Brian Friel with is portrait by Cian McLoughlin.
Photograph: Bobby Hanvey
Friel's work allows us to feel the tension between the desperate need to tell the story and the essential impossibility of doing so, writes Fintan O'Toole
IT SEEMS SOMEHOW appropriate that Brian Friel has two birth certificates. One says he was born, the child of a school-teacher and a junior civil servant, in Omagh, Co Tyrone, on January 9th,1929. The other gives his date of birth as January 10th. The notion at the heart of his plays that our sense of what happened in the past owes more to our imaginations than it does to facts Ÿ seems to have been signaled from the beginning. And it is a much more terrifying idea than a mere slip of a bureaucrat's pen might suggest. For if the past is unpredictable, if we do not travel on a straight road between who we were and who we are now, who is to say that we are the same person at all? This is a question that hovers around almost all of Brian
Friel's work as a playwright and it is, indeed, the reason he is a playwright at all.
It may be strange to wonder at the fact that such an accomplished dramatist, rightly regarded as one of the major figures in the form over the last 50 years, writes plays. In Friel's case, however, the issue arises from his dazzling talent as a prose writer. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was clearly set for a brilliant career in fiction, with a series of superb short stories and a contract from the New Yorker.
As late as 1972, he was declaring himself disillusioned with theatre and contemplating a return to prose fiction. He had a choice. In retrospect, he would explain his decision to swap the page for stage by dismissing his stories as overly derivative of Frank O'Connor Ÿ a judgment that few readers would share. The decision to be a playwright surely goes deeper. Drama was necessary to him as a form that places the whole notion of a fixed self in jeopardy.
In a talk he gave on the BBC in 1972, Friel spoke of memories of childhood holidays in the Donegal village of Glenties, where his mother was raised, "as pellucid, as intense, as if they happened last week". In the most important of these memories, he is nine years old and he and his father are walking home from a lake with fishing rods across their shoulders. It has been raining all day, so they are soaked to the skin. "But for some reason Ÿ perhaps the fishing was good - I don't remember - my father is in great spirits and is singing a song and I am singing with him."
This memory is important to Brian Friel, as it is to his first enduring dramatic creation, the restless young Gar O'Donnell in the play that made his name internationally in 1964, Philadelphia, Here I Come! The only problem, for Gar as for Friel, is that there is no lake beside that road into the village. He cannot have walked along with his father, fishing rods across their shoulders, the two of them singing. The memory, though real, is quite impossible.
These slips between reality and memory might not have mattered greatly had they not chimed with the nature of the world in which Friel grew up. As a personal or philosophical question, the fragility of the self was almost a commonplace of European post-war culture. In Friel's world, however, it had a profound public dimension. It chimed with a double sense of displacement. There was, firstly, the alienation of a Catholic nationalist from both Northern Ireland and the Republic, the feeling of having no homeland. And secondly, there was the pervasiveness of emigration.
The first of these forces enhanced the fragility of the self by giving it no sense of public validation. The public person and the private became separate Ÿ as Gar O'Donnell, in Friel's first great theatrical innovation, is played by two actors, one for Gar Public, the other for Gar Private. Emigration reinforced this sense of fracture by creating disparate selves Ÿ the person you were before you left is not the one who returns. The sense of internal exile is mirrored by the literal exile that is so inextricable from his plays.
What is true of the contemporary arts in general is true in a very specific sense of Friel's people. He wrote of the arts in 1967 that "Flux is their only constant; the crossroads their only home; impermanence their only yardstick". But this could be a description of most of those who populate his plays. Columba in the very early play, The Enemy Within, is in exile; Gar O'Donnell is going into exile; the eponymous Cass Maguire has spent 50 years in New York; The Gentle Island begins with the evacuation of an island off Donegal, as almost everyone heads for Glasgow; Faith Healer, roughly following the legend of the exile of Deirdre and the Sons of Uisneach, and begins with the hypnotic recitation of the names of Welsh and Scottish villages; Dancing at Lughnasa is shaped by the return of one bewildered exile and flashes forward to the sisters themselves as lost emigrants in London. While Friel's work tends, famously, to be set in the same fictional Donegal village of Ballybeg, it is joined by spokes radiating outwards to London and Kent, to Glasgow and Kinlochbervie, to Winfarthing, Norfolk (Translations) and Philadelphia, to Uganda (Dancing at Lughnasa) and the Middle East (Living Quarters); to Skid Row and Butte, Montana.
THIS OVERLAP OF private and public reasons for the fracture of personality is crucial to the distinctiveness of Friel's plays. The private reasons alone would have created a playwright whose work may have been little more than a variant on European existentialism and its expression in absurdist drama. The public ones alone would have created a dramatist whose concerns were local and, in a narrow sense, political. What happens in Friel is that these two different wires cross and generate a spark that is electrifying. Friel's achievement is shaped by his ability to be simultaneously immediate and philosophical, local and international, rooted and displaced, personal and abstract, private and public, realistic and avant-garde.
This latter coupling is perhaps the most remarkable. One of the reasons why Friel was a puzzle outside of Ireland for much of his career is that his work utterly defies the basic categories of post-war theatre. In most countries, there was a mainstream, whose techniques were largely realistic or naturalistic, and an avant-garde, which ostentatiously broke with the conventions of the "fourth wall" and revelled in self-conscious theatrical experiment. In Ireland, and especially with Friel and his near-contemporary Tom Murphy, this distinction didn't function. The social world to be reflected was so strange, so angular and so fractured that in order to be a realist, it was necessary to be avant-garde.
This is a large part of what makes Friel a great playwright - his innovations of form are never experiments. His temperament when he began to write plays was broadly conservative. He was a teacher in a Christian Brothers' school and a member of the old Nationalist Party. The form of his stories (though not their content) is not innovative, nor, in terms of its dramaturgy, is an early play like The Enemy Within. Far from entering the theatre with a mind set on radical experiment, he was actually, as he put it, "almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of playwriting and play production" until he had a six-month stint as an observer at Tyrone Guthrie's theatre in Minneapolis. Instead of setting out to be a theatrical innovator, Friel became one by virtue of his need to dramatise what he saw and felt.
What he was dramatising, in essence, was the impossibility of fixed stories in a world of flux and impermanence. Here was a superb storyteller suffering a crisis of faith in narrative itself. Stories have beginnings, middles and ends because the characters remain constant and the world they live in provides a stable frame of reference. Friel had clearly come to believe in neither of these things. How could character be constant when the basis for its continuity - memory - is so untrustworthy? How can the world be a stable frame of reference when its meanings are fractured by exile and political alienation? And how, as so many of Friel's later plays ask, can words communicate when they are merely, as Hugh says in Translations, "signals, counters"?
What is left when stories become impossible is theatre, a form in which their fragmentation and elusiveness can be played out before our eyes and in which flux is at the heart of the form itself. Friel's plays often have an on-stage narrator, or a writer who is trying to make sense of the lives of the characters - the sociologist Dodds in Freedom of the City; the playwright Sir in Living Quarters; the linguist Tim Gallagher in The Communication Cord; the narrator Michael in Dancing at Lughnasa; the historian Tom in Aristocrats; the propagandist Lombard in Making History. They try, in Sir's words, to "organise those recollections for you, impose a structure on them, just to give them a form of sorts."
But with the partial exception of Michael in Lughnasa, these figures of intellect and authority always fail to do just that. And it is this failure that defines Friel's drama. On the page, the failure of a story to cohere is simply a failure. On the stage, evoked with Friel's consummate craft, it acquires dimensions of both comedy and tragedy. It sets up ironies and absurdities that make us laugh. It establishes a sense of yearning for what will always be elusive that can be, as in Friel's masterpiece Faith Healer, quite terrifying. And above all, it allows us to feel the tension between the desperate need to tell the story and the essential impossibility of doing so.
This is the pressure that generates Friel's restless invention. His best formal ideas - splitting the main character in two in Philadelphia; making a gripping play from four monologues that tell contradictory versions of the same story in Faith Healer; having two characters speak to each other while the audience knows that they cannot understand each other's language in the love scene in Translations; the sisters in Lughnasa "dancing as if language no longer existed" - are direct responses to the failures of words and stories and of the self.
IN ALL OF THIS, there is the energy of not being able to write. Friel turned to theatre because, in a way, he had lost faith in writing. Theatre for him is a search for that lost belief, a search that ends in the act of blind faith that is the compact between the dramatist and the audience. On February 1st, 1996, while working on Give Me Your Answer, Do!, he wrote a note in his diary that seems to sum up his essential attitude. It began with a line from the 17th-century French thinker Blaise Pascal: "He carried out the gestures and by doing this he found faith." Friel added: "Sitting at the desk. Leafing through notes. Hoping to find faith."
This is Friel's theatre in a nutshell. It works as a kind of ritual, performed, not by believers, but by those who half-hope that by doing the gestures (moving, speaking, interacting) something believable will make itself known. Friel spent two years, between the ages of 16 and 19, at Maynooth training for the priesthood, and he later called it "an awful experience" that "nearly drove me cracked". But it is not accidental that the character who most represents Friel the playwright, Frank Hardy in Faith Healer is a kind of down-at-heel, unorthodox, churchless priest. His description of faith healing - "a craft without an apprenticeship, a ministry without responsibility, a vocation without a ministry" - serves very well for the strange profession of playwriting. And the thing that brought Hardy's audience to those draughty halls, "the remote possibility of a cure" is what has kept us going to Friel's plays over the last 50 years. It is not that he ever pretends to heal the rifts in language, in memory, and in narrative, but that he makes a beautiful gesture towards the faith that healing might be possible.
