The Theatre of Brian Friel

Tradition and Modernity

Christopher Murray

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781408154502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre Playwriting

Brian Friel is Ireland's foremost living playwright, whose work spans fifty years and has won numerous awards, including three Tonys and a Lifetime Achievement Arts Award. Author of twenty-five plays, and whose work is studied at GCSE and A level (UK), and the Leaving Certificate (Ire), besides at undergraduate level, he is regarded as a classic in contemporary drama studies. Christopher Murray's Critical Companion is the definitive guide to Friel's work, offering both a detailed study of individual plays and an exploration of Friel's dual commitment to tradition and modernity across his oeuvre. Beginning with Friel's 1964 work Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Christopher Murray follows a broadly chronological route through the principal plays, including Aristocrats, Faith Healer, Translations, Dancing at Lughnasa, Molly Sweeney and The Home Place. Along the way it considers themes of exile, politics, fathers and sons, belief and ritual, history, memory, gender inequality, and loss, all set against the dialectic of tradition and modernity. It is supplemented by essays from Shaun Richards, David Krause and Csilla Bertha providing varying critical perspectives on the playwright's work.

CHAPTER 1

SITUATING FRIEL

Our secret desires fester inside us, to be what we are not! So! We perform! Performance! [. . .] Do you know what that’s like? To be able to change? To have an endless appetite to perform?

– Thomas Kilroy, Henry (after HENRY IV), in Pirandellos: Two Plays (Gallery Press, 2007)¹

Putting down the Markers

It is commonplace to remark that with the premiere of Philadelphia, Here I Come! at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964, Brian Friel (born in 1929) made his grand entrance into world theatre. Huge international success was to follow. Friel is the author of twenty-four published plays (plus three apprentice pieces, unpublished), together with eight published adaptations or versions (beginning with Three Sisters in 1981). If success alone supplied the narrative, the history of Friel’s career would be commonplace: failure tests the lasting reputation of the best writers. But over what is usually termed a lifetime in the theatre the successes, measured as much by critical appraisal in books on Friel (15 monographs, plus 2 forthcoming), collections of articles on Friel (at least 6), books with chapters on Friel (at least 12) and monograph articles (in the hundreds), as by frequencies of production and performance on the international professional stage, have stood out so consistently that Friel’s name is assured in all the histories of twentieth-century drama. So much is already well known about this achievement that it must be questioned if much more remains to be said.

Nevertheless, a great writer who has proved his mettle over the years and whose work holds the stage commandingly is usually so many-sided as to justify a fresh commentary, a new angle of vision. Further, it is my belief that, in recent years, the focus in Friel Studies has been predominantly political and that this emphasis now threatens to overwhelm the commentary. To the contrary, it has always seemed to me that Friel is a Proteus figure, who, like the sea god, is constantly changing his shape in an effort to escape categorisation, being identified with any one theatre, any one style or set of beliefs. No sooner has Friel been lauded on Broadway as the comforting bearer of the Irish tradition than he takes off in another direction to assert his independence. A deceptively cosy Philadelphia is followed by a powerfully experimental Loves of Cass McGuire, a heart-warming Dancing at Lughnasa by a surprising spiritual lesson such as Wonderful Tennessee. No sooner has a critic decided on the road map than Friel is off over the hills working on some counter-statement. A play like The Freedom of the City is followed by a Gentle Island, a Translations by a Communication Cord which you pull at your peril. My inclination is to see Friel as chameleon-like. He confounds definition. The short-story writer (The Saucer of Larks, 1962, The Gold in the Sea, 1966) is father to the playwright: each narrative stands alone, finds its own shape and maintains its own secret. Although there are stories he mined again for plays, such as ‘The Foundry House’ for Aristocrats (1979) and ‘The Highwayman and the Saint’ for the second part of Lovers (1967), Friel has always insisted that the playwright’s technique is ‘the very opposite of the short-story writer’s’ because of the audience and its ‘collective mind’.² Just as he moved on from short stories to stage plays, so Friel moves on from one play to another.³

Interpretation of the work is possible only in partial, contextual terms. ‘If the mask fits, wear it, I say,’ Friel makes a character say in his version of A Month in the Country (1992), and the witticism speaks to his own stance: like T. S. Eliot before him, he is the invisible poet.⁴ Likewise, Friel believes that nowadays the playwright ‘cannot appear to exhibit the same outrageous daring that the painter shows’: he is necessarily more ‘devious’ in his revolutionary purpose.⁵ If the playwright is ‘of his time’, however, truly clued in and in some sort of symbolic relationship to the art and culture of his time, as Oscar Wilde saw himself,⁶ then the difference with the painter vanishes because then the playwright’s ‘flux’ will be, in Friel’s words, ‘as integral but better camouflaged, his groping as earnest, his searching as sincere’.⁷ These terms provide the justification for interpretation at a deeper level than Friel’s nonchalance seems to authorise. But there can be no last word, no definitive answer to the complexity of Friel’s oeuvre. Instead, Friel’s eclecticism continues to offer opportunities for new provisional attempts to approach the texts as texts and the productions as attempts constantly to renew meanings.

At this stage of Friel Studies, the approach I adopt is to view the plays with a few convictions firmly in mind. The first is that Friel is a committed artist of the theatre; he wishes a play to be successful but he is not disturbed if it fails on stage when he is convinced it answers to his artistic intentions. Friel resembles Beckett in that respect. Failure is but another kind of success. He has from the outset measured himself against the best. It follows that he is best interpreted in that context. Accordingly, my reading of a Friel play is both text-based and holistic in the sense of interpretation of content and form as unified achievement. So far so old-fashioned. But allied to this analysis, I offer a comparative, contextualising method on the basis that ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.’⁸ I frequently frame a Friel play with one by another author. Even Shakespeare does not escape, for what Anglophone dramatist does not carry echoes from the great tradition? I have always thought that the shadow of Hamlet falls across Philadelphia, Here I Come! and that Faith Healer owes a lot to Macbeth. But sometimes the textual friendship is closer to home: Philadelphia is aware of a now nearly forgotten Irish play to be discussed in the next chapter, while Molly Sweeney and several other Friel plays are indebted to Synge and the Abbey tradition. I would insist that this critical method is only a strategy to facilitate interpretation of a writerly writer. He is extremely well read. Friel’s awareness of Eliot, for example, is noteworthy and extends from Eliot’s major essays, such as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, through the poems, especially Four Quartets, and the plays, Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party in particular. The intertextuality Eliot himself made part of the modernist discourse runs deep in Friel’s writing.

The core of Friel’s artistic strategy lies in a lifelong commitment to style. He is a very good writer because he takes care to be one; one does not become a favoured author at the New Yorker unless one is committed to the discipline of style. It has not been noticed that at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, which Friel attended from 1946 to 1949, there was in the English Department a lecturer (professor from 1948) who took the matter of style or ‘Elocution’ seriously. Friel would have received a good grounding from Neil Kevin (1903–53), an avid admirer of Walter Pater, whose Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (1889) he put on the syllabus as soon as he took the chair.⁹ Kevin had written his M.A. thesis on Matthew Arnold. As late as 2012, Friel could still recall his book No Applause in Church (1947), recommended reading, one assumes, for the small class taking English for B.A.¹⁰ Other alumni have had much to say concerning Kevin’s interest in literary style. A contemporary of Friel remarked: ‘I believe Pater’s Appreciations was his [Kevin’s] favourite book. He seemed to spend half the lectures of one year mulling over it’; adding, ‘If I learned anything at all about style I learned it then.’¹¹ Kevin’s successor to the chair of English at Maynooth in 1954, Peter Connolly, a year ahead of Friel as student, put it another way: ‘for theory, he [Kevin] had a weakness for Pater and Victorian aesthetes.’¹² Early in his career, Kevin published a series of articles on ‘English in Ireland’. In one of these he stressed the need to develop ‘a style of writing, remarkable for its exactitude and delicacy’: two qualities Friel certainly exhibits in his prose. Kevin also emphasised nonchalance, another Frielian attribute, ‘the power of concealing effort’ or ‘the art of gaining our effort by under-statement’.¹³ The better writers (and speakers) put ‘reticence’ before ‘impressiveness’. The worst fault a spiritual writer’s style could manifest is ‘a straining after the infinite’ in expression. Here the giveaway word, ‘the word which includes defeat’, would be ‘ineffable’.¹⁴ Readers of Friel will recall Frank’s use of the word in Wonderful Tennessee (1993) in an attempt to describe ‘what is beyond language. The inexpressible.’¹⁵ In that play, it takes a dancing dolphin to teach a would-be author (Frank) his lesson on style as jointly a moral and linguistic discipline.

The commitment to style was lifelong for Friel. At the start of his career he wrote a weekly column for the Irish Press. George O’Brien sees the sixty pieces as sitting ‘uneasily’ beside Friel’s early ‘artistic attainments’ and ‘an unusual departure from them’.¹⁶ Not so. They are part of Friel’s artistic DNA. O’Brien calls them ‘trial pieces’; the columns show Friel inventing himself through style. Now that he was a full-time writer, having resigned his position as a schoolteacher in Derry in 1960, he needed extra money; knowing himself to be an artist, he at the same time could only write a weekly humorous column if it offered a challenge. What if – and this is mere speculation – one Saturday morning, having scanned the humorous column by John D. Sheridan (1903–80) in the Irish Independent on his way to the book reviews, Friel asked himself ‘why not’ try a similar piece in the more politically favourable Irish Press?¹⁷ Why not test the Wildean proposition¹⁸ in mock earnest that ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing’? Perhaps it all depended on what is meant by ‘vital’.

John D. Sheridan’s vitality lay in his productivity. No fewer than ten books were published from his weekly columns. They had lively titles such as I Can’t Help Laughing (1944), Funnily Enough (1956) and Joking Apart (1964). One of them was titled Half in Earnest (1948) but mostly Sheridan stuck to self-effacing, simple absurdity. Friel’s first column, ‘Meet Brian Friel’, in April 1962, had the general heading ‘The Lighter Side of Life’, as if in blatant competition to Sheridan. It was almost insolently autobiographical – he even gave details of his bank account – as if Friel were intent on subverting expectations by overdoing the facts. The ‘Lighter Side’ was dropped as heading, but the column was never in fact serious. It described the trivial mishaps and embarrassments of a Chaplinesque but middle-class anti-hero. The humour is deadpan. Only one piece (23 March 1963) gestures towards Wilde: ‘The Importance of Being Frank’, a piece referring to The Francophile, his preferred title for the 1960 play A Doubtful Paradise.

Negotiating Wilde’s dichotomy between style and sincerity, Friel’s mentor Neil Kevin remarked: ‘A lively, though not insidious, form of insincerity is a flair for exaggeration.’¹⁹ This nicely describes the style of the Irish Press columns. They are, as O’Brien says, both ‘performative’ and ‘the projection of a persona’.²⁰ They are playfully insincere, a feature of Irish storytelling, nowadays more a feature of the stand-up comedian. Sincere people, wrote Kevin, ‘have a bark that is the equal of their bite, but they are distinguished by neither. Their way has no drama in it, so that they remain unadvertised.’ Yet these are the ‘really valuable ones among our acquaintances’ because, ‘motivated by an absolute sincerity, their style, like all good style, is inconspicuous and restrained: it does nothing for effect, it shrinks from show, it bides its time for ever.’²¹ This is Brian Friel encapsulated. The short stories are sincere. The plays may be said to fuse the press columns and the stories, combining ‘insincerity’ in the performative sense and style in the sense of pursuit of the right words to meet the dramatic occasion. In a programme note for a revival of Molly Sweeney at the Dublin Gate in 2011, Friel chose to write about language: ‘The tools that are available to the playwright to tell his story are few enough – words, action, silence’ but ‘words are at the core of it all’. Yet language in drama is not mere words, because the playwright’s words are ‘scored’ for ‘public utterance’ so that an audience hears his public and private voices, a ‘duet’ that ‘makes the experience of theatre unique’.²² Friel knew how to make ordinary language sing while at the same time shaping ordinary speech with precision and rhythm. Here I differ sharply from David Krause, who, in his challenging article, ‘The Failed Words of Brian Friel’, included in Chapter 10, argues that Friel’s style lacks the poetic force of Synge and O’Casey.

Denis Donoghue defines style as ‘the dancing of speech’ concerned with ‘ways of being free, or enjoying the exhilaration of feeling free’.²³ Such a gloss allows us to make a connection between Friel’s commitment to style and the tension between tradition and...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Complete List of Plays by Brian Friel
• 1 Situating Friel
• 2 Coming of Age: Philadelphia, Here I Come!
• 3 Formation of an Aesthetic: The Loves of Cass McGuire and Crystal and Fox
• 4 Speaking Out: The Freedom of the City and Volunteers
• 5 Uncertainty, Memory, Tragedy: Living Quarters and Faith Healer
• 6 A Kind of Trilogy: Making History, Translations and The Home Place
• 7 The Chekhov Factor and Gender Issues: Aristocrats, Dancing at Lughnasa and Molly Sweeney
• 8 ‘The Vodka-and-Tonic Society’: Wonderful Tennessee and Give Me Your Answer, Do!
• 9 Performances and a General Conclusion
• 10 Critical Perspectives
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Copyright