Within.)

The action takes place on the night before, and early morning of, Gar’s emigration to the United States, and consists less of a plot than of a tissue of what Friel in later plays calls “episodes.” In effect, Gar’s past life passes before him. The passage takes place in two dimensions—the public, by means of farewells, and the private, by means of Private’s somewhat manic and mordantly witty analysis of that life’s nugatory achievements. The only thing which will relieve life at home in Ballybeg of his abiding sense of depletion, as far as Gar is concerned, is an expression of affection by his father. It is never made; Gar is obliged to carry his incompleteness with him. In that case, staying or going becomes moot.

As in The Enemy Within, the conclusion is inconclusive. The difference is that in the earlier play, inconclusiveness was enacted in a condition; here, rather more satisfyingly, it is embodied in a character. Philadelphia, Here I Come! also benefits from having its cultural resonances localized, as well as having its treatment of division given clever dramatic form. This play launched Friel’s mature playwriting career. It contains an affectionately critical characterization of restlessness and brio, as well as failed love and a lament for it, and longings for a fuller life and a fear of it.

Crystal and Fox

Friel’s preoccupation with love, familial relations, and romance is offered in a delicate, bittersweet blend in Crystal and Fox, one of his most effective works. Crystal and Fox, a man-and-wife team, own a traveling show of no particular distinction. At first, audience response is poor, and Fox, in a typical fit of recklessness, fires some of the players. The company is now reduced to four, one of whom is Crystal’s ailing and incompetent father, who is soon hospitalized. The traveling show, for so long an expression of Fox’s restlessness, now attains a stasis, a condition that makes Fox mean and destructive. All that can save the situation is the unwavering romantic attachment, tantamount to worship, that Crystal and Fox have for each other. Into their impoverished encampment comes Gabriel, their son. Gabriel has spent years in England, like Cass in The Loves of Cass Maguire, the victim of a family row. Now, however, all is forgiven, and Gabriel is seen as an embodiment of renewal. He soon tells Fox that he is on the run from the English police, having, in desperation, committed robbery with violence. This information is kept from Crystal until Gabriel is arrested before her eyes. As a result, Crystal and Fox sell the show’s remaining properties to help Gabriel, but en route to Gabriel’s trial, Fox lies, telling Crystal that he informed on his son for the sake of the police reward. A demented Crystal leaves her husband, allowing the play to conclude with a statement from Fox about the motivation for his destructiveness. He wanted the whole of life to be reduced to one ardent form—namely, his romantic love of Crystal. Such a love, he believes, expresses the best in him. Everything else is tainted with contingency, incompleteness, and mortality. Yet the finality and totality of his love for Crystal is what prompts treachery and ruin.

The play is satisfying on a number of levels. Its spare language complements its essentially violent action. Friel’s metaphoric use of playing and roles is deeply ingrained in the piece’s fundamental texture. Bleakness and joy are communicated with great clarity and economy. The need for romance—the desire that there be something more to life than the mere role one plays in it—is boldly established and subjected to an impressively unsentimental critique. In all, Crystal and Fox is a fitting culmination of Friel’s early phase. From this point onward, his work, while not forsaking love as a theme or the family setting as its representative focus, has engaged more public issues and has placed less emphasis on individual destiny than on collective experience, a departure that has meant the virtual elimination of the often stereotyped minor characters present in his early work.

The Freedom of the City

With The Freedom of the City, Friel began his major phase. Innovative dramaturgy, a marriage of private and public themes, and a major renovation of the part played by love in human affairs, all make this play a work of notable theatrical events.

The city in question is Derry, and the play is inspired by, though it does not mimic, the events of Bloody Sunday, January 30, 1972, when British forces killed thirteen civil rights demonstrators. Friel opens the play’s action by having his three protagonists flee from the violent disruption by army and police of a banned civil rights demonstration. They seek refuge successfully in the Mayor’s parlor of the Guildhall (the ease with which they do so being one of the play’s many ironies about “security”), and with nothing better to do, they have a party. They drink the Mayor’s liquor, smoke his cigars, dress up in ceremonial robes, and parody official ceremonies, including the conferring of the freedom of the city. Skinner, the most restless, deprived, and anarchistically inclined of the threesome, does a minimal amount of damage to property, stabbing a city father’s portrait with a ceremonial sword. His opposite is Michael, a clean-cut embodiment of civil rights aspirations, who, without skepticism, wants nothing more than a fair chance to better himself. Between them stands Lilly, a blowsy mother of eleven, who approves of Michael’s respectability yet is stimulated by Skinner’s vitality. Eventually, summoned by military bullhorn to emerge, the three (now thought of, thanks to rumor, as forty) emerge from the circumscribed freedom of their refuge, to be shot in cold blood on the Guildhall steps.

The play’s action, however, is only one of its levels. It is surrounded by frameworks of judicial and intellectual evaluation. Thus, from the outset, the audience is privy to the findings of the court of inquiry, which examines and distorts the protagonists’ actions and characters. The audience is also periodically subjected to an analysis of the culture of poverty voiced by an American sociologist. These two framing devices—sophisticated revisions of an ironic use of omniscience, introduced in Lovers and used most tellingly in Living Quarters—help the audience appreciate the informal, living texture of the trio’s activities, as it is that very quality that the processes of evaluation and formal discourse are unable to admit.

Perhaps the play is overloaded with framing devices. In addition to the two central ones mentioned, there are also two that derive from the trio’s own cultural constituency, represented by the Catholic Church and by a ballad singer. These two also distort what the characters embody. The aim to be comprehensive is no doubt laudable, and the resultant verbal range is an impressive feature of the play, but the ensuing emphasis on the distorting effects of objectification is overdone. At the same time, however, such an emphasis also draws attention to The Freedom of the City as a hymn to the theater, both in the value it implicitly locates in the spontaneous antics of the three victims and in the sense that the stage is large enough for spontaneity and formality to play opposite each other.

Volunteers

In Volunteers, Friel also uses an event and a set of issues from contemporary Irish history. The matter in question is the Wood Quay, Dublin, excavation, where, during groundbreaking for a new office block, invaluable remains of Viking Dublin were unearthed. Efforts to preserve the site on the part of local bien-pensants led to ugly clashes with the developers, the law, and Dublin’s city fathers and also, ultimately, to frustrating defeat for the preservationists.

Out of this volatile material, Friel fashioned a marvelous play. His volunteers are jailed social activists of a not very well-defined variety; inasmuch as they have a social philosophy, it generally seems to speak in favor of a more abundant life. (The play’s one ideologue, a student radical who is one of the supervisors, in the end lets down the volunteers rather seriously.) The play is set in a hole in the ground, and the action takes place on the last day of the dig, a closing date that has been peremptorily hurried forward and that will leave the work unfinished. When this state of affairs is brought to the attention of Keeney and his fellow volunteers, it increases the audience’s appreciation of the magnitude of their contribution as well as exposing the sterility of orthodox socially instituted planning. Indeed, the spontaneous gesture of volunteering has placed Keeney and his mates in danger of their narrow-minded fellow prisoners. Those who give freely, it seems, will be regarded with the most suspicion.

This conclusion is reinforced by the attitude of George the foreman. Superior to the volunteers in social status alone, his inability to have anything other than a master-servant relationship with them expresses insufferable moral smugness on the part of one who watches but does not dirty his hands. The only figure with whom the volunteers can feel kinship is the skeleton they have disinterred and named Lief, and who seems to have been the victim of a ritual execution. Lief is the authentic representative of a past common to all in the play, a past that is only properly visible to the volunteers. Thus, Lief is to be cherished much more than the vase that George has assembled out of fragments rescued by the volunteers, and when one of them deliberately breaks the vase, the symbolic resonance is as great as that provided by their ceremonial reburial of Lief.

The volunteers, then, are those who come in closest contact with the texture of the past, its earthbound treasures and human blemishes—and this contact is all the more estimable for being freely given. Prisoners of the state, menaced by their own kind and by their masters, the volunteers give unlikely expression to pietas, which is in cultural terms what love is in personal affairs. Yet all this is communicated in anything but solemn terms; the breezy satire of The Mundy Scheme is here deepened and tightened almost beyond recognition. Finally, in Keeney, Friel has created a character who is in total command of himself and prepared to face whatever comes, a character whose abundant energies, verbal pyrotechnics, and keen mind equip him superbly to be the onstage director of what Seamus Heaney has memorably called “a masque of anarchy.”

Translations

Friel’s Translations is among his finest achievements, as well as being, both intellectually and culturally speaking, his most ambitious. Set in the 1830’s among the Irish peasantry, it discourses wittily, economically, and profoundly on the clash between the English and the Irish cultures, on language and its imprecision, on violence and its distortions.

The play opens with young adult peasants entering the hedge school of Hugh O’Donnell for their evening class in Latin, Greek, and arithmetic. In itself, such a scene is replete with noteworthy cultural resonances, being both a far cry from the stage Irishman and a vivid introduction to contemporary peasant life, down to the aging “infant prodigy” in the background who relishes Homer in the original. Hugh’s son, Manus, takes the class this particular evening, because of his father’s inebriation. One of the students is Manus’s sweetheart, ambitious Maire, who is anxious for a fuller life for both of them. She plans to emigrate to the United States, while Manus, to some extent his father’s prisoner, possesses a fierce loyalty to the local native life he loves so well.

In a sense, Maire resembles Manus’s brother, Owen. He, too, desires a wider arena for himself, as is clear from his entry into the schoolroom with two well-disposed British soldiers, Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland. These two are members of a detachment of troops engaged in an ordinance survey of Ireland, an enterprise that has as one of its features the translation of Irish place names into English. Owen is employed in this work, under Yolland’s supervision, and he is painfully aware of the offense against pietas constituted by the effective divorce of native tongue from native place that will inevitably result. His awareness is ironically contrasted with Yolland’s onset of a vague, fashionable, romantic attachment to the locals, and Owen’s situation is further underlined by the deft trick of showing that when the native characters speak among themselves, the soldiers do not understand them. In other words, at certain points, the audience must accept English to be Irish.

In the hope that the cultural conflict will not come to a head, Owen arranges for Yolland to attend a local dance. There, Yolland meets Maire, and despite linguistic barriers, hilarious at the time (Friel’s flair for representing gaucherie is brilliantly displayed here), she seduces him. Having seen Maire home, however, Yolland is never seen again, and the play ends with peasant hegemony broken beyond repair by the threat of dire reprisal by Lancy, and by Manus’s flight from the place whose main hope he was. The situation is left in the hands of Hugh, who is impotently eloquent about its linguistic implications, and Jimmy, the “infant prodigy,” whom language has deluded to the extent of his announcing his impending marriage to Homer’s glaukopis Athene.

The play’s effectiveness is not solely derived from the novelty and richness of its cultural scenario: In addition, this scenario enabled Friel to marshal areas of interest that had hitherto existed separately in his works. Here one finds the intersection of public and personal history, the suffocation of love by unpromising family circumstances, the destructiveness and inevitability of passion, the author’s devotion to the common people and to that sense of Ireland that Ballybeg connotes. The coalescence of these themes certainly makes Translations, in the words of the review in The Times of London, “a national classic.” The play also sets the seal on Friel’s reputation as the most resourceful, most engaging, and most serious voice in postwar Irish drama.

Dancing at Lughnasa

Friel’s plays in the 1990’s mark a return to the more intimate dramas of personal lives in conflict and private emotional turmoil that distinguish his early career. Political and social issues are not absent but usually appear as components of a backdrop that includes small-town life, extended families, occupational ambitions, and other ordinary influences on the personalities of his characters. Dominating the foregrounds of these plays are characters challenged by the circumstances of their lives, and ennobled by their ability to meets those challenges with courage and grace, if not success.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a quiet memory play set in 1936 in the home of the Mundy family two miles outside of the town of Ballybeg. Michael, its narrator, recalls a summer when he was seven years old, at home with his mother (who bore him out of wedlock), his three maiden aunts, and his uncle Jack, a clergyman recently returned home from missionary work in Africa for apparent health reasons. Virtually plotless, the play unfolds through exchanges and interactions between the Mundy sisters, each of whom plays a role in sustaining the family and endures the deprivations and hardships of life with stoic good nature. The sympathy and gentle bemusement Friel shows for common people is tinged with pathos because, as Michael reveals, within a year of the time of the play’s events, the household will be irreparably sundered: His uncle will die, two of his aunts will seek employment in the city and become lost in its hopeless underclass, and he will never again see his loving but irresponsible father, who periodically returns to visit his mother. Unknown to any of the characters, this moment, no matter how bittersweet, is the last happy moment the Mundys will know as a complete family.

Dance is a recurring theme in the play, and Friel uses it as a central metaphor to give structure and significance to the play’s events. The play takes place during the feast of the pagan god Lugh, which is celebrated in modern times with a harvest dance that the Mundy sisters used to attend but are now unable to because of their strained finances. In one of the play’s most memorable moments, the women break into spirited spontaneous dancing to a traditional Celtic song on the radio, briefly expressing a passion and freedom that rarely manifests in the household. Michael’s father is a dance teacher, and Michael sees the dance steps he and his mother share when they meet clandestinely as a ritual tantamount to a marriage ceremony. Dance even plays a role in Jack’s missionary experiences: Recalling dance-based rituals he participated in during his years in Uganda, he arouses very strong suspicions that he was sent home because he had begun to “go native.” No matter what form it takes in the play, dance evokes a simple, natural order that the characters are drawn to but allowed to enjoy only momentarily. The dance of their lives, as choreographed by Friel, is unpredictable and erratic, and puts them out of step with their world and each other.

Wonderful Tennessee

An implicit subtext of Dancing at Lughnasa—that happiness is either transient or ephemeral and must be lived in for the moment—is made explicit in Wonderful Tennessee. Like Dancing at Lughnasa, it is a nearly plotless play, centered around the interactions and relationships between six characters in a brief twenty-four-hour period. Also like Dancing at Lughnasa, it evokes a paradisiacal realm, compared with which the world the characters inhabit is fallen and compromised.

The six characters are three married couples celebrating the birthday of small-time entrepreneur Terry Martin, who has brought them to Ballybeg Pier to be ferried across to the island of Oelian Draiochta (which translates roughly as “island of mystery”). The island has a mystical history: It was a spectral island that appeared only once every seven years until sailors landed on it and dispelled its enchantment. Terry tells his party that he has bought the island sight unseen, based on cherished memories he has of it from a story his father told him in childhood. However, once their bus has departed, the six are unable to rouse the ferryman to take them across the water, and they are left to spend their time stranded on the shore, looking across at an island they cannot reach and can barely even see.

Typical of Friel’s plays, the island symbolizes an ideal the characters live in hope for but cannot attain. The reality of their lives supports this. Private and group conversations reveal that each is wrestling with unhappiness. Terry’s wife Berna knows that Terry preferred her sister Angela, and she feels guilty that she has not been able to bear him children. Angela’s husband Frank is desperate to publish a book that he hopes will succeed financially and free him from his tedious job as a clerk. Terry’s sister Trish is married to George, who is dying of cancer. Despite their hardships and disappointments, they manage to stay friends and muddle through, bearing out Berna’s contention that “Maybe that’s how most people manage to carry on—‘about to be happy’; the real thing almost within grasp, just a step away . . . but there are periods—occasions—when just being alive is unbearable. . . .” The island is thus emblematic of their very lives, its idyllic aspect fleeting and intangible.

Although a work of theatrical realism, Wonderful Tennessee verges at some points on allegory. The ferryman is named Carlin, surely a play on Charon, who ferries souls to Hades in Greek mythology, and in the closing moments, the characters enact a farewell ritual that symbolically parallels pagan ceremonies rumored to have taken place on the island. Furthermore, the play calls for an intentionally ceremonial staging. It is punctuated at many points with snatches of popular song that the characters sing as a natural part of the festivities and also to express their feelings of the moment. The blending of song and dialogue, somewhat in the manner of classic Greek drama, suggest Friel’s attempt to create a unique vocabulary for expressing the otherwise inarticulable, much as he did with dance in Dancing at Lughnasa. The challenging staging this requires did not meet with universal approval, however, and may have contributed to the play’s premature closing on Broadway after a successful run in London. Nevertheless, New York Times theater critic Frank Rich praised the play as that rare theatrical experience that transported the audience, “however briefly, to that terrifying and hallowed place beyond words.”

Molly Sweeney

In Molly Sweeney, Friel approaches the theme of fleeting happiness from a different angle. The title character is a woman who lives in as close to a state of joy as any of Friel’s characters do. Molly has been blind since shortly after her birth, yet she does not feel handicapped or disabled. Her inability to see has sharpened her other senses to the point where she apprehends much of the world around her, albeit in a way vastly different from sighted people. An excellent swimmer, she feels pity for sighted people, because she thinks that seeing somehow qualifies the sense of total immersion in the activity that she experiences. Molly is drawn very much in the spirit of idealized characters evoked in Friel’s other plays, who are vessels for a kind of mystic wisdom that transcends normal routes of expression.

All of this is stripped away from her when her husband Frank, a man whose zeal for self-improvement and noble causes exceeds his common sense, makes it his mission to restore Molly’s sight. At his urging, Molly has eye surgery. The operation is a success, but the results are devastating. Wrenched from her familiar world into one of new and alien perceptions, she finds herself cut off from the comfort and peace she knew. Unable to return to the world of blindness, she retreats into “blindsight,” a psychological blindness that leaves her in a world her physician describes as “neither sighted nor unsighted, somewhere she hoped was beyond disappointment; somewhere, she hoped, without expectation.”

The play is very much about the difference between “seeing and understanding,” as one character describes it, and it is staged with its the three characters—Molly, Frank, and the ophthalmologist, Mr. Rice—posed at different spaces onstage, reciting their parts in monologues that intersect though they themselves never interact with one another. This novel approach to staging reinforces the sense that the characters talk without communicating, and see without understanding one another. It is yet another example of Friel’s continuing efforts to experiment and seek inventive dramaturgic vehicles suitable to both the form and content of his plays.

Molly Sweeney’s blend of introspective drama, compassionate characterization, and provocative staging is characteristic of Friel’s plays throughout the 1990’s, which treat the personal struggles of characters in emotionally challenging situations with the same gravity and grace as his more politically conscious stage work of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Though Friel continues to evolve as a playwright, he remains a champion of the common person who bears up with dignity under the burden of a world indifferent to his or her right to happiness.