Brian Friel Plays 2 (2 page)

Dancing
at
Lughnasa
is, plainly, a memory play. It may be compared in this regard to Williams’s
The
Glass
Menagerie
(1944). Both plays are set in the year 1936, on the cusp of the Second World War; both have a narrator who speaks for the author and who is also the central consciousness; both explore the pathos of loved ones incapable of side-stepping, as the artist-narrator himself must (though not without guilt), the snares set by family and community. But the differences between the two plays are equally important. The main ones are cultural and anthropological. Where Williams re-enacts the classical American need, as first articulated by Huckleberry Finn, to ‘light out for the Territory ahead of the rest’ and find a new frontier, Friel re-enacts the Irish awareness that far-off hills are green and going into exile a tragic condition. Further, there is no correspondence in Williams to the rich, ritualistic material of dance and religious celebration which in Friel’s play arises from the bringing together of residual Celtic myth and modern
African vibrancy. Father Jack would be unthinkable in Tennessee Williams’s St Louis.

Memory is the mother of the Muses; memory is what engenders poetry. On the other hand, as old Hugh says in
Translations
, ‘to remember everything is a form of
madness
’. Selection and compression are necessary to what Friel calls ‘the artist’s truth’, which is subjective. There is an analogy here with Friel’s ‘making history’ in other plays. Experience, or personal history, is also subject to the artist’s manipulation for purposes other and perhaps higher than establishment of empirical truth. In ‘Self-Portrait’, published in 1972, Friel discusses ‘a particular memory of a particular day … a moment of happiness caught in an album’. But the childhood memory, rather like Gar’s sustaining memory in
Philadelphia
of fishing with his father, is blatantly fallacious in the details recalled. Human memory, Friel says, is solipsistically creative: ‘The fact is a fiction.’ The whole of
Faith
Healer
is based on this idea. Friel’s aesthetic is in that sense quite the opposite of nostalgic. He does not recall in order unavailingly to bewail the loss of youth (in that delicious self-abuse which is the hallmark of inferior art) but in order to set before the spectator or reader the centrality of each individual’s self-made universe. The father who comes to this insight in the short story ‘Among the Ruins’ reflects: ‘The past did have meaning. It was neither reality nor dreams…. It was simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving.’ This is the key to Friel’s consistent use of memory in his plays. Thus in
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
Michael finally remembers ‘that summer in 1936’ as ‘simultaneously actual and illusory’.

This simultaneity is extraordinary. The tableau the audience sees just before Michael’s final speech is ‘lit in a very soft, golden light so that the tableau we see is almost, but not quite, in a haze’. It is this doubleness, this ambiguity, this ‘almost but not quite’, which lends to the
play its hypnotic, absorbing power. It enacts loss and imaginative recovery, age and childhood, the decadence of outworn myth and the vigour of residual ritual, parodic dance and the dance of real joy, the union of the sacred and the secular, homecoming and departure, the past and the future, all the rhythms of life’s resilience in the face of injustice, breakdown, lies and double dealing symbolized in those primitive-faced kites doomed never to get off the ground.

Wonderful
Tennessee
could hardly be more different from
Dancing
at
Lughnasa.
In some ways it is a bolder, more uncompromising play, closer to Beckett than to Tennessee Williams. A Dublin wit described it as
‘Waiting
for
Godot
meets
The
Bacchae’
,
but this, like a lot of Dublin wit, is clever rather than profound. It implies a gauche inability to control the register or level of dramatic
communication
, whereas Friel’s intertextuality is invariably knowing if not self-reflexive. He is postmodernist at least in that sense: in his adept manipulation of allusion, quotation and style. If there is a clash of styles in
Wonderful
Tennessee
it is very deliberate.

There is a very serious purpose underlying
Wonderful
Tennessee.
It is, in some respects, a harsh condemnation of contemporary Irish society, what Friel had in 1972 scorned as ‘the vodka-and-tonic society’ of ‘permissive Dublin’. This is the stuff of Hugh Leonard’s social satires, for example in
The
Patrick
Pearse
Motel
(1971) or (more profoundly) in
Summer
(1974). Friel’s venture into Leonard’s territory is, however, under his own banner: as ever, a palimpsest of social, historical, popular cultural and literary sources. Ballads, tin-pan-alley, negro spirituals, and Roman Catholic hymns vie with aborted stories from a range of traditional motifs to make up a multi-layered text.

Avoiding conventional dramatic plotting,
Wonderful 
Tennessee
presents a conflict between a place and a group of people. Out of that conflict certain adjustments and arrivals at decision are made possible among the group. In the course of that process, where no single figure or consciousness dominates or serves as filter of meaning, a range of philosophical, moral and social attitudes is displayed and severely tested. In the end there is a humbling of expectations and a re-charging of moral energies.

This use of a place is poetic in the sense that Seamus Heaney’s use of landscape in, say,
Station
Island
is poetic: the landscape itself seems spiritually possessed. This is altogether different from the usual use of place on stage, even in Chekhov, where all that is required are signs and synecdoche. In other words, space on stage is basically mimetic, as conveyed semiotically, but is usually also representative:
this
room is all the other possible rooms in society and so is symbolic. Stage design usually tries to combine a sense of the real (the ‘lived-in’) and the metonymic (the representative). Even where the Greeks and the Elizabethans used a
skene
or physical building as setting the convention was that this structure could assume an identity, a location, at the playwright’s will: now Thebes, now Athens, or now the exterior of Macbeth’s castle in Scotland, now the interior of King Edward’s palace in England. But for
Wonderful
Tennessee
Friel uses an adaptation of the Greek
skene
which is also and recognizably an old pier by the sea. The designer for the Abbey production, Joe Vanek, spent a week ‘up and down every inlet and pier on the Donegal coast’ before designing a set which was ‘a kind of fusion of parts of them all’. Yet in Friel’s own stage description the stone pier has a history also: ‘It was built in 1905 but has not been used since the hinterland became depopulated many decades ago.’ From the start, the pier has a presence, a personality; it is like a temple in that its solitude emanates
a spiritual atmosphere. It is thus not inert, a mere designation of place, but a living, sacred space. Indeed, at the opening of Act II the morning light ‘enfolds’ the pier ‘like an aureole’ or saint’s halo. The emptiness and the silence all around are strongly emphasized in the opening stage direction: ‘Silence and complete stillness … an environment of deep tranquillity and peace’. The conflict in the play is between these established values and the disorder and restlessness of the human party which invades the setting.

For the story of the ‘island of otherness’,
Oileán
Draíochta
(literally, ‘Magic Island’), which the pier silently guards, Friel draws on the long tradition of voyage literature (‘immram’) in early Irish culture, for example
The
Voyage
of
Saint
Brendan.
Subtitled
Journey
to
the
Promised
Land,
this text was written in Latin
c.
AD
800 and often translated, most recently by John J. O’Meara in 1976. Yet it is the contrast that counts between the meaningful spiritual sea-voyage of Saint Brendan and the absurd non-voyage of Friel’s modern would-be pilgrims. At the same time, the fragile Berna (for in Friel’s later work women are usually both frail and visionary) understands the purpose of pilgrims to the island: ‘To remember again – to be reminded … To be in touch again – to attest.’ Here there is a link back to
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
and Michael’s account of dancing as being ‘in touch with some otherness’. It is perhaps the re-definition of ‘only connect’ as an answer to twentieth-century alienation. It is a reminder of the sacred at the root of the simplest, most commonplace routines.

But the six characters in
Wonderful
Tennessee
are in search of whatever healing from the island which the pier oversees. The island is their ‘named destination’, as Spain was for Gerry Evans in
Dancing
at
Lughnasa
and as Abyssinia was to be for Frank in
Molly
Sweeney.
In each case the destination is illusory. This party-loving group, so
patently ‘lost’ and ‘unhappy’, as they declare from first entrance, find themselves challenged by the landscape, where there is ‘nothing from here to Boston except a derelict church – without a roof’. The placing of a church here, abandoned and roofless, reinforces the motif of religious starvation. The six characters only slowly make any real connection, among themselves or with this landscape and among these ruins.

Although the waiting for the boatman Carlin who never comes appears to echo Beckett, the contrast is far more significant. In
Waiting
for
Godot
(1953) the bleakness is emphasized by the repetition in Act II of the pointless routines of Act I. But at the start of Act II of
Wonderful
Tennessee
the stage direction calls for a lighting effect for ‘a new day’, namely, ‘a pristine and brilliant morning sunlight that enfolds the pier like an aureole and renovates everything it touches’. The last phrase is significant. In Beckett there is never renovation (compare also
Happy
Days
[1961]), but rather repetition and entropy. Friel, however, wishes to suggest, in Joyce’s phrase, the sanctification of the ordinary. His characters begin to stir towards renovation. Frank sees and is overwhelmed by seeing the dolphin, whose dance, like Hopkins’s windhover, stirred his heart in hiding. Frank’s experience brings him into silent alliance with Berna. Then Terry’s story, a brief historical excursion into the Ireland of the 1930s, touches everybody. All parody stops. The characters no longer regard the island as Edenic, but rather as readers of Friel will regard the ‘gentle island’ (title of his 1971 anti-pastoral): as a mirror of Ireland’s complex, ambivalent combination of violence and the sacred. Since the island is orientated in the midst of the audience it follows that the audience is involved in the circular process uniting the perspectives from island and pier. Of course, the audience is free, like Angela, to withhold involvement (‘What a goddam, useless, endless,
unhappy outing this has been!’), but the final rhythms of the play make this difficult, and Angela herself is affected. She breaks with Terry and makes a pledge in altogether another style with George. All of the characters finally imitate at one remove the ritual practices of their forebears. In a sense they find meaning, although this is certainly a tenuous business. The certainty of George’s death is perhaps the one fixture on the characters’ horizon, and their need for a meaningful future takes its direction from that fact. Although they never get to the holy island there is a sense in which the island comes to them. When they all leave, ‘silence and complete stillness’ descend again and overcome their departing noise. The pier recovers its divine presence. The poetic idea behind this victory of silence over human noise turns the theatre into a place where, in Peter Brook’s terms (in
The
Empty
Space
), the invisible can again be made visible. Brook calls that ‘the holy theatre’. It is what
Wonderful
Tennessee
strives to create. It is a far better play than its unhappy failure on Broadway might suggest.

With
Molly
Sweeney
Friel narrows down his social and moral preoccupations to focus – as in
Making
History
but without any overt politics – on a play of ideas. The basic idea is the one Synge explored in
The
Well
of
the
Saints
(1905): the right of the blind to remain blind even when a cure is offered. As Synge presents it, in his high romantic style, the conflict is virtually a class question, between beggars and bourgeoisie, although for Synge the beggars represent the artist in society. In the end, Synge’s blind couple assert their right to choose inner darkness over socially approved light, and must pay the price of social exclusion. Friel, whose immediate source is less Synge than Oliver Sacks’s essay ‘To See and Not See’, ignores Synge’s broad social and aesthetic argument to centre instead on what one might call the ‘Fathers and
Daughters’ theme. At the core of
Molly
Sweeney
is the story of a woman destroyed by patriarchal interference.

It is debatable, however, to what extent the play may be considered allegorical. Is Molly the Irish Everywoman, or even a version of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the traditional representation of Ireland in female form, as has been suggested? It is likely, however, that such critical approaches are better suited to the novel (compare Molly Bloom) than to drama. Nevertheless,
Molly
Sweeney
is an indirect play, where the drama occurs in the form of narrative, not of action, rather as in the earlier
Faith
Healer
(which is undoubtedly allegorical). Reading between the lines, we find Molly’s mother prefiguring Molly’s own collapse at the hands of a father figure. There are many parallels drawn between Molly’s father (a judge, always an ominous parentage in Friel) and her surgeon Mr Rice, who tries, as it were, to father her a second time. Frank, too, while mainly a comic foil for Rice, shares with him a similar ‘phantom desire, a fantasy in the head’, which propels him into re-making Molly. But whereas her father insisted that Molly had nothing to gain from going through the process of what we may call enlightenment, both Frank and (with less certainty) Mr Rice believe she has ‘nothing to lose’ by changing her blind world for the so-called normal or sighted world. Is this an allegory pointing out the dangers of technologically backed progress as against tradition or nature? In any case, the coercion undermines Molly mentally and in the end she inhabits neither one world nor the other but a ‘borderline country’ where she is, though broken and dying, nevertheless ‘at home there’. She implies a willed retreat, rather like the blind badgers which Frank foolishly tries to move from their habitat.