeg is the anglicized form of the Irish ‘Baile Beag’, or Small Town. (He also occasionally refers to Ballymore – ‘Baile Mor’, or Big Town – when he needs to write about a larger community.) For Brian Friel, the border has always been more of a tripwire nuisance than a reality. Yet its presence in the personal and political mythologies of the Irish nations could hardly be ignored. The Catholic, nationalist writer who grew up in a Protestant, Unionist state embodied, even as he became an adult, all the contradictions of his country.
Fortunately, Friel was a talented writer and the 1950s were a period in which the short-story readership flourished, particularly in America. Two magazines, the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post, solicited material from a range of writers.
From 1952 Friel was under contract to the New Yorker to write stories. Not all were accepted. Rapidly learning professional writers’ guile, he managed to sell much of the rejected work on to the rival Saturday Evening Post. Looking back on this period in 1964, Friel states: ‘If it weren’t for the New Yorker I couldn’t live. Couldn’t live at all. And they’re so – I hate to use the word – they’re so respectful. It sounds a pompous thing to say, but you know what I mean in the context. They have such respect for work and for their contributors.’
Introducing some of Friel’s collected interviews, Christopher Murray evocatively outlines the tradition of Irish story writing in which Friel first worked: ‘… a world where authority was taken for granted; a patriarchal and religiously conservative society, dependent on mild eccentricity and occasional bouts of passionate revolt for its repertoire of stories … a world peopled by well-fed, ruminative priests, schoolteachers sporting immortal longings, copious inadequate fathers, wistful mothers and a seemingly endless succession of adolescent children poised on the threshold of disillusion’.
Speaking in 1982, Friel spoke of one overwhelming reason for his stopping short-story writing: ‘It was at the point when I recognized how difficult they were. It would have meant a whole reappraisal. I mean, I was very much under the influence, as everybody at the time was, of [Sean] O’Faolain and [Frank] O’Connor, particularly … I think at some point round about that period [came] the recognition of the difficulty of the thing, you know, that maybe there was the need for the discovery of a voice and that I was just echoing somebody else.’
His first serious playwriting was for radio. Between 1958 and 1962 BBC Northern Ireland produced four of his plays, directed by one of the stalwarts of BBC Radio drama, Ronald Mason. (Mason told the critic Richard Pine that he considered most of Friel’s work to be connected to his early exposure to radio, citing in particular Lovers, Faith Healer and Making History.) Radio has always been a drama medium that lies close to the short story. It can give very quick access to the interior world of characters. Many playwrights who grew up listening to radio in the 1950s found it a resource of great technical and imaginative freedom. For the first time, powerful interior monologues beamed their way into parlours and bedrooms in geographically and socially isolated regions. You no longer had to have access to metropolitan Dublin – or London – trendiness to be touched by this new way of seeing the world. In England, writers such as Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter listened to and wrote for radio, and it began to attract its own drama specialists. Writers such as Giles Cooper and Henry Reed and producers such as Ronald Mason, Val Gielgud and Charles Parker developed a particular set of standards and techniques for radio drama. By happy coincidence, one of the pioneers of radio drama was the man who, in 1962, kick-started Friel’s theatre career, Tyrone Guthrie. Guthrie was in every sense a big man, an English public schoolboy whose boyhood ambition to join the tail end of the First World War had been happily thwarted by a minor disability of the foot. As his name suggests, he had strong Irish roots. His family had a country house in County Monaghan, just south of what, in 1922, became the border. When Guthrie had applied to the BBC, it had been happy coincidence again that sent him back in 1924 to Ireland, to Radio 2BE, the British Broadcasting Company’s outpost in Belfast. Guthrie’s radio drama work bore fruit in what he described later as ‘the microphone play’. Guthrie has his continuity announcer begin his play Matrimonial News like this: ‘What follows is supposed to be happening in the mind of Miss Florence Kipling – who is sitting alone in a cheap restaurant in the Strand, in London. The time is about a quarter to twelve, midday. She has ordered a cup of coffee … Remember you are overhearing her thoughts. She is alone …’
This kind of elaborate setting out of the rules of the game was probably necessary for listeners-in to the new medium, but it is easy to see how close we are to the intimate, button-holing style of the opening of Dancing at Lughnasa, or the public confessional of Faith Healer. Friel was born in the year Guthrie’s play was transmitted, so he couldn’t have listened to it, but he most certainly benefited from it and its descendants. If you can hear a person’s inner thought spoken, you can hear the distance between that thought and what he or she says in public. You are thus well set up to explore the distance between Private and Public, the very heart technically and emotionally of Friel’s breakthrough play Philadelphia, Here I Come! Already in his radio plays, he is beginning to work with the obsessions and interests that surface later – the cracks and contradictions in family life and the ever-present theme of the insularity of rural Ireland. The critic Richard Pine sees these plays as transitional between short-story writing and drama. In particular he notes that Friel tends to end the plays anticlimactically. Lines that on paper can sit on the page and pulse quietly, that can be re-read and pondered upon, lose their impact if they are not written to be heard once only – in other words, if speech needs to be created as action rather than as thought.
In 1962 what Friel himself describes as ‘pale’ success with his short stories, radio plays and some early contact with the stage was about to be transformed by his fellow Ulsterman Guthrie.
Although Friel had two apprentice plays produced (The Blind Mice at the Eblana Theatre in Dublin (1963) and A Doubtful Paradise at the Group Theatre in Belfast), the earliest play that he will acknowledge is The Enemy Within, performed in 1962 at the Abbey in Dublin. A ‘history play’ about Ireland, it contributes to an ongoing pattern of two sorts of Brian Friel play, the other being the ‘family play’, based loosely on some aspects of the author’s own life. In reality, of course, such distinctions are far too crude, and all the history plays turn out to be family plays and vice versa. Clearly the experience of training for the priesthood and his Catholic upbringing were working in his mind alongside the new creative energies of a young writer.
The contradictory demands of the public and the private person were worked out in the narrative of one of Ireland’s great figures, St Columba, who exiled himself from political battles in order to cleanse his soul. Friel talked of wanting to investigate the idea of sanctity and the personal courage and commitment it required. In part, the play pits the demands of family against those of the public man. With Friel at the time being a young father who had chosen the risky life of the professional artist, this must have been potent material, and Friel himself had been reflecting on the exile that Irish writers like Joyce, Beckett and O’Casey had embraced in order to fulfil their artistic integrity. The play is also about the call of Ireland on the articulator of the country’s soul (Columba the Priest/Friel the Artist): Friel has his Columba rage with frustration at the thing he both loves and hates: ‘You soaked my sweat! You sucked my blood! You stole my manhood, my best years! What more do you demand of me, damned Ireland? My soul? My immortal soul? Damned, damned damned Ireland! – (His voice breaks.) Soft green Ireland – beautiful green Ireland. My lovely green Ireland. O my Ireland –’
The tone of that impassioned love-hate is a world away from the gentler, regretful, quietly nihilistic tone of the Irish short-story tradition. It shows that Friel was prepared to rage against the problematic aspects of his country’s culture where necessary. The experience of having the play performed (and at the Abbey, too, with all the prestige and historical significance of that stage) clearly stimulated him to embrace the public art of theatre. The year after the play’s production, Friel’s stories had so impressed Tyrone Guthrie that he offered the young dramatist the chance to immerse himself in a learning experience that would transform him into an internationally known and loved playwright.
Since his radio days in Belfast with Station 2BE, Tyrone Guthrie’s career had taken a path of ever-widening reputation and success that embraced the Old Vic in London, and the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario in Canada. He had become a pioneer in the staging of classical theatre, particularly Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists, and had become closely involved in new stage–audience relationships at the new Canadian theatre. This international activity culminated in a plan that echoed some of the wave of new theatre building throughout Britain in the late fifties and early sixties. Guthrie wanted to create, in the United States where his reputation was well established, a brand-new theatre based upon modern approaches to the classics and constituted as a full-blown, professional repertory system. The unlikely winner of the auction to receive Guthrie and his ambitious plans was Minneapolis, in the Midwestern state of Minnesota. With the energetic enthusiasm created by a blank canvas and serious local support from business and community, Guthrie created a theatre and, more importantly, a company named after him.
Guthrie invited the young man to come and observe the theatre work in the first season in Minneapolis. Friel took up the offer and flew to America with his wife and two young children. The old relationship between Ireland and America, with all its overtones of escape and liberation, now became concrete in Friel’s life. Admittedly he had been receiving dollar pay cheques for his short-story writing, and the ‘exile’ was only for a clearly understood six-month period, but the physical uprooting clearly held symbolic weight.
During the period that Friel was in Minneapolis, Guthrie was rehearsing Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and his assistant Douglas Campbell was doing Molière’s The Miser. These embraced Guthrie’s range from the classical to the more recent enthusiasm for family plays. By this term he meant those dramas that used the family as a holding form for substantial and profound truths about all of human society. Clearly this is true of Chekhov’s work, but Guthrie saw Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, too, as family plays. Given that Friel was already working a vein of personal interest and literary tradition to do with family, it is reasonable to see one result of Friel’s American education as being an awareness of the wider possibilities of the family play. Friel at that time felt it to be a powerful and significant experience. Later, he assessed its effect on him more reflectively: ‘… 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 …’
Friel’s contemporaries in England – playwrights such as John Arden, Edward Bond and Ann Jellicoe – experienced a similar education in practical theatre in the Royal Court’s Writers’ Group, though their experience was more ‘hands-on’ than Friel’s. He basically looked and learned, ‘literally skulking about in the gloom of the back seats’. After a while he became a familiar face: ‘People began to nod to me. I got a pencil and paper and occasionally pretended to jot down some profound observations. Some of the less than secure actors even began to ask my advice about their performance, God help them. It was all very gratifying.’
He was pleased to be described by an actor as ‘The Observer’. It seemed to fit his own image of himself as an artist. The Minneapolis experience seems to have opened up to him theatre’s apparently contradictory qualities of pleasure and discipline, sensuality and craft, imagination and dedication. In what is perhaps a revealing image for a man who trained as a priest, Friel talks about ‘the iron discipline of theatre … I discovered a dedication and a nobility and a selflessness that one associates with a theoretical priesthood.’ It also clearly offered Friel something of an immersion in the art and craft of theatre. Prior to this trip, he had been, by his own assessment, ‘almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of play-writing and play-production apart from an intuitive knowledge’. Now he was to learn about ‘the physical elements of plays, how they are designed, built, landscaped. I learnt how actors thought,!how they approached a text, their various ways of trying to realize it.’ More importantly, he learnt a revitalizing approach to his whole art:
I learned, in Guthrie’s own words, that theatre is an attempt to create something which will, if only for a brief moment, transport a few fellow travellers on our strange, amusing, perilous journey – a lift, but not, I hope, an uplift. I learned that the playwright’s first function is to entertain, to have audiences enjoy themselves, to move them emotionally, to make them laugh and cry and gasp and hold their breath and sit on the edge of their seats and – again to quote the great man himself – to ‘participate in lavish and luxurious goings-on’.
During and after the American experience, Friel kept up a series of submissions to the Belfast Irish Press. These were light pieces of comic journalism, but some of them hint at deeper concerns, now thrown into sharper relief by the educational exile he had undertaken. As George O’Brien, an American writer on Friel, has it: ‘The columns are carefully calculated exaggerations of the intractable and unstable properties of the daily round and of the inadequacy of our command of it, a command which inevitably but laughably relies on language.’
In America, Friel finds himself ‘bereft of the familiar props and amenities of home, such as they are. Now he has nothing to go on but language, with the result that a heightened sensitivity is felt to the primacy of language – rather than, as at home, of action – as a means of revealing the unnerving gap between perception and reality.’ Like many writers before, the literal exile – in Friel’s case from his beloved Derry/Donegal, and its particular use of language – inspired him to revisit the place and the language through drama.
On the family’s return from America in 1963, Friel quickly settled to complete the play that established his reputation with critics as Ireland’s leading contemporary dramatist. Though Friel acknowledged Guthrie as mainly a ‘levelling’ rather than a ‘sign-posting’ influence, he went on to talk about Guthrie’s risk-taking. ‘He was the kind of man who gave you the courage to take formal gambles and technical gambles on the stage …’
The director Hilton Edwards was one half of the influential team that had turned the Gate Theatre in Dublin into an alternative to the Abbey. Where, in the years after the death of Sean O’Casey, the Abbey had tended to rest on its Irish peasant play laurels, the Gate, under Edwards and his partner (in life as in art) Michael Macliammoir, created a theatre that embraced the European modernist movements in theatre. Certainly the formal adventurism of Friel’s new play would not have fazed anyone associated with the Gate Theatre.
Staged at the Gaiety Theatre, in Dublin, as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Philadephia, Here I Come! was welcomed by critics and audiences as the hit of the Festival. A young playwright was at last articulating his and a younger generation’s frustration in a play that seemed in tune with other developments in English-language theatre, particularly from the Royal Court. In England, Bond’s The Pope’s Wedding (1962) and Wesker’s Roots (1959) had similarly tested their society’s inadequacies from rural locations, though in contrast to Friel social class was a more clearly articulated problem for the English writers. Friel’s closer contemporary Pinter produced, in The Homecoming (1964), a kind of reverse image of Philadelphia Here I Come!, with its returning academic, home from the bright, history-lite world of American academia to wallow in and be swallowed once more by threatening, messy old London, with its inarticulacies of violence and patriarchy.
The success of the play in the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival and in another production the following year, together with, presumably, some combination of Friel’s embryonic literary reputation and the play’s title and theme, led to the play’s great success on Broadway in 1966. Friel went with the cast on out-of-town try-outs prior to hitting New York. One venue was Philadelphia, where Friel reported hearing one ‘corpulent, silver-haired lady’ ask: ‘So he’s coming to Philadelphia! So what the hell’s he crying about!’ When it arrived in New York and generated good reviews and excellent box office, Friel was, of course, delighted, particularly as he felt the recast production actually was good. However, his dry scepticism managed to keep the experience in proportion (and to prepare him for later disappointments on American stages). As he was later to observe: ‘Broadway is a theatrical warehouse where theatrical merchandise is bought and sold, and if you have a well-packaged and slick piece of merchandise it will have some kind of a run. New York has as much to do with what’s happening here as Dallas [hugely popular American TV melodrama] has.’
His earlier play The Enemy Within had no particular formal gambles or risks, but it did have at its heart a character who wrestled with the inner person, who tried to reconcile the demands of the public man with his private needs. In Philadelphia, Here I Come!, after the experience of Minneapolis, Friel uses a theatre device to work with those ideas (and much else besides). The play is set on the night before a young Donegal man, Gar O’Donnell, is to leave the stultifying life of provincial Donegal for the wide-open spaces (metaphorically) of the American Midwest (where, of course, thanks to Irish history, he has relations). Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, where a young man can be free and rootless, and therein lies its fatal attraction. Throughout the progress of the play, Gar is faced with what it means to uproot himself from family, from familiarity, from Columba’s ‘damned Ireland … beautiful green Ireland’. This is a play about exile; there had been other Irish plays about that quintessential Irish experience, but it is also a play about the different worlds that Gar is exiled from.
By 1964 the Western, industrialized world was moving faster and faster into a period of change. The post-war military/political standoff (the ‘Cold War’) between the Soviet bloc and the capitalist West ( led by the United States) had dominated the previous decade and sharpened the profile of American individualist culture in the imaginations of many young people, particularly through mass media and pop culture. American movies, TV, pop songs, car design, fast food all stood for a vigorous, exciting modernity, embracing materialist pleasure, the very opposite of the deep-rooted culture of rural Ireland, with its history of dark and bloody struggles, its religious culture founded in guilt and redemption, and its people’s reassuring identification with the landscape. But, as Friel was later to explore in other plays, deep roots can also be poisonous. At the very least they can bind rather than be sources of strength, and on that dilemma rests the play’s basic situation.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! also comes at that idea by another route: Gar’s relationship with his father. Friel’s drama is peopled with father figures who have problematic relationships with sons. By his own account this was not a particular problem in Friel’s own relationship with his father, but it seems clear that his father’s strength of personality gave him a dramatic model from which to extrapolate all sons’ ambiguous feelings about their fathers. Gar’s moving memory of a childhood experience, out fishing with his father, so sensuously evoked in its details – ‘… the boat was blue and the paint was peeling and there was an empty cigarette packet floating in the water … and young as I was I felt, I knew, that this was precious, and your hat was soft on the top of my ears – I can feel it – and I shrank down into your coat – and then, then for no reason at all except that you were happy too, you began to sing …’ – is plainly related to Friel’s own childhood reminiscence in the Self-Portrait of 1972, written as much as a parody of the kind of encounter Friel resents as anything:
We are walking home from a lake with our fishing rods across our shoulders. It has been raining all day long; it is now late evening; and we are soaked to the skin. But for some reason – perhaps the fishing was good – I don’t remember – my father was in great spirits and is singing a song and I am singing with him. And there we are the two of us, soaking wet, splashing along a muddy road that comes in at right angles to Glenties’ main street, singing about how my boat can safely float through the teeth of wind and weather. That’s the memory. That’s what happened. A trivial episode without importance to anyone but me, just a moment of happiness caught in an album. But wait. There’s something wrong here. I’m conscious of a dissonance, an unease. What is it? Yes, I know what it is: there is no lake along that muddy road. And since there is no lake my father and I never walked back from it in the rain with our rods across our shoulders. The fact is a fiction … For some reason the mind has shuffled the pieces of verifiable truth and composed a truth of its own.
Friel realizes ‘its peculiar veracity’ in a composed and mature way, but his character Gar experiences a different, more painful, version of the truth when he asks his father about his fishing incident. A yawning gap opens up between Gar’s happy certainty, warmed by the nostalgia of childhood, and his father’s indifferent and ineffective memory of the fishing trip. In the uncertainty of what the past contains, all kinds of other anxieties about his present and future flood in. If he can’t rely on memory, what can he rely on? Gar finally has to face his own question:
PRIVATE God, Boy, why do you have to leave? Why? Why?
PUBLIC I don’t know. I – I – I don’t know.
The play ends on that anguished note, a stuttering into silence that is all the more poignant because it is uttered by the character Public Gar. This is the remarkable formal device that Friel invents in Philadephia, Here I Come! to allow us access to the theatricalized inner life of the character. It is a device of the theatre, and in one sense is at least as old as the good and evil angels of the medieval mystery plays. On the other hand, it is a modernist ploy in that it embraces and gives form to the idea of the inner mind as a separate entity, operating by itself and able to comment on the actions of the ‘outer’ being that is the social and physical manifestation of personality. This is an approach that can only happen after Freud’s dramatizing of personality into id, ego and superego, all visualized as battling for control over the person. It is also quintessentially theatrical in that it develops out of the stage monologue. If the psychology is necessarily somewhat schematic, Friel engineers a bittersweet comedy out of the differences between the two facets of the character.
Beneath the comedy there is a hard edge of angry despair that refocuses attention on the culture of contemporary (early 1960s) Ireland. It is there in the stunted emotional relationship with his father, who is plainly intended to represent a common trait or tendency. Private Gar rages at the unhearing Screwballs, his father: ‘I’m leaving you for ever. I’m going to Philadelphia, to work in an hotel. And you know why I’m going, Screwballs, don’t you? Because I’m twenty-five, and you treat me as if I’m five – I can’t order even a dozen loaves without getting your permission. Because you pay me less than you pay Madge. But worse, far worse than that, Screwballs, because we embarrass one another.’
S.B.’s inarticulacy – his inability to put his paternal feelings into words and images – hurts Gar deeply, though he in turn is only so ragingly articulate in his Private incarnation. This emotional inarticulacy is not just a matter of personality. It extends by implication to the whole world of Ballybeg, with its boasting sexual braggarts and its small-minded priest and by implication further still, to Ireland as a whole. Finally, the play works because it transcends the parochialism of Irish society and speaks for all adolescents who yearn to escape from a dull, authoritarian historical legacy to find their freedom, at the same time as fearing to lose contact with roots, with security, with locality. Gar’s anguished demand is that the two should not, in a mature society, be incompatible. In that sense, Gar is also Ireland. If Gar is Every(young)man, so Ballybeg is Everytown. The literal translation ‘Small Town’, speaks of a community of great particularity but also of a space in Friel’s and our imagination flexible enough to be home to all his characters and concerns. The achievement of Philadelphia Here I Come! is to pinpoint a critical truth in a very detailed social picture – two days in a Donegal backwater – and touch a far more general nerve in the way any of us live our lives.
The next play was to be Friel’s own refracted look at the narrative of Philadelphia, Here I Come! Cass McGuire is an Irish-American emigrant who returns to Ireland in old age after fifty years in the jungle of an American city. When she returns to her Irish hearth, her language and manner superficially coarsened by brash Americanisms and alcohol, she finds that the money she has been sending to her brother Harry is unspent and her pious purpose in sending it undermined.
Cass is persuaded to enter an old people’s home, the ironically titled Eden House, notable for a statue of Cupid ‘frozen in an absurd and impossible contortion’. The play is partly about the power struggle between Cass and her brother over her life. It is demonstrated in typical Friel form by having the characters dispute the manner and content of the play in front of the audience, as if the play were written by Pirandello: ‘The story begins where I say it begins, and I say it begins with me stuck in the gawdamn workhouse! So you can all get the hell outa here! … What’s this goddam play called? The Loves of Cass McGuire. Who’s Cass McGuire? Me! Me! And they’ll see what happens in the order I want them to see it.’
Friel has said that the play is ‘a concerto in which Cass McGuire is the soloist’ and, as in a concerto, there are ‘rhapsodies’ from the residents of the home, recalling their lives with what is increasingly obviously a large degree of illusion and self-deception. As in a concerto too, the solo instrument – Cass – is also fighting for her identity in this new world of illusion, symbolized by that grotesque garden Cupid. At first she battles with the middle-class respectability of Harry’s orchestral accompaniment, but finds herself gradually overwhelmed by it.
Friel characterizes the four plays Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Loves of Cass McGuire, Lovers (1967) and Crystal and Fox (1968) as analyses of ‘different kinds of love’. Certainly this play probes into family love and the twists and turns of its ambiguity, and it does so, often, through energetic comedy. It is very much a play about Cass’s inner life, but it is firmly rooted in an implicit critique of that old but insistent theme of emigration and the psychological damage that it can wreak. For Cass, the journey from America to Ireland was supposed to be a coming home to die close to the reality of one’s home, a return to organic values. In Friel’s vision, it is a journey to illusion and disappointment, finally as inauthentic as the crass Cupid in the garden. There is an implied critique of the state of Irish culture here, for all the talk of love.
The play was broadcast on 9 August 1966 on the BBC Radio Third Programme, just as rehearsals started for the Broadway production. In America the play failed to reproduce the huge success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! Some American critics felt that Friel hadn’t caught the American tone properly in his portrayal of Cass. Directed, as were all these analyses of ‘different kinds of love’, by Hilton Edwards, a director well versed in European modernism, the play’s reflections on the nature of drama itself may have proved too European and self-conscious for American tastes. Friel’s own analysis of the comparative failure was: ‘American audiences are more attentive than in Ireland, but I think they’re terribly influenced by what critics tell them.’ He also felt that the American production process was damaging to the play’s artistic success: ‘The best theatre was always done, in history, with a writer working with a director and a resident company. This is, of course, what you don’t have on Broadway, and indeed what you don’t have in Ireland except in the Abbey Theatre.’
In The Loves of Cass McGuire, Friel is wrestling still with his love of Ireland and his intense irritation with it. Like a Sisyphean Gar O’Donnell, he was constantly ‘emigrating’ to America through this period as American productions demanded his attention. This served only to increase his homesickness. He would have also been increasingly sensitive to the quietly ticking bomb of sectarian violence and the certainty of action for justice that was to explode a couple of years later in his native Ulster. As The Loves of Cass McGuire was in rehearsal, he told a journalist of his feelings of frustration and resentment at being a North of Ireland Catholic: ‘I … sometimes get very angry and can’t think calmly about the country at all. But I am committed to it, for good or evil. Whatever you flee from in one place, you’ll probably find the same things somewhere else.’
In 1967, Friel moved with his family a few miles out of Derry into a house in the County Donegal town of Muff. The Ulsterborn playwright, whose greatest support and most loyal audiences had been found in Dublin and America, now lived in the Republic of Ireland. He was no longer subject to the government of a Unionist-dominated Stormont, but the move signalled less a conscious rejection of Belfast and Stormont in favour of Dublin and the Dáil than a gesture of dismissive indifference for the border and all the irrationalities it represented. Muff and Derry were part of the same Irish landscape, with the same Irish soul, as far as he was concerned. In 1982, still living in Muff, Friel regretted having moved at that historical moment and so missed being at the centre of the political developments that were about to envelop Northern Ireland: ‘Just to be part of the experience. Instead of driving into a civil rights march, coming out your front door and joining it might have been more real. It would have been less deliberate and less conscious than doing it from here.’
That year (1967) also saw a vastly more successful production of The Loves of Cass McGuire at the Abbey, and the arrival in London of Philadelphia, Here I Come! He gave a talk in Chicago called ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’, which showed him taking in his contemporaries in Britain and Europe, and thinking about the broader role of the artist, perhaps stung by the more polemical, focused aesthetics of British and European counterparts. He makes gentle mock of those (unnamed) European dramatists – ‘less indirect, less devious, less cautious’ – that he believes are abandoning the family audience in favour of mutually back-slapping, presumably ‘lefty’, propaganda. If, sometimes, there is in Friel’s position a school-masterly Blimpishness, he does finally work his way into a clear endorsement of the centrality of the artist’s – particularly the dramatist’s – position in society. At first, he rejects any crude cause-and-effect relationship between the way the arts develop and the way society develops:
they are what they are at any given time and in any given place because of the condition and climate of thought that prevail at that time and in that place. And if the condition and climate are not right, the arts lift their tents and drift off to a new place.
Flux is their only constant; the crossroads their only home; impermanence their only yardstick … This is the only pattern of their existence: the persistence of the search; the discovery of a new concept; the analysis, exploration, exposition of that concept, the preaching of that gospel to reluctant ears; and then, when the first converts are made, the inevitable disillusion and dissatisfaction because the theory is already out of date or was simply a false dawn. And then the moving on; the continuing of the search; the flux.
Impermanence, flux, a sense that there is so much that is unknowable and unpredictable in the world, is very much a theme of Friel’s drama. It may be that the dogmatic culture of Catholicism creates just this flight from certainty if it is not embraced wholeheartedly. However, Friel has faith in his art as a tool for apprehending a fluid, complex world. At the heart of his talk is the idea that much of Western drama expresses despair and anger at the state of the world, whether from a materialist position such as Brecht’s or an idealist one such as Beckett’s, and he addresses the question of whether a ‘theatre of hope’ is possible. His conclusion is that the artist can indeed prefigure hope in an unsentimental and practical way. Perhaps surprisingly, or with typically Frielian sly humour, given that he was addressing a gathering of Catholics, he even invokes the atheist Marx to set out his own personal artistic position:
‘Mankind takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.’ That quotation is from Karl Marx. And although he was talking of social revolution, it applies equally well to art. It could well be that many of the problems the Christian of today faces arise at this point in history because the solutions are at hand or in the process of formation. Camus said: ‘At the end of this darkness there will be a light which we have already conceived and for which we must fight in order to bring it into existence. In the middle of the ruins on the other side of nihilism we are preparing a renaissance. But few know it.’
I am convinced that the dramatists are among the few.
His next play, Lovers (in fact two linked plays, Winners and Losers), for that year of brooding calm before the storm, began with the assembling on paper of reams of biographical material about his character, seventeen-year-old schoolboy Joe. He described the first stage of his writing method at this time as writing everything he could about the character and his circumstances. For Winners he worked out the structure diagrammatically:
I did sort of geometrical drawings of the play, of the form of this play. In the case of Winners, for example, I knew that this was going to be the shape of a rectangle. This was going to be the total shape of the play and half of it was going to be Mag, the girl, with Joe contributing occasional bits of conversation. The other part of the play was going to be the boy. That was simply the geometric shape of that play … I’ve never done this before. I did it with this play, though.
The double bill of plays that makes up Lovers inhabits a world of haunted disappointment and incipient tragedy, sometimes shot through with a grim humour. They are plays that fall into an established tradition of ironic Irish melancholy, but shading into tragedy.
In the first play, Winners, Mag and Joe are schoolkids in love and about to be married. They enjoy an idyllic few hours together revising for exams in the sunny hills above their town. The conventional, soap-operatic elements of the play involve the pleasures and pains of their relationship, Mag’s pregnancy and the problems this gives her conventionally offended parents. What jolts the play out of easy melancholy is the use of two narrating ‘Commentators’, coldly dispassionate lecturers who comment on the action from the extremes of the stage, and make it clear from early on that something fatal has already happened to the two sweet-natured adolescents whose quarrels and tendernesses we watch. Through this characteristic reshaping of the conventions of ‘what-happened-next?’ narrative, Friel allows us, through the Commentators, to see their lives in context as well as in emotional detail. The Commentators, with their ring files full of information about the characters and the ambient weather conditions, aren’t there to fill in detail that the dramatist is too lazy to dramatize – much of their information is bizarrely inconsequential, such as the water-level figures for the loch in which they drown, and the rise in population of their home town. Their somewhat obtrusive presence makes us reflect on what is truthful and what is simply factual. They tell us a sad story but frame it in such a way that we have to think about what ‘sad’ is, what is a ‘story’, what is a newspaper story, and how we deal with such a terrible event as the death of two young lovers by surrounding it with an armour of ultra-rationality. The Commentators turn the audience’s attention back on itself and its/our reaction to the story: ‘Life there goes on as usual … as if nothing had ever happened,’ the play finishes, crystallizing the everyday mystery of how terrible events are absorbed by mundanity. Yet Meg and Joe are ‘winners’, because, dead, like an Irish Tristan and Isolde, they can never grow into older ‘losers’ like those in the companion play.
Losers has something of the comic gloom of The Loves of Cass McGuire, focusing on the lives of an older pair of lovers whose love is forced into stagnation. Adapted from one of his own short stories, ‘The Highwayman and the Saint’, it tells of Hannah and Andy’s cramped life in Hannah’s mother’s house. Bedridden, she has turned her room into a shrine to a Catholic saint and rules the house with her guilt-inducing handbell. When the lovers try to make love, she interrupts them until they are forced to recite Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard out loud in order to mute mother-in-law’s suspicions. It is a farcical sequence, but the play’s pessimism suggests some of that old anger towards his own Church and its sexual puritanism that stemmed from his adolescent encounter with the priesthood. There are no expressionistic experiments like the Commentators, but the play does allow its main character, Andy, to address the audience, and it opens and closes with a powerful image of farcical nihilism: Andy, the fifty-ish builder staring through binoculars at a blank wall. Mrs Wilson and her pious companion Cissy Cassidy embody so much that Friel dislikes in ‘Auld Ireland’ that it is possible simply to see them as symbols of the country itself. Yet they are also prescient of something new, for the angelic little old lady Mrs Wilson and Cissy (her ‘understudy’ Friel calls her, using a consciously stagy term) are on the way out. The sadness is that Hannah and Andy are too old to break away from them and are fated to be dragged down with them. If they had been more like Mag and Joe, the winners who died, perhaps they would not have ended up in futility, losers who lived.
Now producing new work at a prolific play a year, in 1968 Friel finished work on Crystal and Fox. Some of his work so far had featured self-dramatizing characters, such as Gar O’Donnell, and he had learned to use his plays to explore the connections between lived reality and the reality of art in plays like Lovers and the The Loves of Cass McGuire. Now he was to conclude his group of plays about love with an exploration of betrayal and failure by a father who is also an artist of sorts.
Fox is a travelling showman whose lack of self-worth leads him to seek a kind of redemption in dismantling, one by one, all the relationships that have supported him in his rickety show business. He sacks and antagonizes his fellow artistes, trying to get back to an illusory innocence and the purity of his early love and life with Crystal. Because he addresses his problems negatively, he condemns himself to further self-hatred. Most poignantly he drives Crystal away by claiming that he has betrayed to the police their son Gabriel, who has attacked and killed a woman in possible self-defence. Friel is warning about a personal human tendency to destroy the thing that one loves most in the face of the felt tawdriness of life, but there is also a sense that, yet again, his characters have an Irish dimension to them. To seek to find personal salvation in a mythical past will never create meaning or redeem failure.
Ireland – Northern Ireland in particular – was about to undergo the first renewed political convulsions that had been latent for some decades, and the mythical past with its unresolved tensions was about to take its own revenge on the present. In September of 1968, speaking in America, Friel was backing away from the idea that he might write directly about his society’s troubles:
If I were an American man of thirty-nine years of age, I’d think I must be writing about this particular time and the people of my time. But why must I be so obsessed with writing about this morning’s newspaper headlines? This seems to be their concern. You know, Selma [Black American protest march against Civil Rights violations] is as far back in American history as the Gettysburg Address, isn’t it? And that was only a few years ago. An obsession with this morning’s headlines is really what it is, and there’s nothing as dated as this morning’s headline.
Ironically, it was these Black Americans who offered the model for the Irish Civil Rights movement in the North of Ireland. As Northern Ireland Protestants reacted with increasing violence to what they saw as a challenge by the Civil Rights campaign to their power and privilege, Friel, who had been a Nationalist Party member in the early 1960s, was clearly going to reassess his own work. A month after his distancing himself in New York, from ‘morning headlines’ drama, Ireland took a significant turning. Speaking in 1970, Friel explained the extraordinary impact of that one day on him: ‘Until October 5 1968, which was a red-letter day, I thought that society was absolutely dead. Then suddenly five young men, who had nothing to gain in temporal terms, organized a very shabby rally. The parallel is not accurate, but suddenly the whole thing was dignified, as in 1916. The police beat hell out of these fellows. And suddenly the conscience of Derry was aroused.’
1969 began ominously, with a Civil Rights march from Belfast to Derry that was attacked en route by Protestant mobs. The two cultures, Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Republican, were on a frightening collision course, propelled by their distinct histories and the inequality of justice between them. As a Nationalist with his roots in the Six Counties, Friel must have asked himself what exactly he stood for in championing the Republic against the Union. If his next dramatic response to that question was not exactly writing about that morning’s headlines, it was certainly an engagement with public questions.
The Mundy Scheme is a farce about the political nature of the South of Ireland, based on the mordant idea that a crisis-beleaguered Irish government would sell its western regions (so loaded with mythology in literary and dramatic terms) to the United States as a mass burial ground. (Other schemes to rescue the disintegrating state, such as siting a US nuclear weapons base in Cork, have been rejected, the latter on the grounds that decent Cork girls might be seduced by American sailor-boys … ) At this period, in part because of its historical links with the the New World through the diaspora of the poor, Ireland was acutely conscious of its possible status as little more than a cute colony of American cultural imperialism – the current, more European, orientation of the South was not to begin until its membership of the European Economic Community in 1972. Friel’s farce is an expression of this anxiety, one that he shared: ‘Ireland is becoming a shabby imitation of a third-rate American state. This is what The Mundy Scheme is about. We are rapidly losing our identity as a people and because of this that special quality an Irish writer should have will be lost … We are no longer even West Britons; we are East Americans.’
He submitted the play with, in his own words, ‘the gravest misgivings and little enthusiasm’, to the Abbey Theatre, with the unbending stipulation that it should be directed by Donal Donnelly (his first Private Gar), and should feature the actor Godfrey Quigley as the Taoiseach, F. X. Ryan. The Abbey management rejected the play by three votes to one and Donnelly angrily took it to the Olympia Theatre in Dublin, though Friel affected not to be surprised or worried by the verdict: ‘I was not disillusioned. I have never seen myself writing for any particular theatre group or any particular actor or director. When I have written a play I look for the best possible interpretation from a director and actors, and after that my responsibility ends.’
The play was not particularly liked and the consensus is that it remains too one-dimensional a piece, its ideas insufficiently worked into the kind of rich dramatic tapestry Friel normally achieved. However, some of the ideas about the nature of Ireland and its ambiguous relationship to both a mythical past and a place in the modern world were about to re-emerge in the more powerful, more complex form of his next play, The Gentle Island.
Friel’s friend and fellow playwright Frank McGuiness spoke in 1988 about the impact of seeing The Gentle Island: ‘When it was first presented in 1971, I think it was ahead of its time and perhaps deliberately ahead of its time, because then it was a prophetic play, prophetic in that it diagnosed the problems that were going to afflict Ireland over the last twenty years – the hypocrisy of the South, the violence of the North, and he brings the two together on this Gentle Island and exposes them mercilessly.’
The play opened at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in November 1971. Politically the situation in Northern Ireland had deteriorated by the play’s first performance. Inter-cultural fighting was increasingly commonplace as two working classes fought each other on the ground for hegemony. Critically, the UK government had introduced internment without trial for terrorist suspects, a move that simply served further to alienate Nationalists, driving them into support of the IRA and other armed Republican groups. The British army, once welcomed into Derry’s Bogside as protectors against Unionist attacks, was increasingly recognized as that of an occupying power. The weekend before the play’s opening saw violent rioting throughout the province.
The Gentle Island is not a play about the North, but its evocation of an Irish society deeply riven by anger, frustration and intolerance perhaps coincidentally locked into the immediate civil war situation stirring in the North. The title is ironic, of course, playing on the romantic pastoralism of Ireland as perceived by Bord Failte (the Irish Tourist Board) and the cultural tourism of city(Dublin)-based cosmopolitans. It also holds in its associations the matrix of ideas surrounding the old western island culture so significantly discovered and given dramatic expression by Synge and the Abbey Theatre.
What is offered here, though, is a play about the clash between old and new, symbolized by the expended ejector seat from some sea-swallowed military aircraft washed up on the shore and now sat in like a throne by Ireland’s de facto ‘King’, Manus Sweeney. It is also a play about East and West, rural and urban. Friel even draws on the mythological potency of the movie western to emphasize this. One of the characters is called Shane, an engineer from the East. He and Peter, a musician and teacher who seems to be Shane’s lover, think they have found a peasant paradise, but its beautiful emptiness is the result of economic conditions that have depopulated the region. Their heavenly Eden turns to hostility and eventual violence. That they are gay in a homophobic culture is one reason for this ugly turn of events, but there are other problems that Shane and Peter catalyse rather than cause. When he hears that Manus wants the two Dubliners to come back to the island at Christmas, Shane says: ‘Of course he does. Because we give support to his illusion that the place isn’t a cemetery. But it is. And he knows it. The place and his way of life and everything he believes in and all he touches – dead, finished, spent.’ And so it is, except in the romanticized imaginations of admiring outsiders. The unresolvable dilemma (in conventional economic terms, anyway) for the islanders is laid on the line in this exchange between Manus and Joe:
MANUS Fifty years ago there were two hundred people on this island, our own school, our own church, our own doctor. No one ever wanted.
JOE Scrabbing a mouthful of spuds from the sand, d’you call that a living?
When Frank McGuiness characterized The Gentle Island as prophetic, it was in the sense that unjust and uncreative living situations will breed despair and violence. On Sunday, 30 January 1972 the second great seal of Northern Ireland’s fate after Internment came with the killing by British paratroops of thirteen unarmed civilians in Derry, demonstrating, yet again, for Civil Rights. Amongst the demonstrators marching that day was Brian Friel. Bloody Sunday resonates nearly thirty years later even as this book is written, with another inquiry to come into the truth of what happened. What is certainly true is that the event understandably created a huge disturbance in Friel – the Derry man, the Nationalist, the decent teacher, the playwright with a powerful access to the potentials for despair and betrayal in Ireland’s culture.
Above all, Friel was the playwright who in 1968 had fought shy of dealing with contemporary issues head-on, rejecting, from his New York bedroom, the morning’s headlines as subject matter, and having burned his fingers over The Mundy Scheme. Bloody Sunday, however, was unavoidable, a different order of headline altogether, and by the following year he had written one of his most important plays, The Freedom of the City.
In 1970 Friel told a radio interviewer that ‘the Troubles’ were a possible theme to write about. Yet he was very wary of the overtly political: ‘… it’s in many ways an obvious theme. And it does have a kind of international relevance because of the drift to the left over the world, because of the student disturbances [Friel refers here to protests and uprisings largely around America’s Vietnam War], and for all these good reasons. But in some strange way I shy away from it; I don’t understand this.’
Friel’s fruitful quandary as a writer is that his instinct is frequently to explore personal dilemmas, the consequences of personal choices, and the degree to which men and women frequently fail to know their own weaknesses. On the other hand, he lives in a society whose past and present history insist, often bloodily, more frequently poignantly, on his sense of justice. The playwright as artist and the playwright as citizen have to find common ground. For English contemporaries of Friel, such as Arden, Bond and Wesker, these divisions are less painfully felt. There is a sense with Friel that the reconciliation is always a struggle but that his best work is spun out of that struggle, and The Freedom of the City provides just such an illustration.
Although unquestionably based on Bloody Sunday’s events, in this play Friel had learned the lessons of The Mundy Scheme. He took the documentary material of 1972 and put it through a transformation process so that he could widen the thematic resources with which he could work. His take on the narrative symbols of Bloody Sunday is set two years earlier. Now that he is dealing with fiction and not documentary fact, the play becomes an exploration of Irish poverty – both material and spiritual – and a revisiting of all the old themes of despair, self-deception, and a doomed quest for freedom.
Speaking during rehearsals for the première at the Abbey, Friel was characteristically wary of his play being stereotyped:
The trouble about this particular play in many ways is that people are going to find something immediate in it, some kind of reportage. And I don’t think that’s in it at all. Very often an accident in history will bring about a meeting-point, a kind of fusion for you. And this is what happened. This is a play which is about poverty. But because we’re all involved in the present situation people are going to say ‘this is a very unfair play’. And of necessity it has got to be unfair in this public kind of way.
The huge sensitivity of the subject was made clear the following year when the New York production folded after only nine performances. This wasn’t only the normal Broadway critics’ response to a play deemed to be uncommercial, but a response to the fact that the play took seriously the claims for justice and freedom of the Catholic/Republican minority. The reaction was similar even in the supposedly more sophisticated London press. Reports of bomb scares at the Royal Court Theatre in London contributed to an atmosphere of danger and unease around the play. Friel himself was surprised by the amount of instant judgement characterizing the play as terrorist propaganda. On Irish television, he said:
If you’re working in the arts you’re always astonished at that kind of response because you always think that what you’ve been saying is read by two friends and nobody else and when you get the British Army moving into your agent’s office asking questions, ringing back to Belfast asking questions, when you get threatening letters, you are really astonished! … I was kind of alarmed at it. Suddenly I was being threatened by all kinds of people and institutions.
Most of Friel’s mature plays deal with struggles for freedom. Escaping – to America, from America, from Dublin to the western isles, from the western isles to Glasgow, from life to death – his characters are forever wrestling with what freedom is and where it might be found. Invariably they fail either to understand or to achieve freedom. Sometimes it is because of their own inadequacy, but always their failure is compounded by the condition of Irish culture. It is that social dimension that seems to well up from Friel’s own feelings of anger and frustration with his homeland. It is appropriate, then, that this play with ‘Freedom’ in its title opens with an image that is a negation of freedom: ‘Three bodies lie grotesquely across the front of the stage –’ Two young men and a middle-aged woman have escaped from the tear gas and rubber bullets fired on them during a demonstration by sheltering in the Mayor’s Parlour of Derry’s Guildhall. This place is the heart of Protestant power in Derry, and the rooms around it would have been familiar to Friel’s councillor father. As they hide up there, they talk about their reason for being on the march, about what they can do (very little) and about their own unfulfilled and difficult lives. Skinner, a typically garrulous Friel character, capable of eloquently articulating others’ problems but not of addressing his own, tells Lily why, in his opinion, she is marching. As he does so, he probes beneath the layer of ideals and abstractions that Lily has expressed to what he sees as a deeper and more mundane truth:
Because you live with eleven kids and a sick husband in two rooms that aren’t fit for animals. Because you exist on a state subsistence that’s about enough to keep you alive but too small to fire your guts. Because you know your children are caught in the same morass. Because for the first time in your life you grumbled and someone else grumbled and someone else, and you heard each other, and became aware there were hundreds, thousands, millions of us all over the world, and in a vague groping way you were outraged.
Woven into the texture of the introspective events inside the Guildhall are contributions from characters – more accurately roles – who are part of the pattern of events. Amongst others there are a Judge, a Sociologist, a British Army Brigadier, a Pathologist. They are official voices, authoritative but partial and therefore demonstrably unreliable. There is a satirical edge to their pronouncements and Friel is engaging with another profound concern: that of language – its power to define, contain and distort. The play concludes with a Judge issuing a summary based on the actual Widgery Tribunal into the events of Bloody Sunday. Its gist is that the army and security forces were provoked into firing and that Lily, Michael and Skinner were armed. Neither in life nor in the play are the protesters armed. The final stage picture unequivocally defines the dead three as victims of injustice: ‘(The entire stage is now black, except for a battery of spotlights beaming on the faces of the three. Pause. Then the air is filled with a fifteen-second burst of automatic fire. It stops. The three stand as before, staring out, their hands above their heads.) Black-out.’
Yet the opportunity Friel has given them to speak to each other and be heard by the audience has widened and deepened their tragedy. They are not faceless victims, and their tragedy is caused by factors greater than the sharp edge of a neo-colonial army. It is woven deep into the fabric of a society that blunts their humanity and creativity. Often in Friel authority figures (fathers mainly) betray their offspring, and the greatest of these is the State, the ultimate father figure (though Ireland’s national muse is conventionally always female). Friel’s anger at the waste of lives, a compassionate anger, rumbles through his plays, its target the Ireland he will not leave but cannot wholly endorse.
The year that began with Bloody Sunday continued with the overturning of an experimental power-sharing executive by a summertime general strike of Protestant workers. For Friel’s community the outlook was grim, as it was for the community at the other end of the sectarian spectrum. British attempts to manage the crisis militarily were highly counterproductive, and strains in British political life were hindering any clear view of the crisis. Friel had obviously come to a watershed of sorts with The Freedom of the City. He was later (1982) to say of the play:
I think one of the problems with that play was that 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. It was really – do you remember that time? – it was a very emotive time. It was really a shattering experience that the British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot thirteen people. To be there on that occasion and – I didn’t actually see people get shot – but I mean, to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is a very terrifying experience. Then the whole cover-up afterwards was shattering too. I still had some kind of belief that the law is above reproach!
This passage clearly demonstrates the massive effect those events had on Friel as well as the familiar struggle to keep his aesthetic guard up against dramatic oversimplification. Although his next three plays were to revert more characteristically to that blend of individual tragic melancholy and sometimes savage humour at the expense of his nation and its history, all three plays resonate with political ideas more strongly than those written before the events of the seventies.
One aspect of Friel’s skill as a playwright was his developing ability to create richly symbolic narrative settings within which to explore his obsessions. Irish history, and its contemporary resonances, had been part of Friel’s playwriting toolbox since The Enemy Within in 1962. In Volunteers, the new play that premièred at the Abbey in 1975, history is made palpable in the set design. The basic holding form for the play is an archaeological dig in ‘a city’, almost certainly Dublin, whose rapid development at this time had uncovered archaeological remains. At this period, Dublin Corporation was involved in building an office block on an old Viking site at Wood Quay, described as ‘one of the major archaeological discoveries of the century’. Towns themselves were a legacy of the Scandinavian wave of the ninth and tenth centuries and the bony evidence of that contribution to Irish history is a skeleton whose discovery has temporarily halted the building of a new hotel complex. ‘Leif’ lies visible to the audience. The setting, elaborately described by a writer determined to be in full control of the meanings his play can generate, is a visual metaphor that presents history as quite literally underlying present-day Ireland. The workers on the site are mainly volunteers – Desmond, a student, and a group of IRA prisoners who have volunteered to do the work (the title ‘volunteer’ is also one given to all ordinary IRA members). This potent mix of Ireland’s violent past – Leif appears to have been ritually murdered – and violent present – the IRA men know that their act of betrayal in volunteering for the dig will be fatally punished by their imprisoned colleagues – allows Friel to uncover ideas and perceptions about Ireland and bounce them around the walls of the dig. (It is as if the theatre ‘fourth wall’ itself is already part of the shored-up structure, a ‘pit’ temporarily opened in the world of business and bland modernity for the excavation of awkward perceptions and necessary questions.) In a lecture called ‘Digging for the Truth: The Detective Process in Brian Friel’s Theatre’, the theatre scholar Katherine Worth put this play in a tradition ranging from Beckett to crime fiction – ‘a fascination with mysteries, searches and hidden places of the self’. Once again Friel sees political history through the anguished psyches of men who are trapped by their own fates – fates that are themselves seen as products of a flawed and unresolved Irish history.
Volunteers was not a critical success at the Abbey, in the way that superficially ‘warmer’ plays like Philadelphia, Here I Come! or Lovers had been. Friel observed at the time: ‘… more than its effect on audiences 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.’
Poor reviews kept audiences away. Friel’s own bitterness with his country’s civic life, wittily articulated by IRA man Keeney (a typically Frielian character, fatalistic but gabby), and the lack of an obvious ‘love story’, may have alienated audiences. Volunteers is nevertheless an important play in Friel’s output precisely because it eschews sentimentality and offers a real opportunity to deal with themes of power and authority in the context of Irish history.
Irish history and its hold on the present, never far from Friel’s concerns, seem particularly close to the surface in the clutch of plays of the seventies, from The Freedom of the City in 1973, to Translations in 1980. (Faith Healer, in 1979, is exceptional in every sense.) In 1976 he wrote two short dramas for BBC TV Education: Farewell to Ardstraw and The Next Parish, about the Great Famine and emigration to America.
Brian Friel is often described as a ‘Chekhovian’ writer, and there is a sense in which an old-fashioned literary craftsmanship based in naturalism does partly describe his work. Yet his output is shot through with non-naturalistic devices. Temperamentally not an ‘experimental’ writer who explores form for its own sake, he nonetheless introduces technical devices that perhaps derive from the authorial control he became used to having in his prose fiction. (Without doubt also, he has always kept himself well informed about developments in European and American theatre form, and has appropriated what he feels he needs.) We have seen how, in plays like The Freedom of the City and Lovers, time can be manipulated and the deaths of characters announced without losing them from the stage. This has the effect that Brecht sought of taking away the conventional gratification of surprise and substituting curiosity – as if to say: ‘Now that I know that character will die soon, I can focus on what has led her to death.’ (Unlike Brecht, Friel has no problem with generating a mystery that may not be solvable, nor does he worry that some tragic events in life are simply ‘fated’.)
In his next play, Living Quarters, he invites comparison with another twentieth-century innovator, Luigi Pirandello, who also worked from a basis of naturalism but asked the audience to incorporate into their experience awareness of the artifice of what they were watching. In Six Characters in Search of an Author Pirandello created characters who were aware of their own status as playthings of the author. Friel, similarly, in Lovers: Winners gives dramatic form to the outside world’s influences on, and perceptions of, his characters through the impassive Observers on either side of the stage, holding clipboards of information. In Living Quarters another variant of this technique is used as ‘Sir’, another Recording Angel-like figure with a ledger of biographical facts, narrates the story of Commandant Frank Butler of the Irish army, returning to Ballybeg to be honoured after service with UN forces in the Middle East. The difference now is that Sir interacts with his characters, who treat him partly as stage director in rehearsal – ‘Are we all set? Good. Now – you’ve all been over this hundreds, thousands of times before. So on this occasion – with your co-operation, of course – what I would like to do is organize those recollections for you, impose a structure on them, just to give them a form of sorts’ – and partly as playwright, as when the alcoholic army chaplain Tom Carty protests about the way he is written up in the ledger:
SIR ‘As the tale unfolds they may go to him for advice, not because they respect him, consider him wise –’
TOM (Sudden revolt) Because they love me, that’s why! They love me!
SIR ‘– but because he is the outsider who represents the society they’ll begin to feel alienated from, slipping away from them.’
TOM (Beaten) Outsider?
(ANNA goes to TOM and puts her arm around him.)
The central metaphor of the play derives from the practice of theatre but its underlying themes have to do with our capacity to deceive ourselves about the control we have over our lives. Typical also for Friel’s concerns at this time is his probing at the institution of the family. Family reunions are staples of drama, and the conflicting needs of rival siblings, their challenge to (usually paternal) authority, and the lurking presence of sexual betrayal are all there in Living Quarters, with the added context that the form of the play – Sir’s assembly of them in a kind of ritualized picking at the scabs of their lives – involves the audience as necessary participants in the event rather than being mere voyeuristic spectators.
Friel has sanctioned publication of some of his work diaries that give valuable insights into the mental and emotional processes of his writing. Writing about a later batch of extracts, Friel observes: ‘I do not keep a diary. But occasionally, usually when the work has hit a bad patch, I make sporadic notes, partly as a discipline to keep me at the desk, partly in the wan hope that the casual jottings will induce something better.’
Amongst the many richnesses in these ‘casual jottings’ is an ongoing anxiety about finding an exciting new idea for a play. His next play, Aristocrats, follows up many of the themes of family life in an Irish social context explored in Living Quarters, but he is concerned about ‘an odour of musk – incipient decay’ (1 September entry). He develops the anxiety into thought about the necessity for the artist not to pander to superficialities, to ‘drop in for the crack (sic)’. In his commentary on the making of Aristocrats, we can feel this struggle with the temptations of easy solutions worked out. Characteristically the first phase of the writing process is about a process of listening for ‘faint signals’ (31 August), or about getting ‘a scent of the new play’ (7 November). It is as if the play exists already fully grown and the writer’s job is to search for it, stalk it and make it his own.
Back from holidays and now stancing myself towards winter and work. Throughout the summer there were faint signals of a very long, very slow-moving, very verbose play; a family saga of three generations; articulate people wondering about themselves and ferreting into concepts of Irishness. Religion, politics, money, position, marriages, revolts, affairs, love, loyalty, disaffection.
Would it be a method of writing to induce a flatness, a quiet, an emptiness, and then to work like a farm-labourer out of that dull passivity?
A. B. describes C. B.’s new play to me as ‘a romp’. A curious phrase, attempting to disarm. This is merely to make you laugh, it suggests; the artist is on Sabbatical; the man like yourselves is At Home to you; drop in for the crack.
This is precisely what we can’t do. We cannot split ourselves in this way. We must synthesize in ourselves all those uneasy elements – father, lover, breadwinner, public man, private man – so that they constitute the determining artist. But if we attempt to give one element its head, what we do is bleed the artist in us of a necessary constituent, pander to an erratic appetite within us. The play that is visiting me brings with it each time an odour of musk – incipient decay, an era wilted, people confused and nervous. If there are politics they are underground.
Somehow relevant to the play – Mailer on his daughters: ‘If he did something wrong, they being women would grow up around the mistake and somehow, convert it to knowledge. But his sons! He had the feeling that because they were men their egos were more fragile – a serious error might hurt them for ever.’
A dozen false starts. And the trouble with false starts is that once they are attempted, written down, they tend to become actual, blood-related to the whole. So that finally each false start will have to be dealt with, adjusted, absorbed. Like life.
Coming back to the idea of the saga-drama, maybe even a trilogy with the Clydesdale pace and rhythm of O’Neill. Possibly. Intimidating.
For some months now there is a single, recurring image: a very plain-looking girl of about thirty-eight – perhaps slightly masculine in her mannerisms – wheels on to the stage her mother in a wheelchair. Her father follows docilely, like a tinker’s pony.
I think I’ve got a scent of the new play. Scarcely any idea of character, plot, movement, scene; but a definite whiff of the atmosphere the play will exude. Something stirring in the undergrowth. At the moment I don’t want to stalk what may be stirring there. No. I will sit still and wait. It will move again. And then again. And each time its smell will become more distinct. And then finally when that atmosphere is confident and distinctive, I and the play will move towards one another and inhabit that atmosphere.
‘You have chosen to be what you are’ – Sartre.
[Now, as the play-creature is stalked and its outlines and manners more clearly understood, Friel spins off occasional thoughts about the wider picture. Two of the most interesting of these concern Chekhov (2 June) and the nature of the dramatic experience (16 December). About Chekhov, Friel’s perception about the melancholy being a way to avoid tragic closure is clearly part of his own attempt to understand what he wants to get from his own, Chekhovian, work forming itself in his mind. On the nature of drama itself, he makes a very Frielian distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘perceptions of new adjustments and new arrangements’. Though this phrase might itself be thought an excellent definition of ‘meaning’, the distinction underlines his characteristic wish for meaning not to be pinned down reductively, but to be understood as a dynamic process rather than a fixed construct. Before that, Friel’s next entry is significant because it is about a moment when a characteristic Friel choice – about form – seems to be presenting itself.]
The crux with the new play arises – as usual with me – with its form. Whether to reveal slowly and painstakingly and with almost realized tedium the workings of the family; or with some kind of supra-realism, epiphanies, in some way to make real the essences of these men and women by sidestepping or leaping across the boredom of their small talk, their trivial chatterings, etc. etc. But I suppose the answer to this will reveal itself when I know/possess the play. Now I am only laying siege to it.
THE CANARY IN THE MINE SHAFT. Title? (It is important when its song hesitates and stops.)
A persistent sense that the play is about three aging sisters. And a suspicion that its true direction is being thwarted by irrelevant politics, social issues, class. And an intuition that implicit in their language, attitudes, style, will be all the ‘politics’ I need. Concentrate on the three girls. Maybe another married sister who visits with her husband. Maybe set some years back – just pre-war?
Endless and disturbed wanderings in various directions, with considerations of masks, verse, expressions, etc. etc. But the one constant is Judith who is holding on to late young-womanhood, who has brothers and sisters, and who misses/has nursed an old father. THE JUDAS HOLE?
O’Neill: ‘… but O’Casey is an artist and the soapbox is no place for his great talent. The hell of it seems to be, when an artist starts saving the world, he starts losing himself. I know, having been bitten by the salvationist bug myself at times. But only momentarily …’
Judith–Alice–Claire; and Father.
Making no headway with the new play; apart, perhaps, from the suitability of the word ‘consternation’ to our lives. I feel – again – that the intrusion of active politics is foreign to the hopes and sensibilities of the people who populate this play.
The play – this must be remembered, reiterated, constantly pushed into the centre of the stage – is about family life, its quality, its cohesion, its stultifying effects, its affording of opportunities for what we designate ‘love’ and ‘affection’ and ‘loyalty’. Class, politics, social aspiration are the qualifying decor but not the core.
Going back over four months of notes for the new play and find that the only residue left by dozens of strained excursions is: an aging, single woman; a large house for which she acts as medium; a baby-alarm; the word ‘consternation’; and perhaps various house furnishings that are coyly referred to as Yeats, O’Casey, Chesterton, etc. Cryptic symbols that may contain rich and comprehensive revelations – or disparate words that have no common sympathy? So all I can do is handle and feel them. Talk with them.
Every day I visit the site where the materials of the new play lie covered under Cellophane sheets. I have no idea of its shape from those outlines. I can envisage what the final structure may be. But I have no plans, no drawings – only tempting and illusory ‘artist’s impressions’.
Is there an anti-art element in theatre in that it doesn’t speak to the individual in his absolute privacy and isolation but addresses him as an audience? And if it is possible to receive the dramatist and apprehend him as an individual, is the art being confronted on a level that wasn’t intended?
Mark time. Mark time. Pursue the commonplace. Tag on to the end of the ritualistic procession.
The play has become elaborate, like a presentation Easter egg.
Has it a centre?
A persistent feeling that I should leave the play aside until it finds its own body and substance. Stop hounding it. Crouch down. Wait. Listen. In its own time it may call out.
To see the thing exactly as it is and then to create it anew.
What makes Chekhov accessible to so many different people for 180 years is his suggestion of sadness, of familiar melancholy, despite his false/cunning designation ‘Comedies’. Because sadness and melancholy are finally reassuring. Tragedy is not reassuring. Tragedy demands completion. Chekhov was afraid to face completion.
My attitude to the new play alternates between modest hope and total despair. What I seem to be unable to do is isolate its essence from the faltering existence I keep trying to impose on it. I keep shaping characters, looking for i-nodes of realisation, investing forms – when what I need to do is determine what the core of the play is and where it lies.
I have a sense that everyone (i.e. all the characters) is ready in the wings, waiting to move on stage; but somehow something isn’t quite right on the set. So they drift about, smoking, scarcely talking to one another, encased in privacy. A sense, too, that that slight adjustment, if only I knew what it was, could endow them all with articulacy. Maybe that’s the essence of the play: the burden of the incommunicable.
Six days at THE JUDAS HOLE, when it seemed to take off, not with a dramatic lift, but resolutely, efficiently. And now at a standstill – that total immobility when it is not a question of a scene stuttering and dying but when the entire play Swansea specious, forced, concocted. Trying to inflate and make buoyant something that is riddled with holes.
Moving, inching forward again. But whole areas – central characters, integral situations – about which I know nothing. And my ignorance and their magnitude looming and threatening.
The play has stopped; has thwarted me. I still work at it. But it sulks. And yet – and yet I sense its power. If only I could seduce it past its/my blockage.
The imagination is the only conscience.
On a day (days? weeks! months!) like this when I come upstairs at a fixed time and sit at this desk for a certain number of hours, without a hope of writing a line, without a creative thought in my head, I tell myself that what I am doing is making myself obediently available – patient, deferential, humble. A conceit? Whether or not, it’s all I can do.
‘Sometimes, however, to be a “ruined” man is itself a vocation’
– Eliot on Coleridge.
The dramatist has to recycle his experience through the pressure-chamber of his imagination. He has then to present this new reality to a public – 300 diverse imaginations come together with no more serious intent than the casual wish to be ‘entertained’. And he has got to forge those 300 imaginations into one perceiving faculty, dominate and condition them so that they become attuned to the tonality of the transmission and consequently to its meaning, Because if a common keynote isn’t struck and agreed on, the receiving institutions remain dissipated and unreceptive. But to talk of ‘meaning’ is inaccurate. We say ‘What is the play about?’ with more accuracy than ‘What does the play mean?’ Because we don’t go to art for meaning. We go to it for perceptions of new adjustments and new arrangements.
Yesterday I finally browbeat the material into Act 1. There may be value in it. I don’t know. Occasionally I get excited by little portions. Do they add up to anything?
The play completed and christened ARISTOCRATS.
Performed at the Abbey in the spring of 1979, Aristocrats is the play of Friel’s most readily characterized as ‘Chekhovian’ because of its constant echoes of the three great Russian plays – like Three Sisters it is about frustrated sisters in a dull provincial town; like Uncle Vanya it is about the flawed authority of a patriarch, and like The Cherry Orchard it assembles a family in an old country house as both are about to succumb to the social changes of the modern world. As the diary suggests, Friel is keen to subsume the political hinterland into the characters’ lives, rather than foreground them. Nonetheless the play’s setting is full of political resonance. The large house outside Ballybeg is home to the Catholic O’Donnell family who have for generations been involved in the law and governance of Ireland. Now, with the impending death of District Justice O’Donnell, patriarch of Ballybeg Hall, things are about to change. The capacity for fruitful change amongst the family is diminished by their character flaws (Friel’s diary borrowed Sartre’s ‘You have chosen to be what you are’ to express that idea), but their own ability to deal with change is also the result of their father’s decayed authority. Like Lear he has created a vacuum of authority that, in Aristocrats, generates a genteel havoc of despair and decay in his family. Other Friel themes are present as well – there is a hovering academic, the American Tom Hoffnung (ironically, the German for ‘hope’), who seeks, like the sociologist (Dr Dodds) of The Freedom of the City, to see a dry, impersonal pattern in the history of the house.
By contrast its inhabitants and owner experience their various personal crises viscerally. The corrosive effects of class are explored in the engagement of Claire to the local greengrocer. This accomplished pianist is also an impoverished daughter of the faded aristocracy and marrying ‘down’ to trade is her last hope for a decent standard of living. The politics in Aristocrats are about decay and despair rather than passionate change. The ‘big house’ culture, last remnant of a feudal past that has limped into the first half of the twentieth century, is on its way out and new shifts have to be made in society to accommodate the changes. In its way Aristocrats is no less a political play than The Freedom of the City, because it is rooted in a pattern of Irish social life that profoundly affects people’s lives. This is true in spite of Friel’s unease with the idea of a political play as expressed in his diary entry: ‘The play is about family life, its quality, its cohesion, its stultifying effects, its affording of opportunities for what we designate “love”, “affection” and “loyalty”, Class politics, social aspiration are the qualifying decor but not the core.’
In the character of Eamon, Friel brings to a pitch a particular character type that is a staple of his own and Irish writing in general – the loud-mouthed truth-teller who lives out a pattern of failure, yet ends by transcending failure because of his ability to speak truth where others equivocate or resort to violence. (The part was first performed by the Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea, soon to partner Friel in the Field Day project.) In his next play (actually written before Aristocrats but performed at about the same time), Friel takes up the idea of the failed truth-teller and offers him, for large parts of the play, sole occupation of the stage.