[In the following essay, Binnie considers Friel's plays and his involvement with Field Day Theatre Company, drawing parallels to the work of Bertolt Brecht.]

In the ancient and troubled frontier city of Derry, Brian Friel established the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980. He was joined in this bold endeavour by a number of other artists, including the actor Stephen Rea and the poet Seamus Heaney. All of the Board of Directors are Northerners. Their motives, in founding the new company, were to reappraise the political and cultural situation in Northern Ireland as it affects the whole of Ireland. They aim to examine and analyze the established opinions, slogans, myths and war-cries which have gone to the creation of the present troubles in Ireland. Like Brecht's Galileo in his final exchange with Andrea, perhaps like Brecht himself in his final years, on a not dissimilar frontier, Friel and his fellow directors clearly believe that there can, indeed, be a new age, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

The name Field Day has several implications—a day spent away from normal activities, a day spent outdoors, a sports day, a festival, a brawl, and, for example, in such popular usage, as "the critics had a field day," it suggests the chance to assert oneself to the fullest and most triumphant or pleasurable extent. In terms of famous paintings, one thinks of Breughel's rustic holidays, the topsy-turvy world of periodic and necessary excess by which means rampant vitality is contained—a safety valve on the darker, less manageable energies of the people. Brian Friel has chosen the title Field Day wisely, having in mind most of the implications just listed. It is a theatre company which flourishes defiantly in the face of a grim, relentless, daily existence; festive, certainly, but also portentous.

Just as Brecht chose to create his ensemble company right on the border between East and West, in order fully to exploit each side's fears and suspicions of the other in ways which were, ultimately, uniquely creative, so Friel founded his company in the strife-torn city of Derry, right on the edge of British Ireland, artificially cut off from its hinterland of Donegal, now in the Republic (Southern Ireland). During his East Berlin years Brecht used the paradoxical invulnerability provided by the East/West dichotomy to create a theatrical system which now rightly bears his name. Brechtian theatre, or dialectical theatre, became a mature form during these frontier years. As yet, Brian Friel's plays are too diverse in form to be compared to Brecht's later works, yet they may be comparable, in terms of their similar origins on border locations, which are, by their very nature, dialectical.

The aims of Field Day Theatre Company are to create a shared context which might make possible communication across Ireland's border; to give all Irishmen an artistic "fifth province" rising above and covering the whole island, an hypothetical province which would neither accept the North/South division, nor ignore the separate traditional strengths of those on either side. Thus Field Day is located in the North (British Ireland) and works in both North and South, yet has strong reservations about both. The intention is to create an awareness, a sense of the whole country, North and South together, and to examine predominant attitudes to the island as a whole. Friel's artistic development since the formation of Field Day has moved steadily towards a closer integration of historical considerations and contemporary themes, achieved, for example, by examining the role of language as a reflection of national character. He expresses this concern for language in the statement, "We [Irish playwrights] are talking to ourselves as we must, and if we are overheard in America or England, so much the better.

Friel sees contemporary Ireland as being in a state of uneasy confusion, in which it is the dramatist's overwhelming duty to clarify, elucidate, and establish agreed codes, for purposes of communication and discussion. In explicating Friel's play Translations, Seamus Heaney points to the speechless character, Sarah, as a type of Kathleen ni Houlihan (a symbolic figure for Ireland itself), whose difficult struggle to pronounce her own name "constitutes a powerful therapy, a set of imaginative exercises that give her [Ireland] a chance to know and say herself properly to herself again."

The creation of Field Day has forced Friel into a more prominent public role, yet he shuns easy political labels or pat solutions. He sees his role as that of one who creates self-awareness through the critical examination of Irish beliefs, as these are expressed in the contours of everyday speech. For this reason his translation of Chekhov's The Three Sisters avoids the many fine English versions and attempts to make the play accessible to his audience by using identifiably Irish forms of English speech. Reaching his audience through adaptation to Irish speech should not be confused with any belated twitterings over a new Celtic Twilight. In his most recent play, The Communication Cord, Friel makes farcical use of the sentimentalism of artificial traditional. The stage directions read:

His satire makes it clear that there is no going back, that uncritical restoration of the Irish past is no solution to the contemporary malaise. This latest play acts as a humorous corrective to any superficial impression wrongly created by the elegiac mood of the earlier play Translations.

To what extent can we call Friel a political writer? He is not committed to any particular party or faction. Yet his later plays, especially, are dependent upon the dialectical method to the extent that the spectator may feel that he is watching a particularly fine debate. Undoubtedly Friel himself would not describe himself as a Brechtian, yet the effect he and his company are having on audiences in contemporary Ireland is not far removed from the political excitement achieved by Brecht during his consciously ambivalent Berliner Ensemble years.

Perhaps a sense of the directors' intentions can be gathered from the series of pamphlets published by Field Day as a separate activity from that of play production. The aim of the pamphleteers is to re-examine those aspects of Irish life which have come to be accepted uncritically. Twelve pamphlets have so far been issued by Field Day, and the public response has been exciting. Naturally, many reviews have been polemical, but the over-all result has been to raise the level of critical debate about issues which have for far too long been shrouded in blind, partisan myth. Looking over the titles, or sub-titles, of these pamphlets one is reminded of nothing so much as of the theatre songs or scene captions from such Brecht plays as The Measures Taken or The Mother. Typical pamphlet headings are "An Open Letter," "Civilians and Barbarians," "Myth and Motherland," "Dynasties of Coercion," and "The Apparatus of Repression." It is characteristic of Field Day, that when the first half-dozen pamphlets were collected and published in one volume, this included, by invitation, an afterword by Denis Donoghue, whose comments were far from laudatory. This is a telling detail about the publishing aspect of the company. Clearly, as with the plays, the purpose of the pamphlets is to encourage discussion and to question mindless obedience to any one cause. Despite this intention, there has been a tendency to berate Field Day simply for raising such issues. One is reminded that it has taken a critic of the stature of John Willett something like thirty years to shake up popular notions about Brecht's hard-line adherence to one unique system of belief, by repeatedly drawing attention to Brecht's inbred scepticism and detachment. Let us hope that the detachment of the Field Day Company and its directors will be accepted more readily.

The theatrical function of Field Day is organised on lines more akin to the early productions of Planchon in Lyon, or even to the pre-war productions of Brecht, than to those of the Berliner Ensemble. Using tiny budgets, mostly raised from the Arts Councils of both Northern Ireland and the Republic, the company manages to commission one new play each year, to workshop this production extensively and to tour the play to every variety of make-shift venue, before audiences at every level of theatrical experience, holding diverse political or religious persuasions, and living on both sides of the border.

Friel is not the only playwright whose works are produced by Field Day. The directors have encouraged younger writers both in the creating of new works, such as Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross, and in the writing of Irish adaptations of foreign classics, such as Derek Mahon's High Time—a version of Moliere's The School for Husbands. The plays are first presented in the town hall, or Guildhall, of Derry, on an improvised stage which provides little more than Frank Fay's "two planks and a passion." After their initial run they go on tour. The latest production, Kilroy's Double Cross, transferred to the Royal Court Theatre, London, for a very successful run. The company has few constant elements: there is no permanent roster of actors or crew, rather members are hired to meet the demands of each play. Nevertheless, Stephen Rea, one of the founders of Field Day, has either directed or acted in all of the plays produced so far, and a number of other actors re-appear fairly frequently. Clearly this does not constitute an ensemble in any sense that Brecht would have used the term, but, given the financial constraints of producing theatre in such seemingly unfavourable conditions, there is still a remarkable element of continuity. Friel and Rea are closely involved in all planning and selection. The plays produced so far demonstrate considerable variety of form, yet there appears to be a consistency of purpose—to challenge accepted notions, to counteract lethargy or despair, to make Irish men and women more aware of their own responsibilities and potentiality, to create open-ended speculation, and to do so with wit and style.

There can be few dramatists writing during the last thirty years who have not felt the impact of Brecht's theatrical innovations. Brian Friel is no exception. One need only think of the use of the double (or alter-ego) in Philadelphia Here I Come, the separate but interlocking monologues of Faith Healer, or the chorus of speaking corpses which ends The Freedom of the City, to recall Friel's attention to experimental form. While his more recent plays, Translations and The Communication Cord, depend upon more conventionally realistic settings, experimentation continues in the plays of younger writers within the group. With considerable success, Thomas Kilroy's Double Cross explores the complexity of the Irish/English relationship. One actor plays both the sycophantic Brendan Bracken (Churchill's Minister of Information) and the quisling, William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw). The juxtaposition of these two Irish characters within the performance of a single actor, manifesting different aspects of the love-hate relationship between the Irish and the English, is a dramaturgical conceit worthy of Brecht, and in the tradition of Brecht's doubling of Shen Te and Shui Ta in the Good Person of Setzuan.

This fine new play by one of the younger Field Day writers has a unique structure and effectiveness. Thematically, it raises the same questions as Friel's best known play, Translations. Both plays present the effects of Irish emotionalism in face of the rationality of the more powerful and ponderous neighbour, England. While Kilroy's play examines this characteristic in terms of personality, Friel's treatment used historical incident as his starting point. The early nineteenth-century process of standardization which the central British government imposes upon the local inhabitants, in particular the systematic Anglicizing of Irish place-names, becomes a telling metaphor for the relationship of one country to the other. Friel presents the resultant loss of Irish self-confidence in socio-linguistic terms—briefly, language creates history; a people who do not keep faith with the historical names of their location lose their identity; a people without a sense of their own history become vulnerable for take-over. Vagueness about the past leads from a loss of self-confidence either to hopelessness or to violent crisis. Thus, without spelling it out, the relationship between the historic context and present Irish problems is relayed to the contemporary audience. Yet the structure of the play is complex, its subtle effects unfolding with reflection rather than immediately. Friel was concerned that the play should not be received as a simple lament for what is past, that it should make its political point quietly but clearly. His fears were unwarranted. The play became a new national classic almost immediately. Though the play is not Brechtian in structure or style, its theme reminds one of Brecht's warning "one must not build on the good old things, but on the bad new ones." Its historical setting does not detract from its relevance to the contemporary audience. Its immense popularity may owe something to its elegiac charm, but its gentle satire on Irish passivity has not been lost. If we try to evaluate the play in Brechtian terms, it must be through the Brecht of quiet subversion rather than the Brecht of chilling rationality and didacticism.

Each playwright, Brecht and Friel, has mastered the implication of his own frontier location, and has used it in his own way. Brecht's ambitions were greater—his concern was with global, rather than with local issues; though the larger questions can be seen, at least in part, as having arisen out of his specific situation. Each playwright has shown his genius in the individuality of his plays, but, also, in the important effect he has had on younger dramatists. Brecht's legacy is all about us; Kriel's is best described by Thomas Kilroy, in the preface to his recently published text of Double Cross:

This play could not have been written without Field Day. Some years ago Field Day asked me to write one of their Pamphlets and I completely failed to do so. It was round about that time that I decided to try and write a play for the company instead, addressing the kind of topics which Field Day has restored to serious debate in Ireland. For me, Field Day is the most important movement of its kind in Ireland since the beginning of this century. It has provided a platform for the life of the mind, of whatever persuasion, at a time when mindlessness threatens to engulf us all.