Questions of creation

IN THE opening scene of Brian Friel's new play, Give Me Your Answer, Do!, the novelist, Tom Connolly, addresses an animated monologue…

IN THE opening scene of Brian Friel's new play, Give Me Your Answer, Do!, the novelist, Tom Connolly, addresses an animated monologue to his silent, autistic daughter, Brigid. Compensating for her muteness by loquacity, he makes her a gift of a string of verbal jewels in a blend of comic fantasy and hyperbole which becomes mockingly ironic as he parodies his publisher's reaction to his latest novel:

"The best thing you've ever done, Tom. It's intelligent and rich and elegant and heartening and true and compelling and disturbing and witty, and deeply, deeply moving, Tom ... Do you know the effect it had on me, Tom? It made me feel humble."

This stock vocabulary of evaluation and critical judgement has a jaded, hollow ring; throughout the play it both attracts and repels Tom Connolly as he attempts to work out how much he needs the validation of experts, arbiters - or audiences.

In the course of a single summer's day in a dilapidated house in Co Donegal, Tom Connolly and his wife Daisy, Daisy's parents, Maggie and Jack, and their friends, Garret Fitzmaurice (also a novelist) and his wife Grainne, come together to sit in the garden, talking, drinking and listening to music, while a literary agent decides whether his university in Texas will buy Tom's complete collection of manuscripts for its Irish archive. They are waiting, as Daisy says, "for the big answer."

READ MORE

The fact that the agent, David Knight, has already made a generous offer for Garret's manuscripts adds to the tensions in the atmosphere, which is thick with the dust of disappointed dreams, the collusions and petty destructiveness of marriage, the evaporation of love, and hopes.

The intense, lyrical monologues of Friel's last play, Molly Sweeney, have given way to the elliptical exchanges of the ensemble; characters speak past and through each other, revelations are interrupted, moments of potential closeness or illumination are smothered and truncated as brutally as in any Beckett play; private pain becomes public performance. Friel has captured the unease of family members in proximity, huddling in pairs to speak in hushed, concerned tones about the one who has just left the room.

Give Me Your Answer Do! recreates the elegiac tone of Living Quarters (1977), Aristocrats (1979) and more recently, Wonderful Tennessee (1993). With its house-party setting and air of expectant lassitude, it echoes, the work of Chekhov and Turgenev who have both been translated and adapted by Friel in the past. Here, the selling of literary estates to an American university becomes the equivalent of the sale of the Russian dachas. Some quotes from The Three Sisters early on make the allusions more explicit.

While the money from the sale of Tom's manuscripts would be more than welcome to the Connollys, who live an isolated, impoverished life, there is more at stake than that, as Daisy relentlessly points out to Tom: "That acknowledgment, that affirmation, might give you, whatever it is the courage? The equilibrium? The necessary self-esteem just to hold on? Isn't that what everybody needs?"

Tom does not want to listen to Daisy, whose role in the play is to ask questions that become increasingly uncomfortable - and acerbically expressed - with each glass of gin. A talented musician in her youth, Daisy has now given up on her own life and concentrates on analysing Tom's. Both she and Grainne, who makes bitter public comments about her husband Garret's work, function as judges and critics who do nothing themselves, but uphold exacting standards for their husbands and express the anger and disappointment of people who had hoped that they would live through someone else.

GRAINNE wounds Garret by telling him: "You aren't at all the writer you might have been - you know that yourself. Too anxious to please. Too fearful of offending. That has made you very popular...But I thought once you were more than that. I think you did too." Even when Grainne thinks about leaving the marriage, it is the effect of this on Garret's work that she is thinking of: "If I weren't in your life, maybe you'd, find your own resiliences. They won't make you a stronger man but perhaps they'd make you a better writer."

The two women are stern critics; but their judgment is tainted by disillusionment. Even the great arbiter, David, is as fragile, flawed and quietly desperate as everyone else. Friel is turning the spotlight on to what he has called "our trivial achievements and abysmal failures". In earlier work, such as Philadelphia, Here I Come!, his characters looked to their fathers for approval. Give Me Your Answer Do! questions the criteria by which we measure success or failure, and our need to jump through the correct hoops to receive a validating imprimatur. "What's the yardstick anway?" Daisy's father, Jack, asks Tom. "Whatever money David offers you?"

Having explored in earlier plays, the untrustworthy, inadequate, politically circumscribed nature of language (Translations, Communication Cord), the unreliability and deceptions of memory (Faith Healer), and the impossibility of constructing a historical narrative that can ever be more than a version of the past (Making History), Friel now turns his attention to the nature of aesthetic judgement, which is inevitably coloured by, relativism, culturally determined values, subjectivity and, of course, the marketplace. Is it possible to arrive at the reasoned defence of a judgment which could claim a universal status and transcend the conventions of taste?

In other words, can Kant's Critique Of Judgement be re-written for a post-modernist age? As ever, Friel is searching, and posing questions which the unfolding drama attempts to answer.

MANY commentators have noted the tension between the priest and the politician in Friel's work. There is also, invariably, a teacher, who pops up to wag a finger and say "listen to me, now whether the lesson is about the ideological construction of history (Making History) or Berkeley's theories on the relationship between tactile and visual perception (Molly Sweeney). In this play too there is a lesson, about the impossibility of, making verdicts, and it comes from Daisy in a final, explicatory speech: "Uncertainty is necessary . . . Because there can be no verdicts, no answers. Indeed there must be no verdicts. Because being alive is the postponement of, verdicts, isn't it?".

While the play is not political in the sense that The Freedom Of The City, Volunteers, Translations and Making History are, with their explorations of history, myth, the language of politics and the politics of language, the questions it raises are broadly political, evoking the cultural politics of post-colonialism. Literary merit is conferred through financial acquisition, and novels become the property of whichever foreign institution pays the most. The Irish literary canon can be bought, collected, owned and contained. The emigration and exile of the early plays has been replaced by the export of culture, by which, as Grainne says, "its real worth is established". Or is it?