SOURCE: "Brian Friel: Transcending the Irish National Pastime," in The New Criterion, Vol. 10, pp. 35-41.

[In the following essay, Tillinghast discusses the function of language in Friel's plays and its pertinence to issues of Irish society.]

HUGH: Indeed, Lieutenant. A rich language. A rich literature. You'll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. I suppose you could call us a spiritual people.

OWEN: (Not unkindly; more out of embarrassment before the Lieutenant) Will you stop that nonsense, Father?

HUGH: Nonsense? What nonsense?… Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception—a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to … inevitabilities. (To OWEN) Can you give me the loan of half-a-crown?

"How these people blather on!", the London Sunday Times's drama critic, John Peter, wrote recently about a new production of Sean O'Casey's Plough and the Stars. Irish playwrights have, over the years, confirmed the nation's reputation for talk by mounting plays which live or die by their characters' ability to keep an audience enthralled by language. From The School for Scandal by Sheridan (one forgets he was Irish) to The Importance of Being Earnest by Wilde, to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, we remember the great Irish plays for their dialogue rather than for the inventiveness of their dramatic structure. One tends to think of Beckett as an international phenomenon rather than as an Irishman; but how quintessentially Irish he was to put his characters in trashcans or bury them up to their necks in sand so that, their movements severely restricted, they were free to spellbind with their talk! After eight hundred years of invasion, military occupation, economic plundering, and systematic attempts to eradicate their native religion and culture, what has been left to the Irish other than talk? Talk is the national pastime.

Among the myriad ironies of Irish history is that even after the colonizing British had virtually stamped out the Gaelic language, the Irish went to work on English itself and transformed it into the colorful hybrid that is spoken on the island today. This variety of English, though it largely uses standard vocabulary, has taken on the rhythms, syntax, intonations, and often even the grammar of Irish, which, though almost extinct, has managed while dying to inseminate another linguistic organism with its inventiveness, its evasions and qualifications, its elaborate and ambiguous courtesies.

Brian Friel, the foremost living Irish playwright, author of over twenty plays and a prolific short-story writer, has consistently created characters who have defined themselves through talk. While his focus on language places him firmly within Irish theatrical tradition, his insistence that language is a tool of oppression both from above and from within has put the politics of language at the center of his concerns. This emphasis is unprecedented on the Irish stage. Seamus Deane, in his book Celtic Revivals (1985), has made the point that Friel, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1929 and grew up in Derry, a Northern city plagued by chronic unemployment and sectarian tensions between the Protestant descendants of British colonists and the native Catholic Irish, grew up in a world where failure and frustration were a constant, and politics was a given. Friel, unlike writers from more comfortable backgrounds who "discover" politics and see it as a solution, regards politics as part of the problem, as basic as bad weather.

Despite modernization and the growth of a new spirit of optimism in Ireland following the economic boom of the Sixties and the country's entry into the European Community, the stereotype—amounting almost to a cultural icon—of the brilliant failure, the great talker who accomplishes nothing, still persists. No other Irish writer has been as forthright as Friel in identifying talk, not as a way to charm, but as a temperamental response to, and compensation for, failure—itself seen as resulting from centuries of defeat and suppression.

While Friel and the other writers who founded the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, partially as a way of addressing the political crisis in the north, have made a point of writing especially for an Irish audience, his plays make clear to the non-Irish playgoer that oceans of sentimentality and prejudice keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity. The sentimentality is likely to be initiated by Irish-Americans who from a position of relative prosperity are free to romanticize The Ould Sod. The prejudice is more likely to come from the British who still, after all these hundreds of years, seem unable to admit how they crushed the Irish nation.

Beyond his political analysis of the national passion for talk, to which I shall return, Friel stands out among Irish playwrights by his deft touch with theatrical devices and dramatic structure. At a performance of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), the audience may not at first realize—unless they have read the play, or unless they are serious types who arrive at the theater early and study the program before the house lights go down—that the two young men they see talking onstage are, as Friel's notes put it, "two views of the same man." What the audience apprehends are two characters unnervingly familiar with each other's thoughts and lives—or rather with that single life they constitute as private and public aspects of the same character. Considerable time passes before we notice that Gar (Private) is invisible to the other characters and that, in the words of the stage notes, Gar (Public) "never sees him and never looks at him. One cannot look at one's alter ego."

Friel's employment of this and similar devices is both bold and simple. The confidence of his dramatic imagination is apparent in Dancing at Lughnasa—pronounced "Loo-nusuh"—(1990) a triumph in its Abbey Theatre premiere and winner of the Olivier Theatre Award for Best Play of 1990 in London. […] As the play opens, Michael stands downstage, reminiscing to the audience about his childhood, to one side of the set's rendering of an Irish country kitchen, where the family spends much of its time. The kitchen in the Abbey production was realistic but set at an angle to the audience, with its front and side walls removed so that the space outside the house was not blocked from the vision of either actors or audience. Gerard McSorley, who played Michael at the Abbey, wore a good but rumpled suit and the dark shirt and solid-colored tie of someone in the arts, journalism, advertising, etc. It was clear both from his dress and his accent that he had come some distance from his upbringing in Donegal, the remotest and "wildest" Irish country. As the action of the play begins, the child Michael is meant to be sitting on the ground outside the cottage, making kites, and his mother and aunts address him and respond to him, though the child is invisible and his remarks are assumed rather than heard.

More radical and more difficult, since the illusion must be carried off not visually but by dialogue alone, is the pretense that most of the characters in Translations (1981)—though of course the play is in English—speak Irish, which is their only language other than a smattering of Greek and Latin they learn from their "hedge" schoolmaster. Dialogue like the following is a bit disorienting:

MAIRE: Sum fatigatissima.

JIMMY: Bene! Optime!

MAIRE: That's the height of my Latin. Fit me better if I had even that much English.

JIMMY: English? I thought you had some English?

MAIRE: Three words …

In Living Quarters (1978), using the non-naturalistic character Sir as an omniscient guide who stage-manages the Butler family through their shared catastrophe, Friel deconstructs plot as a device for revealing the truth. Such ploys, sometimes outlandish but very clear-cut once the audience has accepted the illusion, give Friel's plays a satisfying crispness on the stage, a reassuring sense that what we are witnessing is guided by a sure hand.

Faith Healer (1980) deserves mention here because it represents a crucial moment in Friel's development. In the Fifties his short stories appeared frequently in The New Yorker, and perhaps their popularity owed something to the American taste for the occasional glass of Irish sentimentality. In Philadelphia, the play that established Friel's reputation on the New York stage, Gar (Private)'s palaver smoothed over, in performance at least, dark truths about the desperate conspiracy in rural Ireland to strangle any attempt to rise above the stultifying influence of the Church, the schools, and a class structure that is all the more rigid for having such a short distance between its cellar and attic. But Friel later got himself branded as what in Ireland is called a Republican—i.e., an IRA supporter and exponent of violence—and he suffered at the box office as a result.

Faith Healer may be seen as a gesture of defiance by Friel as an artist. The play has no political surround. Nor has it a conventional dramatic structure. Instead it daringly structures itself around four monologues, delivered in turn by the play's three characters. Radical in construction, it is at the same time utterly traditional, utterly Irish one might say—because it depends completely on the Irish genius for captivating an audience, whether in a pub, in someone's kitchen, or in the theater, by telling a story. The easy approach to the leading role would be to play Frank Hardy, the faith healer of the title, as a charlatan. The problem is that Frank is not really a fake. He has the gift—on certain nights. I should think the actor would find the parallels to his own art a challenge, and more. James Mason played the role in its first production, at the Long-acre Theater in New York. I saw Donal McCann—whom moviegoers will remember as Gabriel in John Huston's film of Joyce's story "The Dead"—as Frank in the 1990 Abbey revival. What one could never forget about his performance was the stillness, the sense of nothingness almost, from which his rendering of the character sprang. As he stood motionless on the bare stage, risking the longest pauses I have ever heard and getting away with them, one glimpsed the abyss from which the human enterprise proceeds.

The sense that the play represented, for its author, not merely a comeback, but more than that—a definition of himself as an artist—is borne out in resemblances between the faith healer and the playwright or fictionalist. "It wasn't that he was simply a liar," his wife, Grace, says about Frank, "it was some compulsion he had to adjust, to refashion, to re-create everything around him. Even the people who came to him … yes, they were real enough, but not real as persons, real as fictions, his fictions, extensions of himself …"

The high-spirited banter of Gar (Private) in Philadelphia consists of asides audible only by stage convention: remarks Gar (Public) makes to himself. They delight the audience because they remind us of our own inner commentaries. For Gar O'Donnell himself, though, they serve a complex and ambivalent function. Interior dialogue is, first of all, a survival mechanism in this character who exists as his father's employee in the family grocery and dry-goods business in a small town in Ireland in the Fifties. On the other hand his rich inner life facilitates Gar's further isolation, because providing as it does an outlet for his humor, cynicism, idealism, ambition, and hostility, it prevents him from confronting openly his frustrations in the public arena.

While in performance the fine talker familiar from Irish life and literature has his way with the audience, who leave the theater under the spell of his charm, all that fine talk constitutes, Friel suggests, a kind of pathology—a character's means not only of surviving psychically through what Skinner in Freedom of the City (1974) calls "defensive flippancy" but of managing to keep any hard self-analysis from penetrating his defenses. In Aristocrats (1980) Casimir, a dotty fabulist, lives in a world of his own invention, wherein his ancestors rub elbows with the famous, as at the birthday party for Balzac in Vienna which he "remembers" his grandfather telling him about:

Everybody was there: Liszt and George Sand and Turgenev and Mendelssohn and the young Wagner and Berlioz and Delacroix and Verdi—and of course Balzac. Everybody. It went on for days. God knows why Grandfather was there—probably gate-crashed.

A foil to this highly amusing blather is Tom Hoffnung, an American academic doing research on "recurring cultural, political and social modes in the upper strata of Roman Catholic society in rural Ireland since the act of Catholic Emancipation," as he puts it. To which Casimir, taken aback, replies, "Good heavens. Ha-ha." Tom, with the utmost tact, questions the veracity of Casimir's fables: "A few details, Casimir; perhaps you could help me with them?" Even when he catches Casimir out in all sorts of improbabilities and patent lies, he remains gentle and apologetic: "I make little mistakes like that all the time myself. My mother worked for the Bell Telephone Company and until I went to high school I thought she worked for a Mr. Bell who was my uncle for God's sake …" Casimir manages to fabulize even this, getting a huge laugh from the audience by saying a few minutes later, "I suspect he may be a very wealthy man: his uncle owns the Bell Telephone Company."

Friel characters often maintain fictions about themselves, using talk, of course, as a way of supporting these fictions. As in the classic English mystery novel of the Thirties, the action of these plays takes place within a closed community—usually adhering to the classical unities of time, place, and action. The friction of interaction between characters wears these fictions away, and the secret that lies behind the fiction is revealed. In Translations the action occurs in the classroom of an Irish "hedge" school of the 1830s; in Freedom in the Lord Mayor's parlor in the Guildhall, Deny; in Faith Healer on a stage that simulates the provincial hired halls where Frank Hardy failed or succeeded in working his healing magic. The three characters, Frank, Grace, and their cockney manager, Teddy, form a family of sorts.

An observer of Irish society might be tempted to identify the Church as the nation's most potent institution. But Tom, the family priest in Living Quarters, occupies (though not in his own view) a position only a step above Commandant Frank Butler's personal servant:

SIR: [reading from a ledger in which he has written out the family's story] "'Is Uncle Tom coming with us?' they'd say. And he did. Always. Everywhere. Himself and the batman—in attendance."

TOM: That's one way of—

SIR. "—and that pathetic dependence on the Butler family, together with his excessive drinking make him a cliché, a stereotype. He knows this himself—"

The Canon, played by Derry Power in the Second Age production of Philadelphia I saw in Dublin last winter, got a huge laugh at his first appearance onstage, his white hair and lobster-red face triggering an immediate shock of recognition, as Gar (Private) muttered "Bugger the Canon!" Like Uncle Tom in Living Quarters, this priest is a harmless old parasite whom no one takes seriously. Here he is arriving for his nightly game of draughts with S. B. O'Donnell:

CANON: She says I wait till the rosary's over and the kettle's on … hee-hee-hee.

S. B.: She's a sharp one, Madge.

CANON: "You wait," says she, "till the rosary's over and the kettle's on!"

The schoolmaster, another brick in the wall of the Irish village, gives Gar, as a going-away present, a book of his poems ("I had them printed privately last month. Some of them are a bit mawkish but you'll not notice any distinction") before touching him up for the loan of ten shillings on his way to the pub.

But the observer I invoked in the previous paragraph would be mistaken if he gave the Church pride of place among Irish institutions. The family, that prototype of the closed community, is the prime focus of Brian Friel's analytical dissection of Irish society. Why the family is an even mightier force in Ireland than elsewhere may be explained in part by the country's history. Though there were petty kings in Ireland as far back as its history can be traced, Ireland never had the centralized government of countries like England. Loyalty always meant loyalty to a clan. When Ireland was forced into the British Empire, the family provided one of the few available defenses against the redcoats and the landlord.

I have mentioned how the three characters in Faith Healer form an impromptu family, and how Tom in Living Quarters clings pathetically to the Butler family. Likewise Madge, the housekeeper in Philadelphia, gives Gar the maternal love he never received from his mother, who died three days after giving birth to him. The play's central pathos, though, resides in Gar's and his father S. B.'s inability to connect. The moment that Gar remembers fondly from childhood involves a blue boat in which father and son once went fishing. When Gar finally brings himself to mention the boat, this is his father's response:

S. B.: (Justly, reasonably) There was a brown one belonging to the doctor, and before that there was a wee flat-bottom—but it was green—or was it white? I'll tell you, you wouldn't be thinking of a punt—it could have been blue—one that the curate had down at the pier last summer—

Once Gar has gone to bed on his last night at home before emigrating to America, his father tenderly relates to Madge some moments he recalls from Gar's childhood. But they can never say these things to each other. The bonds between parent and child are parodied in the play when Gar (Public) discusses with his friend Joe his decision to emigrate:

JOE: Lucky bloody man. I wish I was you.

PUBLIC: There's nothing stopping you, is there?

JOE: Only that the mammy planted sycamore trees last year, and she says I can't go till they're tall enough to shade the house.

PUBLIC: You're stuck for another couple of days, then.

To put broader political issues in a larger context, Friel's favorite ploy is to bring an "expert," like Tom Hoffnung in Aristocrats, onstage—or, in Freedom, Dr. Dodds, another American professor, who announces: "I'm a sociologist and my field of study is inherited poverty or the culture of poverty or more accurately the subculture of poverty." Dr. Dodd's ideas simplify the characters, but do not ultimately distort them. That the subculture of poverty provides the chronically poor with strategies for self-definition and survival will find little disagreement. But a balance of viewpoint is achieved by the presence and the dialogue of characters who actually come from "the subculture of poverty," and who are more likely to be talking about things like how their feet hurt, or whether the horses they bet on have won or lost. These characters—or some of them, at any rate—are not incapable of analyzing their own predicaments:

SKINNER: If I'm sick, the entire wisdom of the health authority is at my service. And should I die, the welfare people would bury me in style. It's only when I'm alive and well that I'm a problem.

Friel's cultural explorations in his latest play, Dancing at Lughnasa, are both broader and more dramatic than anything he has attempted before. Early in the play the casual language of the characters establishes a framework or "civilized" Christian contempt for all that is "pagan," non-European, uncontrollable. The new wireless set, which Maggie, the joker of the family, at first wants to call "Lugh, after the old Celtic God of the Harvest" (this is the narrator Michael's voice), has thrown the household into disarray here in the summer of 1936. One of the sisters calls two of the others, who have hiked up their skirts and are dancing, "A right pair of pagans, the two of you." But the "voodoo" radio is not alone in disrupting this tightly controlled household. Living a short distance from the imaginary town of Ballybeg (where most of Friel's plays are set), the Mundys are "townies" who hold themselves above the country people—particularly the back-country folk who celebrate the druidic festival of Lughnasa. "Pagan" influences, though, seep irresistibly into the Mundys' lives.

Some of the play's funniest moments are provided by Michael's Uncle Jack, a priest who has been repatriated from Africa not, as we at first are told, because of poor health but because, during his years in mythical Ryanga, he has been converted to the wisdom of the "pagan" religion the natives follow. Jack often finds himself using the pronoun "we" when describing Ryangan customs: "That's what we do in Ryanga when we want to please the spirits—or to appease them: we kill a rooster or a young goat." Significantly, Jack has come to think in Swahili and is having a hard time recovering his English: "When Europeans call, we speak English."

In answer to Maggie's having asked whether, if they went to Ryanga, Jack could find husbands for the four sisters, Jack replies: "I couldn't promise four men but I should be able to get one husband for all of you." Not a bad solution to the Mundy sisters' problems, since "the husband and his wives and his children make up a small commune where everybody helps everybody else and cares for them." The schoolteacher Kate's response brings the house down:

KATE: It may be efficient and you may be in favor of it, Jack, but I don't think it's what Pope Pius XI considers to be the holy sacrament of matrimony. And it might be better for you if you paid just a bit more attention to our Holy Father and a bit less to the Great Goddess … Iggie.

A few moments later, Michael's errant father, Gerry, dancing with one of Michael's mother's sisters to the tune of "Anything Goes," hints that group marriage might suit him very well. Later we learn that he has another wife and family in Wales. So in this and other ways Jack may be correct in saying "In some respects [the Ryangans are] not unlike us."

Having identified the family as his characters' major frustration, Friel asks: as constricting, as repressive, as the family may be, where would we be without its support? Kate, head of the predominantly female family, puts it this way:

You work hard at your job. You try to keep the home together. You perform your duties as best you can—because you believe in responsibilities and obligations and good order. And then suddenly, suddenly you realize that hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile it can't be held together much longer. It's all about to collapse, Maggie.

That provincial Irish life is hag-ridden by failure and small-mindedness, that the country still has a long mile to go before shaking off its post-colonial mentality, in no way diminishes the humor, good-heartedness, and courage of its people. Certainly it makes little sense to speak of Ireland as Ben, the Episcopalian from America, speaks of the United States: "It's just another place to live, Elise: Ireland—America—what's the difference?" On the one hand Ireland's best and brightest are constantly leaving, asking themselves, from Camden Town to South Boston and the Bronx to Sydney: "God, Boy, why do you have to leave? Why? Why?" Gar asks himself this question on the eve of his departure from Ballybeg, only to answer: "I don't know. I—I—I don't know." For the exiles in Friel's plays, according to Seamus Deane, "their ultimate perception is that fidelity to the native place is a lethal form of nostalgia." If emigration opens up a dream world of infinite possibility, home is where everything is known. Frank Hardy, returning to Ireland, sensing he will die there, concludes, "At long last I was renouncing chance."

And yet for all that, Friel sees in Ireland an authenticity of culture and personality, an integral society, unchanged in essence since the Middle Ages. In Philadelphia, Friel identifies Ireland—and he is only partly ironic here—with the ancien régime, having Gar O'Donnell recite as a recurrent motif Edmund Burke's paean to pre-Revolutionary France: "It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision …"

A play is not a tissue of ideas, however, or even of words, but rather a spectacle, an experience. Leaving a Brian Friel play, looking for a taxi or hurrying to the pub before closing time, one is less likely to feel depressed by the puritanical repressiveness of small-town Ireland than heartened by an impression of the human spirit asserting itself in the face of impediments: Gar's mordant asides; the risky improvisations of Skinner, who, just before stepping outside into Guildhall Square in Derry, where he will be slaughtered by automatic weapons fire from British troops, signs himself in the visitors' book in the mayor's office: "Freeman of the city." And remembering Lughnasa, one smiles, thinking of the play's most celebrated (and, significantly, almost wordless) scene, where the Mundy sisters, inspired by music from their "voodoo" radio, break into spontaneous dance, a pure expression of defiance and transcendence.