Should we be festivalising Friel?

Current cultural practice in Ireland differs little from other strategies of marketing: packages of culture are unleashed in a festival format every few months, producing momentary gluts with the aim of increasing demand and consumption. It is, by and large, reasonably successful, but it also produces stretches of cultural emaciation in between.

A look at the theatrical calendar will reveal how frequent are these bouts of cultural bulimia. We hop from the Galway Arts Festival in July to the Dublin Theatre Festival in October, and then to the Belfast Festival at Queen's in November: five months when culture vultures never see their perch as we gobble up the great and the good of home and world theatre. In the intervening period other festivalisations continue: we might start with Bloomsday, take in a summer school or two and wash it all down with oysters and jazz. What better time, then, than this current "fallow" period to celebrate Brian Friel's 70th birthday. But is a Frielfest the most sensible format? Of course, festivals rope in new or less frequent spectators (which is all to the good) but any long-term benefit for our theatres - customer loyalty and investment in home production - is not part of the agenda. The long-term effect of such festivals is not necessarily felt by the theatre but is aimed at the less visible collective benefits of the nation.

And for a country whose national identity has been bound up from its inception with its cultural identity, collective benefits are hugely important. Festivalised culture like this increases our profile as a nation on the world stage as well as offering an opportunity to celebrate ourselves.

To bring elements of this Friel festival on tour to the diaspora, as is planned, will do us no harm whatever, and the safer and more traditional the approach, the more it will appeal to diasporic taste, which is for an agrarian Celtic twilight, not a thriving "Celtic tiger". Placing it at the beginning of the tourist season and in a normally fallow period theatrically makes prudent financial sense. The Gate Theatre, which established the single-author festival tradition in 1991, acquired deserved international accolades and also produced a noticeable effect as it repositioned the work of both Beckett and Pinter within Irish theatre practice. They enriched both nation and culture. But why Friel? He is already a linchpin in our theatrical canon, and is very much alive and writing.

This festival differs markedly from its precursors and contemporaries. It is stretched over a period of months (thus less taxing on our time and our pockets all at once), and it involves only our established and heavily subsidised companies. The festivalisation of the product is a purely cosmetic marketing exercise. The same number of shows as always will take place on the Dublin stages, with the same directors, the same casts, the same designers, using the same tried and trusted methods of serving texts. Rather than creating an exciting new product (and what better tribute to Friel than that?), it will simply generate demand as the same old product will be dressed in a brand-new box. Can you imagine, if all the art galleries in Dublin honoured Jack Yeats in a retrospective like this, at the same time, for such a lengthy period, what might be the effect on attendance? Friel-ing our theatres simultaneously has the effect of excluding alternative voices, new practices, new writing . . . creativity, in fact. No disrespect to Friel, but we are in danger of being short-changed, since for the next few months we have less choice than ever before. What, God forbid, if we are not all Friel fans? Hang it, we'll go to the IFC. Would it not be more sensible in the long term, then, to improve the product radically, create a new one entirely, or simply reduce the time and devotion so that the work of others gets a chance? But with a tribute festival, which is intended as a retrospective, respect will hold sway. Its length is an honour. But can we get too much of a good thing?

How to vary the diet, create a new product, and still pay tribute to the man? The independent, poorly or un-subsidised companies that contribute so much to our current cultural well-being and whose work falls outside the parameters of festivalised culture, entertain a youthful and vibrant constituency. Their often deviant visions of the home canon are festivalised also, but contained within the Fringe. We are living at the cusp of heterogeneity, socially and culturally. The cultural practices of our refugees and new immigrants, and the external influences of our new avant-garde, challenge perforce the nature of representation. Can we talk any longer with any certainty of "our Friel" in terms of solely text-based, realistic representation? Teaching Friel's plays in a racially-mixed classroom in Dublin will never be the same again as our past pains of emigration are our new neighbours' very present sufferings. Our "one actor/one character" practice in the theatre could also be challenged by the traditions which immigration also imports. Irish actors' obsession with the psychology of character might soon have to give way to new strategies of performing narratives, if our audiences' expectations change.

When Friel wrote the dance sequence in Dancing At Lughnasa he did more than just permit a paganistic release from social, economic, familial and psychological entrapment for women. He allowed a group of actors to communicate solely through their bodies. Many 20th-century theatre theorists and practitioners such as Artaud and Lecocq have pointed out that the word is the full-stop of communication, coming at the culmination of the idea when the thought has already past. The thought is separated from the point of utterance. Are we so precious about our literary heritage as not to entertain companies such as, say, Cois Ceim or Firkin Crane to bring physicality to our literary theatre, communicating psychology through the body, dancing memory, loss, anguish and joy? One of the most liberating aspects of Irish dance in the 1990s has been to see on our stages by our Irish companies, sense communicated through sensuality, and the intellectual replaced by the instinctual. These companies, and many others (Barrabas, Desperate Optimists, Macnas, Pan Pan, Shibboleth, for instance), challenge excitingly our textual orthodoxy. They could be enormously helpful is letting us see what Friel does rather than simply what he means.

Let us not be afraid of the highart, non-realistic aesthetics of our avant-garde, or the performance practices of our new immigrant traditions. If we are to perform on the world stage as cultural leaders, we must do so with confidence, maturity, vision and, above all, an ongoing, energised creativity drawing on all of theatre's arts. Then we will have a new product to package, and then let's have a festival.

Brian Singleton is a lecturer at the Samuel Beckett Centre for drama studies, TCD. This is an expanded version of an article that first appeared in Irish Theatre Magazine.