[In the essay below, Deane explores the functions of the "secret stories" that lie at the center of many of Friel's plays.]

A closed community, a hidden story, a gifted outsider with an antic intelligence, a drastic revelation leading to violence—these are recurrent elements in a Brian Friel play. They are co-ordinated in the pursuit of one elusive theme, the link between authority and love. Most of the people in Friel's drama are experts in the maintenance of a persona, or of an illusion upon which the persona depends. But their expertise, which most often takes the form of eloquence and wit, and which is a mode of defence against the oppressions of false authority, has no power to alter reality. So they become articulators of a problem to such a degree that the problem becomes insoluble, so perfectly etched are all its numbing complexities. To be gifted at all, an expert, is to be displaced, a commentator, not a participant, an outsider, not an insider. Yet the sense of displacement is acute in such figures and it is the more profoundly felt when it is expressed for them in the secret or hidden stories of others. The stories are tales of passion, thwarted and violent; the displacement is a condition of lucid weariness, often witty and cruel in its responses. The tension between the two embodiments of thwarted desire disrupts the closed community, undermines its sham system of authority and leads to various kinds of break-down, individual and social. Friel's drama is concerned with the nervous collapse of a culture which has had to bear pressures beyond its capacity to sustain.

The closed community is that of the County Donegal village of Ballybeg, or of sectors within that generic community—monastic as in The Enemy Within (1962), psychological as in Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), sexual-familial as in The Gentle Island (1971) or Living Quarters (1977), political as in The Freedom of the City (1973) or Volunteers (1975). The cast of characters is tightly contained in a quarantined area, enclosed with the infection which is coming to a head on this particular moment, in this particular setting. The dramatic unities of time, place and action are strictly observed but the apparently effortless and often humorous registration of the details of provincial manners helps to disguise the structural tautness which gives these works their symmetry—although Friel's most recent play, The Communication Cord (produced in 1982) reveals more obviously than these others how strictly organized his plays are. The illness which plagues the small community is failure, cast in every conceivable shape, protean but always recognizable. The central failure is one of feeling and, proceeding from that, a failure of self-realization and, deriving from that, the seeking of a refuge in words or work, silence or idiocy, in exile or in a deliberate stifling of unrequitable desire. Every character has his or her fiction; every fiction is generated out of the fear of the truth. But the truth is nevertheless there, hidden in the story which lies at the centre of the play, a story which tells of how authority, divorced from love, became a sham. In Volunteers Keeney draws a distinction between himself and Butt:

All the wildness and power evaporate and all that's left is a mouth. Of course there is a reason—my over-riding limitation—the inability to sustain a passion, even a frivolous passion. Unlike you, Butt. But then your passions are pure—no, not necessarily pure—consistent—the admirable virtue, consistency—a consistent passion fuelled by a confident intellect. Whereas my paltry flirtations are just … fireworks, fireworks that are sparked occasionally by an antic imagination. And yet here we are, spancelled goats complementing each other, suffering the same consequences. Is it ironic? Is it even amusing?

The secret story in this play concerns Smiley, who has been reduced to idiocy by the brutal beatings he received at the hands of the police. It also touches upon Knox, who has also been degraded by the treatment he has received at the hands of the IRA. Most of all, it touches upon their common fate, for Keeney, Pyne, Butt and the others are going to face death at the hands of their comrades in prison once the archaeological excavation, for which they have volunteered, is over. The secret story is in this case, as in many others, a premonition of the violence to come. Its secrecy, which is there to be broken; its violence, which is there to be repeated; its degradation, which is there to be hidden or shunned, all conspire to transform the stage into a 'magic circle', a place into which the audience is being given a privileged insight. On the other hand, the surrounding commentary on this kernel story—that is, the chatter of people who try to preserve themselves from the truth it contains—displays the conditions of their social and personal lives in a sociological spirit, turning the stage into a public exhibition area. So, in Volunteers, the republican prisoners working on the archaeological site on which a new hotel is to be erected, provide us with an image of many of the characteristic political and economic forces in Irish society, all of them governed by corrupt authorities. Equally, in Living Quarters the Butler family, or in The Gentle Island the Sweeney family, or the central trio in The Freedom of the City, all provide us with this public display of existing conditions, of circumstances easily recognized as the sort which would make news—the return of Irish UN troops from a trouble spot, the mass departure of a community from an island, the official killings and inquiries of the Northern situation. Yet the recognizability of the conditions is one of Friel's naturalistic illusions. For the secret story—of Smiler in Volunteers, of Lily in The Freedom of the City, of Manus in The Gentle Island, challenges that recognizability and forces the audience to sense within it an element of mystery, a suppressed quotient of feeling. Clearly, these people are all victims of foul conditions. Their fate is predetermined and all their attempts to escape it are futile. Smiler's mock escape, Manus's invented story about the loss of his arm, Lily's fake reasons for being on the civil rights marches are all illusions, lies created to disguise a truth, their malevolent presence indicated by some physical deformity or mental affliction. The function of the hidden story, when it is uncovered, is to transform the stage as public exhibition area into the stage as private and sacral area. The recognizable social 'meaning' is constantly being undermined by another kind of significance which is more complex and cryptic. The shock of the conclusion finally clarifies this cryptic element. Violence is not a manifestation of the pressures of specifically Irish conditions. In the conclusion we see death, individual death, the death of a way of life or of a social formation, finally confronted by people who have been escaping it all their lives. In the light of that, all authority fails, even the authority of love.

Still, our sympathy or our admiration tends to be given to the people who have no illusions, who are not locked into some conspiracy of discretion or of despair and who regard the world with a liberated and liberating intelligence. Keeney in Volunteers, Skinner in The Freedom of the City, Eamon in Aristocrats, Shane in The Gentle Island, are the most obvious examples. But Keeney and Skinner are killed, Shane is crippled for life, Eamon is bereft with the rest of the O'Donnell family. Further, they are all outsiders, but with an insider's knowledge of the society. They put an antic disposition on, partly as a mode of rejecting authority, partly as a mode of escaping responsibility. But, disengaged in this way, they become mere wordsmiths. Their language is gestural, being in effect nothing more than a series of mimicries, a ventriloquism by performers who run the risk of losing their own voices. The displacement of voice, the switching of vocabularies, always important in a Friel play, is a symptom of the splintering of authority, the failure of any one voice to predominate and become accepted as a standard. The stage machinery of Aristocrats, with its loudspeaker and tape-recorder and its human recorder Hoffnung, is a characteristic example of this. Still, the moment has to come when the gesturing is laid aside and the voice of conviction, the true voice of feeling of, say, Skinner in The Freedom of the City is heard, telling Lily why she marches in Derry:

Because you live with eleven kids and a sick husband in two rooms that aren't fit for animals. Because you exist on a state subsistence that's about enough to keep you alive but too small to fire your guts. Because you know your children are caught in the same morass. Because for the first time in your life you grumbled and someone else grumbled and someone else, and you heard each other, and became aware that there were hundreds, thousands, millions of us all over the world, and in a vague groping way you were outraged. That's what it's all about, Lily. It has nothing to do with doctors and accountants and teachers and dignity and boy scout honour. It's about us—the poor—the majority—stirring in our sleep. And if that's not what it's all about, then it has nothing to do with us.

Such set speeches frequently occur in Friel's plays and they are not confined to the type Skinner represents. Some-times their eloquence is out of character, although usually we feel that, at the point of crisis, the characters are able to draw on resources they never knew they had. But the explanatory, even hectoring voice which emerges, in a kind of authorial overdrive, and spells out 'what it's all about', turns the stage into a platform, the text into a lecture. Dr Dodds, the sociologist in The Freedom of the City, and the various experts called upon by the Widgery-like judge in that play, have similar moments of annunciation. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the voice of the truth-teller and that of the expert. Yet it is important to do so, since the expert is usually someone who knows everything but the truth. In this particular case, is Lily really marching on behalf of the poor, the outcasts of the earth, of whom her mongol child Declan is one? If so, the play is a political one in essence and the object of its complicated structure is the analysis of official injustice, the corruption that is inseparable from authority. Suppression and oppression are so frequently analysed in Friel's drama that it is not difficult to accept him as a political dramatist. But the point bears some further consideration.

Authority and love may be divorced, to the detriment of both, but there is at least the implication that they were once married. In The Enemy Within, St Colmcille discovers that his love for family and for country is beginning to undermine his vocation and his position as abbot in the island community of Iona. In order to give himself wholly to his work he has to destroy the enemy within himself—his fatal attraction to Ireland and home. This attraction has repeatedly led Colmcille into the position of seeming to lend his authority to bloody faction fights. So, with great difficulty and determination, he stifles it. So too in the dialogue between Public and Private Gar in Philadelphia Here I Come, the attraction of Ireland has to be subdued so that the place may be left. In Faith Healer, the attraction has to do with Francis Hardy's hope for a restoration of his strange gift; but it is also an attraction towards sleep and death. In Translations, there are two Irelands, two languages, two kinds of violence, and Owen, who has migrated to the new Ireland, is nevertheless pulled by his sentimental loyalties towards the one he has helped to bury. The unfortunate Lieutenant Yolland is his mirror image in this respect. In all of these cases the repudiation of Ireland carries with it a certain guilt, a sense of betrayal; but equally, to give in to the place is a form of suicide. Ireland is, of course, a metaphor in these contexts as well as a place. It is the country of the young, of hope, a perfect coincidence between fact and desire. It is also the country of the disillusioned, where everything is permanently out of joint, violent, broken. Hugh, the hedge-schoolmaster in Translations, remembers the hope:

The road to Sligo. A spring morning. 1798. Going into battle … Two young gallants with pikes across their shoulders and the Aeneid in their pockets. Everything seemed to find definition that spring—a congruence, a miraculous matching of hope and past and present and possibility. Striding across the fresh, green land. The rhythms of perception heightened. The whole enterprise of consciousness accelerated.

But earlier Hugh had warned the Englishman Yolland, who wanted access to the old Ireland, that

words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen—to use an image you'll understand—it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact.

It hardly needs saying that these two versions of the Irish psychic landscape are enunciated on the brink of violence—the '98 Rebellion and the disappearance of Yolland. On the hither side of violence is Ireland as paradise; on the nether side, Ireland as ruin. But, since we live on the nether side, we live in ruin and can only console ourselves with the desire for the paradise we briefly glimpse. The result is a discrepancy in our language; words are askew, they are out of line with fact. Violence has fantasy and wordiness as one of its most persistent after-effects.

Like Owen in Translations, we can thus give our love to the failed world (Ireland) but our respect to the conquering world (England). But if what can be respected is not loved, and what can be loved cannot be respected, there is little recourse for us but violence. Authority is denied for the sake of the failure that is loved; failure is mocked and hated for the sake of the authority it has lost. Skinner and Lily in The Freedom of the City are caught in the same dilemma as Owen or Hugh in Translations. They have two roles each. One is heroic, that of the oppressed natives in the Mayor's Parlour, later as murdered victims of British Army SLR bullets. The other is the sociologist's categorization of them as creatures of the 'culture of poverty', Bogsiders immersed in the stupor of their condition. Again it is the choice between paradise and ruin. Again it is a choice enforced by violence. Finally neither alternative allows one to live. The native condition, which is that of being human, not Irish, is almost destroyed; the foreign condition of an enforced identity, political or sociological, is also resisted. Struggle is the only action, crisis the only climate.

Such a politics is metonymic of a wider condition. The plays all work as parables in which the development of a particular action contributes to the representation of a general condition. Also, the propositions which abound in these plays and which seem to have a general import when they are directed outward at the audience in an oratorical tour de force, and thus seem to have meaning for the human condition as such, tend to narrow themselves into statements symptomatic of a particular person's plight, or of a culture's specific pressure. This ambivalence of scope in the language of these plays is most clearly manifest in Faith Healer, the play in which the device of metonymy is most openly used or at least most appropriately applied. If we cast the play into the form of a question and look to the text for an answer, we may ask, what is the gift of Francis Hardy and why does it necessarily lead to his death in Ballybeg? And the text, in the voice of Grace Hardy, the wife of Francis, answers the first part of the question so:

Faith healer—faith healing—I never understood it, never. I tried to. In the beginning, I tried diligently—as the doctor might say I brought all my mental rigour to bear on it. But I couldn't even begin to apprehend it—this gift, this craft, this talent, this art, this magic—whatever it was he possessed, that defined him, that was, I suppose, essentially him. And because it was his essence and because it eluded me I suppose I was wary of it. Yes, of course I was. And he knew it. Indeed, if by some miracle Frank could have been the same Frank without it, I would happily have robbed him of it. And he knew that, too—how well he knew that; and in his twisted way read into it the ultimate treachery on my part.

In answer to the second part of the question, the Faith Healer himself, in his last moments, says:

And as I moved across that yard towards them and offered myself to them, then for the first time I had a simple and genuine sense of home-coming. Then for the first time there was no atrophying terror; and the maddening questions were silent. At long last I was renouncing chance.

Hardy's gift is his essence and yet it is subject to chance; only by giving himself over to death does he renounce chance. In doing so he also renounces the gift. The certitude of death is preferable to the vicissitudes of life with (or without) the gift. His capacity to heal others, in other countries, and his incapacity to heal himself except by coming back to his own country, dying back into the place out of which his healing came in the first place, is a strange metonym for the gift in exile, the artist abroad. This association between gift and exile, creativity and death, is more purely stated here than elsewhere in Friel's work. The play throws no political shadow; it provides no action, only four monologues. It shows a man creating his own death by coming home out of exile.

It is the inevitability of death, finally realized, which makes the Faith Healer feel at peace in that last scene. The maimed body which he faces but cannot heal, the instruments in the tractor which will maim him, the 'black-faced macerated baby' buried in Scotland, the weekly parade of cripples who listen to the scratched record of Fred Astaire singing 'The Way You Look Tonight', are all semi-farcical, semi-tragic recognitions that perfection is a desire granted only on the other side of violence, through death. Thus Friel asserts the lethal quality of the gift, the urge to create wholeness out of distortions. So the gift, the stolen fire, is returned to death, to its source. But other things remain. The unique life of Francis Hardy is not repeatable, but as a parable its weight is inherited. It is this weight of inherited failure and the uniqueness of the individual response to it which are both made manifest on Friel's double stage, the exhibition area and the magic circle area. The anguish of the individual life passes over into the communal life through violence, borne in language. The exploration of that difficult transition, the discovery of a series of dramatic forms in which it could be reconnoitred, is central to his achievement and part of the reason for his importance.