Brian Friel Plays 1

by Brian Friel

  Although The Freedom of the City and Volunteers were evidently related, in however oblique a manner, to the troubles in Northern Ireland, it was still surprising to see the ferocity and the blindness with which critics, especially in London and New York, reacted to them. During those years (1973–6), the IRA campaign against the British presence in the North was at its height and the propaganda war was, as a consequence, intensified to an almost unprecedented degree. Friel was accused by some rather hysterical English and American reviewers of defending the IRA by his attacks upon the British Army and the whole system of authority which that army was there to defend. Wisely, he ignored this hack reviewing, although it cost him dear financially, especially in New York. Instead, Friel kept his attention fixed on the evolving form of his own work and in 1979, at the Longacre Theatre in New York, with José Quintero as director and James Mason in the leading part, he presented one of his most important, if also one of his most unexpected plays – Faith Healer.

  Faith Healer has no political background. It is the story of Frank Hardy, the faith healer, his wife Grace, and his manager Teddy. The play is composed of four monologues, the first and last spoken by Frank, the second and third spoken by Grace and Teddy in turn. A ramshackle caravan, patrolling the remote villages of England, Scotland and Wales, offering to the chronically ill the prospect of a miracle cure at the hands of the faith healer; within that, another story, of a drastic event, the death of Frank’s and Grace’s child, or of Frank’s mother, or of something which both of these are emblems of; and beyond that, the final return to Donegal and Ballybeg, where Frank’s treacherous gift will finally betray him into the brutal death he has begun to long for and expect. We have here a complex metaphor of the artist who is possessed by a gift over which he has no control. A travelling showman, putting on his little theatrical production night after night, waiting for the miracle to happen, for the moment at which the audience will be cured, energized by a miracle, he is also, very clearly, the artist as playwright. However, the return to home and death out of exile, often inspected by Friel before (as in The Laves of Cass McGuire) reinstitutes the social and political dimension which had been otherwise so subdued. Home is the place of the deformed in spirit. The violent men who kill the faith healer are intimate with him, for their savage violence and his miraculous gift are no more than obverse versions of one another. Once again, Friel is intimating to his audience that there is an inescapable link between art and politics, the Irish version of which is the closeness between eloquence and violence. The mediating agency is, as always, disappointment, but it is a disappointment all the more profound because it is haunted by the possibility of miracle and of Utopia. Faith Healer is the parable which gives coherence to the preceding four plays. With them, it marks the completion of another passage in Friel’s career. It is his most triumphant rewriting of his early work and stands in a peculiarly ironic, almost parodic relationship to Philadelphia, of which it is both the subversion and the fulfilment.

  With the new decade of the 1980s, Field Day was born. It is a theatre company, founded by Friel and Stephen Rea, the Irish actor, and it is a cultural group embracing three poets, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and the present writer as well as the broadcaster and musician, David Hammond. It was founded to put on plays outside the confines of the established theatre and, through that, to begin to effect a change in the apathetic atmosphere of the North. Although Field Day will not be an exclusively theatrical venture, that aspect of its activities is the only one pertinent here. Derry was chosen as the centre of its operations. All the plays have their world première there. The first of these was Translations, widely acclaimed both in Ireland and abroad as Friel’s masterpiece. It was first produced in Derry, in the Guildhall, on 23 September 1980. Since then, it has had long runs in London and New York. However, the play is best seen in relation to the third Field Day production (the second was Friel’s translation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1981), The Communication Cord (produced 1982, published 1983). For this most recent play is an antidote to Translations, a farce which undermines the pieties sponsored by the earlier play, a defensive measure against any possible sentimentality in its predecessor. Translations is not, in fact, sentimental, but it treats of a theme which is powerfully emotive in the Irish context and one which has been subjected to a great deal of vulgarization and hypocrisy. That theme is the death of the Irish language. Friel locates the moment of its final decline in the Donegal of the 1830s, the years in which the British Army Engineer Corps carried out its famous ordnance survey of Ireland, mapping and renaming the whole country to accord with its recent (1800) integration into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The crisis of the language is expressed in terms of the crisis in a family. Owen, the son of a hedge-school master, who teaches Latin and Greek through Irish, arrives home from Dublin with the British Army corps to help them in the mapping and renaming of his native territory. He is the recognizable Frielian outsider who has the intimacy of an insider, the man who is betraying his ancestral and anachronistic community into the modern, Anglicized world. The subsequent events demonstrate once more the salience of the connection between language (its loss and its mastery) and politics (its violence and its authority). It states with unprecedented clarity and force much that had been implicit in Friel’s work since the beginning. The crisis he is concerned with is a crisis both of language and of civilization and it is experienced directly by people who are trapped within the confines of a place and an attitude of mind from which there is no escape. It is, thus, a tragic play. Military and cultural imperialism, provincial rebellion and cultural fantasy collide with such force that the worst aspects of each are precipitated into a permanent and deadly confrontation. It is a play about the tragedy of English imperialism as well as of Irish nationalism. Most of all, it is a play about the final incoherence that has always characterized the relationship between the two countries, the incoherence that comes from sharing a common language which is based upon different presuppositions. The failure of language to accommodate experience, the failure of a name to fully indicate a place, the failure of lovers to find the opportunity to express their feeling whether in words or deed, are all products of this political confrontation. In Translations, Friel has found a sequence of events in history which are transformed by his writing into a parable of events in the present day. Paradoxically, although his theme is failure, linguistic and political, the fact that the play has been written is itself an indication of the success of the imagination in dealing with everything that seems opposed to its survival. What is most characteristically tragic about the play is the sense of exhilaration which it transmits to the audience. Language lost in this fashion is also language rediscovered in such a way that the sense of loss has been overcome. In that strange, contradictory triumph, Brian Friel has reached a culmination in his dramatic career. No Irish writer since the early days of this century has so sternly and courageously asserted the role of art in the public world without either yielding to that world’s pressures or retreating into art’s narcissistic alternatives. In the balance he has achieved between these forces he has become an exemplary figure.

  SEAMUS DEANE

  January 1984

  PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!

  for my father and mother

  CHARACTERS

  MADGE Housekeeper

  GAR O’DONNELL (PUBLIC)

  Son of the house

  GAR O’DONNELL (PRIVATE)

  S. B. O’DONNELL Gar’s father

  KATE DOOGAN/MRS KING Daughter of Senator Doogan

  SENATOR DOOGAN

  MASTER BOYLE Local teacher

  LIZZY SWEENEY Gar’s aunt

  CON SWEENEY Lizzy’s husband

  BEN BURTON Friend of the Sweeneys

  NED

  TOM The boys

  JOE

  CANON MICK O’BYRNE The parish priest

  The first performance of Philadelphia, Here I Come! was given at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on
28 September 1964 by Edwards-MacLiammoir: Dublin Gate Theatre Productions Ltd in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival and Oscar Lewenstein Ltd. The cast was as follows:

  MADGE Maureen O’Sullivan

  GARETH O’DONNELL in Public Patrick Bedford

  in Private Donal Donnelly

  S. B. O’DONNELL Éamonn Kelly

  KATE DOOGAN Máire Hastings

  SENATOR DOOGAN Cecil Barror

  MASTER BOYLE Dominic Roche

  LIZZY SWEENEY Ruby Head

  CON SWEENEY Tom Irwin

  BEN BURTON Michael Mara

  NED Éamon Morrissey

  TOM Brendan O’Sullivan

  JOE Emmet Bergin

  CANON MICK O’BYRNE Alex McDonald

  Direction Hilton Edwards

  Setting Alpho O’Reilly

  Set

  When the curtain rises the only part of the stage that is lit is the kitchen, i.e. the portion on the left from the point of view of the audience. It is sparsely and comfortlessly furnished – a bachelor’s kitchen. There are two doors; one left which leads to the shop, and one upstage leading to the scullery (off). Beside the shop door is a large deal table, now set for tea without cloth and with rough cups and saucers. Beside the scullery door is an old-fashioned dresser. On the scullery wall is a large school-type clock.

  Stage right, now in darkness, is Gar’s bedroom. Both bedroom and kitchen should be moved upstage, leaving a generous apron. Gar’s bedroom is furnished with a single bed, a wash-hand basin (crockery jug and bowl), a table with a record-player and records, and a small chest of drawers.

  These two areas – kitchen and Gar’s bedroom – occupy more than two-thirds of the stage. The remaining portion is fluid: in Episode I for example, it represents a room in Senator Doogan’s home.

  The two Gars, PUBLIC GAR and PRIVATE GAR, are two views of the one man. PUBLIC GAR is the Gar that people see, talk to, talk about. PRIVATE GAR is the unseen man, the man within, the conscience, the alter ego, the secret thoughts, the id. PRIVATE GAR, the spirit, is invisible to everybody, always. Nobody except PUBLIC GAR hears him talk. But even PUBLIC GAR, although he talks to PRIVATE GAR occasionally, never sees him and never looks at him. One cannot look at one’s alter ego.

  Time: the present in the small village of Ballybeg in County Donegal, Ireland. The action takes place on the night before, and on the morning of Gar’s departure for Philadelphia.

  Music

  Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64

  Ceilidh music

  ‘All Round My Hat’ – first verse

  ‘She Moved through the Fair’ – second verse

  ‘California, Here I Come!’

  ‘Give the Woman in the Bed more Porter’

  EPISODE ONE

  Kitchen in the home of County Councillor, S. B. O’DONNELL, who owns a general shop. As the curtain rises MADGE, the housekeeper, enters from the scullery with a tray in her hands and finishes setting the table. She is a woman in her sixties. She walks as if her feet were precious. She pauses on her way past the shop door.

  MADGE: Gar! Your tea!

  PUBLIC: (Off) Right!

  (She finishes setting the table and is about to go to the scullery door when PUBLIC GAR marches on stage. He is ecstatic with joy and excitement: tomorrow morning he leaves for Philadelphia.)

  PUBLIC: (Singing) ‘Philadelphia, here I come, right back where I started from …’ (Breaks off and catches Madge.) Come on, Madge! What about an old time waltz!

  MADGE: Agh, will you leave me alone.

  (He holds on to her and forces her to do a few steps as he sings in waltz time.)

  PUBLIC: ‘Where bowers of flowers bloom in the spring’ –

  MADGE: (Struggling) Stop it! Stop it! You brat you!

  PUBLIC: Madge, you dance like an angel. (Suddenly lets her go and springs away from her.) Oh, but you’d give a fella bad thoughts very quick!

  MADGE: And the smell of fish of you, you dirty thing!

  (He grabs her again and puts his face up to hers, very confidentially.)

  PUBLIC: Will you miss me?

  MADGE: Let me on with my work!

  PUBLIC: The truth!

  MADGE: Agh, will you quit it, will you?

  PUBLIC: I’ll tickle you till you squeal for mercy.

  MADGE: Please, Gar …

  PUBLIC: (Tickling her) Will you miss me, I said?

  MADGE: I will – I will – I will – I –

  PUBLIC: That’s better. Now tell me: what time is it?

  MADGE: Agh, Gar –

  PUBLIC: What time is it?

  MADGE: (Looking at clock) Ten past seven.

  PUBLIC: And what time do I knock off at?

  MADGE: At seven.

  PUBLIC: Which means that on my last day with him he got ten minutes overtime out of my hide. (He releases Madge.) Instead of saying to me: (Grandly) ‘Gar, my son, since you are leaving me forever, you may have the entire day free,’ what does he do? Lines up five packs of flour and says: (In flat dreary tones) ‘Make them up into two-pound pokes.’

  MADGE: He’s losing a treasure, indeed!

  PUBLIC: So d’you know what I said to him? I just drew myself up and looked him straight in the eye and said to him: ‘Two-pound pokes it will be’ – just like that.

  MADGE: That flattened him.

  (She goes off to the scullery. He stands at the door and talks in to her.)

  PUBLIC: And that wasn’t it all. At six o’clock he remembered about the bloody pollock, and him in the middle of the Angelus. (Stands in imitation of the Father: head bowed, hands on chest. In flat tones –) ‘Behold-the-handmaid-of-the-Lord-Gut-and-salt-them-fish.’ So by God I lashed so much salt on those bloody fish that any poor bugger that eats them will die of thirst. But when the corpses are strewn all over Ballybeg, where will I be? In the little old USA! Yip-eeeeee! (He swings away from the scullery door and does a few exuberant steps as he sings –) ‘Philadelphia, here I come, rightah backah where Ah started from –’ (He goes into his bedroom, flings himself down on his bed, rests his head on his hands, and looks at the ceiling. Sings alternate lines of ‘Philadelphia’– first half – with PRIVATE (off)).

  PUBLIC: It’s all over.

  PRIVATE: (Off, in echo-chamber voice) And it’s all about to begin. It’s all over.

  PUBLIC: And it’s all about to begin.

  PRIVATE: (Now on.) Just think, Gar.

  PUBLIC: Think …

  PRIVATE: Think … Up in that big bugger of a jet, with its snout pointing straight for the States, and its tail belching smoke over Ireland; and you sitting up at the front (PUBLIC acts this) with your competent fingers poised over the controls; and then away down below in the Atlantic you see a bloody bugger of an Irish boat out fishing for bloody pollock and –

  (PUBLIC nose-dives, engines screaming, machine guns stuttering.)

  PUBLIC: Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  PRIVATE: Abandon ship! Make for the life-boats! Send for Canon Mick O’Byrne!

  (PUBLIC gains altitude and nose-dives again.)

  PUBLIC: Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat.

  PRIVATE: To hell with women and children! Say an Act of Contrition!

  PUBLIC: Yip-eeeee!

  (He finishes taking off the shop coat, rolls it into a bundle, and places it carefully on the floor.)

  PRIVATE: It looks as if – I can’t see very well from the distance – but it looks as if – yes! – yes! – the free is being taken by dashing Gar O’Donnell (PUBLIC gets back from the coat, poises himself to kick it), pride of the Ballybeg team. (In commentator’s hushed voice) O’Donnell is now moving back, taking a slow, calculating look at the goal, I’ve never seen this boy in the brilliant form he’s in today – absolute magic in his feet. He’s now in position, running up, and –