Biography

Born 9 January 1929, Catholic, in Omagh, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland, Brian  Friel is one of Ireland's most prominent playwrights.  In addition to his published plays, he has written short stories; screenplays; film, TV and Radio adaptations of his plays; and several pieces of non-fiction on the role of theatre and the artist.

Friel's father was a native of Derry and a primary school principal.  His mother was from Donegal and Friel spent many holidays there.  In 1939 the family moved to Derry, where Friel's father had a teaching position at the Long Tower school.  Friel attended the same school and then went on to attend secondary school at Saint Columb's College, Derry.  He attended the Republic of  Ireland's national seminary, Saint Patrick's College, near Dublin but instead of going on to the priesthood, he took a post-graduate teaching course in Belfast.  He started teaching  in Derry in 1950 and wrote in the meantime.  His first radio play A Sort of Freedom aired  on BBC in 1958.  In 1959 his first short story, "The Skelper," appeared in the New Yorker  and his first stage play, The Francophile, was performed at the Group Theatre, Belfast.  In  1960 he retired from teaching to write full-time.

Friel's early life had a strong influence on his writing.  Though his  father was a teacher, his grandparents, whose first language was Irish, were illiterate peasants from County Donegal whose first  language was Irish. Thus his own family exemplifies the divisions  between traditional and modern Ulster and  Ireland, a recurring  theme for Friel.  Donegal is another influence that features strongly  in Friel's life and work.  He moved there in 1969 because he always felt his roots lay in Donegal "partly to get into the countryside and  partly to get into the Republic"; he left partly because of the political situation in  the North, where he says, "The sense of frustration which I felt under the tight and  immovable Unionist regime became distasteful" (qtd. in Andrews 2).  He had joined the  Nationalist Party in Derry but had left in 1967, disappointed with its lack of initiative.   Many of his plays are set in Ballybeg, ‘a remote part of Donegal' and, as Seamus Deane notes, in "that borderland of Derry, Donegal and Tyrone in which a largely Catholic community leads a reduced existence under the pressure of political and economic  oppression" (qtd. in Andrews 2). In 1980, Friel helped found the Field Day Theatre Company which is committed to the search for "a middle ground between the country's entrenched positions" (qtd. in Andrews 6) to help the Irish explore new identities for themselves.

Brian Friel married Anne Morrison in 1954 and has four daughters and one son.  Shy, elusive, yet playful and sceptical, he has made very few personal statements.  In his "Self  Portrait" he says,

I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit,  read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the  involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at this moment. (qtd. in Andrews 2)

The interviewer's chestnut: When did you know you were going to be a writer?  The answer is, I've no idea.  What other writers influenced you most strongly? I've no idea.  Which of your plays is your favourite?  None of them.  Which if your stories?  Most of them embarrass me.  So you think the atmosphere in Ireland is hostile or friendly to the artist?  I'm thinking of my lunch.  So you see any relationship between dwindling theatrical audiences all over the world and the fragmentation of what we might call the theatrical thrust into disparate movements like Theatre of Cruelty, Tactile Theatre, Nude Theatre, Theatre of Despair, etc., etc., Or would you say, Mr. Friel, that the influence of Heidegger is only beginning to be felt in the drama and that Beckett and Pinter are John the Baptists of a great new movement?  Well, in answer to that I'd say that—I'd say that I'm a middle-aged man and that I tire easily and that I'd like to go out for a walk now. (qtd. in Andrews 3)

Awards and Achievements

Brian Friel's plays have premiered and been produced at prestigious venues like the Abbey Theatre, London's West End and Broadway and have been highly successful everywhere.  His first major play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! was the hit of the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival.  In 1972 he was elected as a member of the Irish Academy of Letters.  In 1981, Translations, one of his seminal pieces, was awarded the Ewart-Biggs Peace Prize.  After co-founding Field Day, Friel continued his interest  in the arts as a member of Aosdana, the national treasure of Irish artists, to which he was elected in 1982.  He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature by the National  University of Ireland in 1983, and in 1987 was nominated to the Irish Senate.  Dancing at  Lughnasa, probably his most successful play so far, received three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play.

Themes

Friel's plays deal with identity, the notion of truth, and communication, which he explores through the nature of language.  Identity is formed through memory, both public and private, and it is the collective memories of a community which distinguish it from others.  However, communal memory often conflicts with individual experience and several communal memories may exist simultaneously even within an individual.

The different associative and emotive memories and experiences of individuals and communities allow for different perspectives and perceptions of reality to exist.  In examining the issue of memory, Friel exposes the falsity in the notion of a single, comprehensive history or truth.  What becomes important is not a factual history or identity but exploring different histories and identities.

Language, for Friel, is closely implicated with identity.  The names of places, for example, contain within them the history and memories, both public and private, associated with them.  However, because of this difference in association, there is always a gap in communication.  Friel's later plays expose the inadequacy of language in any real communication and move towards an exchange beyond language.

Translations

Translations was the first play produced by Field Day.  It is set in a rural, Irish-speaking
community in County Donegal in 1833.  Into this world arrives a corps of Royal
Engineers to conduct an Ordnance Survey of Ireland, which would map the country and
‘standardise', or rather, anglicise, the place-names.  Captain Lancey and Lieutenant
Yolland are being assisted by Owen, son of the local hedge-school master, Hugh
O'Donnell.  The romantic Lieutenant Yolland is enchanted by the Irish names and culture
and Maire (Owen's brother, Manus' fiancee) and Yolland fall in love.  Yolland
disappears, and as a punishment, Captain Lancey threatens to destroy several places in the
County.  Ironically, the names of these are read in English and Owen must translate them
back into the Irish for the sake of the locals.

Translations shows the forces of cultural imperialism at work through the colonial project
of cartography and the demise of the hedge-schools in favour of the national schools that
use English as a medium of instruction.  At the same time, it also reveals the forces of
modernisation, for Maire wants to learn English and go to America before the arrival of
the English soldiers.  The fallacy in living in a mythical past is expressed through the
character of Jimmy Jack, who is so far removed from reality that he inhabits the stories of
the mythology he studies.  As Hugh says,  "it can happen that a civilization can be
imprisoned in a linguistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of fact" (351).

Friel says of Translations,  "The play has to do with language and only language" (qtd. in
Pine 146).  The play revolves around the subject of names and their relation to identity,
culture, and the possession or dispossession that comes with naming.  Sarah, who
struggles with saying her name, and consequently with establishing her identity, is
silenced once the colonisers arrive.  The efforts of Maire and Yolland to comprehend
each other had been unsuccessful because of the differences in culture embodied in
language that fall through the gaps of translation.  In the love scene between Maire and
Yolland, however, it is ultimately when they move beyond language, when the Irish
names become just a litany devoid of conceptual meaning, that the two are able to
establish any real communication.

Making History

Friel had always been fascinated with Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone (1550-1616), who is
the main character of this play.  Making History is "an informative, entertaining, ironical
play on the theme of the living man helplessly watching his translation into a star in the
face of all the facts that had reduced him to poverty, exile, and defeat" (qtd. in Pine 21).
Peter Lombard, an archbishop and an historian, takes on the task of writing "The History
of Hugh O'Neill"; however, as Hugh accuses him, it becomes the history of the person
writing it.  As Lombard says, there is no such thing as a single history based on truth:

I don't believe that a period of history—a given space of time—my life—your life—that it contains within it one ‘true' interpretation just waiting to be mined.  But I do believe that it may contain within it several possible narratives: the life of Hugh O'Neill can be told in many ways.  And those ways are determined by the needs and demands and the expectations of different people and different eras.  (15-16)

Friel, through the character of O'Neill, insists upon a complexity of identity for his hero, for both the private and the public, in order to reveal the relativity of truth as well as the existence of several simultaneous truths and histories, for single versions of history are often those produced by those in dominance and obscure the truths of others.

Dancing at Lughnasa

One of Friel's most popular plays, and set in 1936, Dancing at Lughnasa is a memory
play told by a narrator, Michael, twenty-five years later.  Michael is the son of Chris, the
youngest of the five Mundy sisters, Kate, Agnes, Maggie, and Rose.  Living during the
oppressive Catholic ethos, the women live repressed lives, unable to express their emotions or sexuality.  Friel contrasts them with Father Jack, who was repatriated from Africa because he had "gone native."  He too has lost the ability to express himself: "My vocabulary has deserted me" (71).  But this is because he, among the Ryangans, has found a way of expression beyond rational thought, an expression that taps into a deeper spirituality that accommodates the sensual in wordless, ritualistic ceremony.  Gerry, Michael's father, and the other man in the picture, represents the appeals of the future and the world outside: he has a London accent, speaks of adventure, and can fix the radio to make music.  He is a smooth talker who awakens the sexuality of the women, but he is also a dancer, who ultimately carries them beyond words: "Don't talk...Not a word" (32).  The order that Kate represents, however, is one that is suspicious of both the ritualistic past, like the pagan celebration of Lughnasa, as well as the forces of change.

The dancing in the play represents the breakdown of rational order and the inevitability of
change.  The play deals with this issue on several levels:

The great merit of the play is the unmistakeable tension we feel between the very  human desire for order and stability and the equally strong desire for excitement  and new experience.  This tension has various forms.  On one level, it is a struggle  between Christianity and paganism, on another, it is the challenge offered to  civilised value by an irruption of repressed libidinal energy, at yet another, it is the  harassment of the symbolic order of ‘ordinary' language and fixed structure by a  semiotic force outside language which disrupts all stable meanings and  institutions. (Andrews 223)

Michael recalls this period, but even in the memory of it, language, order and fact, fails:
"what fascinates me about that memory is that it owes nothing to fact...atmosphere is
more real than incident" (71).  Moreover, the memory itself is arbitrary and unreliable;
like history, expressing memory in language is a construction: "memories offer
themselves to me" (70).  The scene he paints in the end, where "the stage is lit in a very
soft, golden light so that the tableau we see is almost, but not quite, in a haze" and it is set
to "dream music", with an almost imperceptible movement, however, expresses this
memory in which past and present coexist and "everything is simultaneously actual and
illusory" (71).

Major Works

The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland. New York: Doubleday, 1962.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1965.
The Gold in the Sea. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
The Loves of Cass McGuire. New York: Noonday Press, 1966.
Lovers. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
Crystal and Fox. London: Faber and Faber, 1969.
Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.
The Gentle Island. London: Davis-Poynter, 1973.
Freedom of the City. London: Faber and Faber, 1974.
The Enemy Within. Newark, Del.: Proscenium Press, 1975.
Living Quarters. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.
Volunteers. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Selected Stories. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1979.
Aristocrats. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1980.
Faith Healer. London: Faber and Faber, 1980.
Translations. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1981.
American Welcome. Best Short Plays 1981. Ed. Stanley Richards. Radnor, Pa.: Chilton
Books, 1981.
The Diviner: Best Stories of Brian Friel. Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1983.
The Communication Cord. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.
Fathers and Sons. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Making History. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Dancing at Lughnasa. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
London Vertigo. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1990.
A Month in the Country. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1992.
Wonderful Tennessee. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1993.
Molly Sweeney. Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1994.

Works Cited

Andrews, Elmer. The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality Nor Dreams. New York: St.
Martin's, 1995.
Friel, Brian. Dancing at Lughnasa. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
---Making History. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
---"Translations." Modern Irish Drama. Ed. John P. Harrington. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co., 1991.
Pine, Richard. Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Selected Bibliography

Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: A Study. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.
Kerwin, William, ed. Brian Friel: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997.
Maxwell, D.E.S. Brian Friel. Cranbury, New Jersey: Associated UP, 1973.
O'Brien, George. Brian Friel. New York: Gill and Macmillan, 1989.
Peacock, Alan J., ed. The Achievement of Brian Friel. Gerrards Cross, Great Britain:
Colin Smythe, 1993.

Related Link

• Ireland: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory

Author:  Shirin Keen, Fall 1998.

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