Brian Friel Plays 2 Read online

  BRIAN FRIEL

  Plays Two

  Dancing at Lughnasa

  Fathers and Sons

  Making History

  Wonderful Tennessee

  Molly Sweeney

  Introduced by

  Christopher Murray

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Dancing at Lughnasa

  Characters

  First Performance

  Act One

  Act Two

  Fathers and Sons

  Characters

  First Performance

  Act One

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Scene Three

  Act Two

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Scene Three

  Scene Four

  Making History

  Characters

  First Performance

  Act One

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Act Two

  Scene One

  Wonderful Tennessee

  Characters

  Set

  First Performance

  Act One

  Scene One

  Scene Two

  Act Two

  Acknowledgements

  Molly Sweeney

  Characters

  First Performance

  Epigraphs

  Act One

  Act Two

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence

  Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,

  In states unborn, and accents yet unknown!

  (III.i.111–13)

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

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

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

  Dancing at Lughnasa is, plainly, a memory play. It may be compared in this regard to Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944). Both plays are set in the year 1936, on the cusp of the Second World War; both have a narrator who speaks for the author and who is also the central consciousness; both explore the pathos of loved ones incapable of side-stepping, as the artist-narrator himself must (though not without guilt), the snares set by family and community. But the differences between the two plays are equally important. The main ones are cultural and anthropological. Where Williams re-enacts the classical American need, as first articulated by Huckleberry Finn, to ‘light out for the Territory ahead of the rest’ and find a new frontier, Friel re-enacts the Irish awareness that far-off hills are green and going into exile a tragic condition. Further, there is no correspondence in Williams to the rich, ritualistic material of dance and religious celebration which in Friel’s play arises from the bringing together of residual Celtic myth and modern African vibrancy. Father Jack would be unthinkable in Tennessee Williams’s St Louis.

  Memory is the mother of the Muse
s; memory is what engenders poetry. On the other hand, as old Hugh says in Translations, ‘to remember everything is a form of madness’. Selection and compression are necessary to what Friel calls ‘the artist’s truth’, which is subjective. There is an analogy here with Friel’s ‘making history’ in other plays. Experience, or personal history, is also subject to the artist’s manipulation for purposes other and perhaps higher than establishment of empirical truth. In ‘Self-Portrait’, published in 1972, Friel discusses ‘a particular memory of a particular day … a moment of happiness caught in an album’. But the childhood memory, rather like Gar’s sustaining memory in Philadelphia of fishing with his father, is blatantly fallacious in the details recalled. Human memory, Friel says, is solipsistically creative: ‘The fact is a fiction.’ The whole of Faith Healer is based on this idea. Friel’s aesthetic is in that sense quite the opposite of nostalgic. He does not recall in order unavailingly to bewail the loss of youth (in that delicious self-abuse which is the hallmark of inferior art) but in order to set before the spectator or reader the centrality of each individual’s self-made universe. The father who comes to this insight in the short story ‘Among the Ruins’ reflects: ‘The past did have meaning. It was neither reality nor dreams…. It was simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving.’ This is the key to Friel’s consistent use of memory in his plays. Thus in Dancing at Lughnasa Michael finally remembers ‘that summer in 1936’ as ‘simultaneously actual and illusory’.

  This simultaneity is extraordinary. The tableau the audience sees just before Michael’s final speech is ‘lit in a very soft, golden light so that the tableau we see is almost, but not quite, in a haze’. It is this doubleness, this ambiguity, this ‘almost but not quite’, which lends to the play its hypnotic, absorbing power. It enacts loss and imaginative recovery, age and childhood, the decadence of outworn myth and the vigour of residual ritual, parodic dance and the dance of real joy, the union of the sacred and the secular, homecoming and departure, the past and the future, all the rhythms of life’s resilience in the face of injustice, breakdown, lies and double dealing symbolized in those primitive-faced kites doomed never to get off the ground.