The Friel papers reveal the key to his artistic aim

THEATRE: Brian Friel: Theatre and PoliticsBy Anthony Roche Palgrave Macmillan, 235pp. £55

ANTHONY ROCHE has impeccable credentials as a critic of contemporary Irish theatre and of Brian Friel's work in particular. He edited a Friel issue of the Irish University Reviewin 1999 and the more recent and extensive Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel(2006). His Contemporary Irish Drama, which appeared in a revised and updated edition in 2009, includes a chapter on Friel.

In the preparation for his new work, Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics, he was able to use the expanded archive of Friel papers at the National Library of Ireland. The book contains helpful and extensive notes, and it becomes apparent that Roche relies heavily on this archive rather than on the huge library of Friel criticism that has developed over the years. Brian Friel: Theatre and Politicsis influenced by Slavoj Zizek's theories on fantasy and Paul Ricoeur's work on memory and history.

Roche's aim, given the new access to the archive, is to illuminate Friel's process in the writing of his plays, showing how and why his work is "more radical and experimental than is commonly perceived". In eight loosely chronological chapters he charts a career from Friel's earliest radio plays to the three stage plays produced since his huge international success with Dancing at Lughnasain 1995. Particular focus is given to directorial input and influence, particularly those of Hilton Edwards and Tyrone Guthrie in Friel's writing life.

Chapter four speaks to an assertion made by Nicholas Grene, who in an essay published in 2007 noted the occluded link between contemporary Irish dramatists and their English counterparts, instancing John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and others. Roche's book pursues this thread with a thorough analysis of such influence on Friel's Volunteersand Crystal and Fox. This discussion leads to another major premise: that Friel is a political writer, always, and on more levels than we generally consider.

Roche argues further that Friel is insistent, although working subtly, to address political concerns both north and south of the border, touching more than once on such then-secret and sensitive subjects as police brutality.

Despite this emphasis on the political undercurrent in his plays, Roche, like most critics, dismisses the more overtly political thematic rendering in The Mundy Scheme,finding the play dramatically inert. As one who saw the original Dublin production, I have borne a hope that Friel might someday revisit this work. (Unlikely, given the author's writing pattern.) "Inert" though it may be, the play's money-grubbing conceit – turning the west of Ireland into a graveyard with plots to be sold off to sentimental emigres – is nothing short of prophetic in this time of ghost estates, the further depopulation of western counties and its targeting of Fianna Fáil.

This is a book crammed with information, much of it new and intriguing. It can at times show the effects of an archive-driven undertaking, as it is not always felicitously written, and the reader must contend with frequent backtracking. Economic reality makes itself evident in the publisher’s choice of mingy margins and no dust jacket, but no amount of financial constraint can excuse the repeated orthographic howlers. Paul Ricoeur’s name is misspelled in two ways in the introduction, text and index. A name closer to home, that of Charles Stewart Parnell, suffers a similar fate. These are unfortunate distractions that the reader, avid for information, will overlook.

In his introduction, Roche draws our attention to the dying words of a character in The Freedom of the Citywho bemoans the fact that her unexamined life had passed with never "an event, even a small unimportant happening [which] had been isolated, assessed, and articulated", and finds here a key to the artistic aim Friel has fully achieved. In its isolation, assessment and articulation of elements both large and small within Friel's corpus, Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics succeeds admirably.

Christina Hunt Mahony’s

Out of History: Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry

was published by Carysfort Press in 2006. She teaches in the school of English at Trinity College Dublin