Living Quarters (1978) [Narrator:] ‘But reverie alone isn’t adequate for them. And their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived [the ledger] - a complete and detailed record of everything that was said and done that day, as if its very existence must afford them their justification, as if in some tiny forgotten detail buried there - a smile, a hesitation, a tentative gesture - if only it could be found and recalled - in it must lie the key to an understanding of all that happened. And in their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived me - the ultimate arbiter, the powerful and impartial referee, the final adjudicator, a kind of human Hansard who knows those tiny details and interprets them accurately. And yet no sooner do they conceive me with my authority and my knowledge than they begin flirting with the idea of circumventing me, of foxing me, of outwitting me. Curious, isn’t it? (Selected Plays, 1984, pp.177-78; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000, pp.60-61.) Further, Frank: ‘[...]what has a lifetime in the army done to me? ... have I carried over into this life the too rigid military discipline that - that the domestic life must have been bruised, damaged, by the stern attitudes that are necessary over - I suppose what I am saying is that I am not unaware of certain shortcomings in my relationships ...’ (Selected Plays, 1984, p.194; McCarthy, op. cit., p.59.)
Sir: ’But reverie alone isn’t adequate for them. And in their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived this (ledger) - a complete and detailed record of everything that was said and done that day, as if its very existence must afford them their justification, as if in some tiny, forgetten detail buried here - a smile, a hesitation, a tentative gesture - if only it could be found and recalled - in it must lie the key to an understanding of all that happened. And in their imagination. out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived me - the ultimate arbiter, the powerful and impartial referee, the final adjudicator, a kind of human Hansard who knows those tiny little details and interprets them accurately. And yet no sooner do they conceive me with my authority and my knowledge than they begin flirting with the idea of circumventing me, of foxing me, of outwitting me. Curious, isn’t it? (Friel, 1984, p.177-78; here pp.60-61.)
Dram. pers.: Frank Butler; second wife Anna (first wife Louise); Ben, a son; Helen, a dg.; Miriam, a dg., m. Charles Donnelly; Tina, a dg.; Fr. Tom, Army chaplain and friend of Frank.
Aristocrats (1979), ‘Well, when we talk about the Big House in this country, we usually mean the Protestant Big House with its Anglo-Irish tradition and culture; and the distinction is properly made between that tradition and culture and what we might call the native Irish tradition and culture which is Roman Catholic.’ (Friel, Aristocrats, in Selected Plays, London: Faber 1987, p.281; quoted in Claude Fièrobe, contrib. To Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.)
Faith Healer (1979), Frank: ‘Those were nights of exultation, of consummation ...because the questions that undermined my life then became meaningless and I knew that for those few hours I had become whole in myself, and perfect in myself. [...] But they persisted right to the end, those nagging, tormenting, maddening questions that rotted my life. When I refused to confront them, they ambushed me. And when they threatened to submerge me, I silenced them with whisky.’ (Coll. Plays, p.333.) Grace [about Frank: ] ‘he kept remaking people according to some private standard of excellence of his own, and as his standards changed, so did the person’ (CP, pp.346.) ‘I knew he had some sense that Ireland might somehow recharge him, maybe even restore him’ (CP, p.351.) Frank, ‘There was no sense of homecoming. I tried to stimulate it but nothing stirred. Only a few memories wan and neutral’ (CP, p.338.) ‘And as I moved across the yard towards them and offered myself to them, then for the first time I had a simple and genuine sense of homecoming. Then or the first time there was no atrophying terror and the maddening questions were silent. At long last I was renouncing chance.’ (CP, p.376). [Grace:] ‘It wasn’t that he was simply a liar ... 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, extensions to himself that came into being only because of him. And if he cured a man, that man became for him a successful fiction and therefore actually real, and he’d say to me afterwards, “Quite an interesting character that, wasn’t he? I knew that would work.” But if he didn’t cure him, that man was forgotten immediately, allowed to dissolve and vanish as if he had never existed.’ (Selected Plays, 1984, p.345; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Four Courts Press 2000, p.68.) ‘O my God I’m one of his fictions too, but I need him to sustain me in that existence - O my God I don’t know if I can go on without his sustenance.’ (Ibid., p.353; McCarthy, op. cit. 2000, p.69.)
Translations (1980), Maire:
‘But we’re always sniffing abut for it, aren’t we? - looking
for disaster. The rents are going to go up again - the harvest’s
going t be lost - the herring have gone away forever -ther’s going
to be evictions. Honest to god, some of you people aren’t happy unless
you’re miserable and you’ll not be right content until you’re
dead!’ (Sel. Plays, p.395.) (Owen:) ‘Owen - Roland -
what the hell. It’s only a name. It’s the same me, isn’t
it? Well, isn’t it?’ (Sel. Plays, p.408.) (Hugh:) ‘[...]
it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour
which no longer matches the landscape of [...] fact’ (Selected
Plays, p.419.) ‘We must learn those new names [...] We must learn
where we live. we must learn to make them our own. We must make them our
new home’; ‘it is not the literal past, the “facts”
of history, that shape us, but the images of the past embodied in language.’
[...] ‘We must never cease renewing those images; because once we
do, we fossilise.’ (Sel. Plays, p.445.) Translations,
(Hugh:) ‘I will provide you with the available words and the available
grammar. But will that help you to interpret between privacies’ (Sel.
Plays, p.446.) Hugh, ‘Confusion is not an ignoble condition’
(Sel. Plays, p.446). Also, ‘It is not the literal past, the
“facts of history” that shape us, but images of the past embodied
in language.’ (Translations; quoted in Chris Morash, The
Hungry Voice, IAP 1989, Introduction [epipgraph], p.15.) Translations,
Manus, ‘It’s a bloody military operation’ (Translations
[sep. edn.], 32.) Hugh, ‘I went on to suggest that our own culture
and the classical tongues made a happier conjunction [...] English, I
suggested, couldn’t really express us.’ (T., 25.) [quoting Steiner’s
Babel: ] ‘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.’
(ibid., 42.) ‘We must learn those new names [...] We must learn where
we live. We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new
home.’ (ibid., 66.) ‘[D]on’t expect too much. I will provide
you with the available words and available grammar. But will that help
you to interpret between privacies? I have no idea [...] I have no idea
at all.’ (ibid., 67.) Yolland, ‘Even if I did speak Irish, I’d
always be considered an outsider here, wouldn’t I? I may learn the
password but the language of the tribe will always elude me, won’t
it? The private core will always be ...hermetic, won’t it?’
(ibid., 40.) Jummy Jack, ‘do you know the Greek word endogamein?
It means to marry within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry
outside the tribe. And you don’t cross those borders casually –
both sides get very angry. Now the problem is this, Is Athene sufficiently
mortal or am I sufficiently Godlike for this marriage to be acceptable
to her people and to my people?’ (ibid., 68). Further, Hugh: ‘Urbs
antiqua fuit - there was an ancient city which, ‘tis said, Juno
loved above all the lands. And it was the goddess’s aim and cherished
hope that here should be capital of all nations - should the fates perchance
allow that. yet intruth she disocvered that a race was springing from
Trojan blood to overthrow some day these Tyrian towers - a people late
regem belloque superbum - kings of broad realms and proud in war who would
come forth for Libya’s downfall.’ (Cited in Elizabeth Butler
Cullingford, ‘British Romans and Irish Carthaginians: Anticolonial
Metaphor in Heaney, Friel and McGuinness, PMLA, March 1996, pp.222-36
[see remarks in Commentary, supra].) Further, Hugh:
‘I went on to suggest that our own culture and the classical tongues
made a happier conjunction [...] English, I suggested, couldn’t really
express us.’ (p.25.) Manus, ‘It’s a bloody military operation
… what’s “incorrect” about the place-names we have
here?’ Owen: ‘Nothing at all.They’re just going to be standardised’.
Manus: ‘You mean changed into English.’ (p.32.) Yolland, ‘Even
if I did speak Irish, I’d always be considered an outsider here,
wouldn’t I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe
will always elude me, won’t it? The private core will always be ...hermetic,
won’t it?’ (p.40.) [echoing Steiner’s Babel:] ‘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.’ (p.42.)
Hugh: ‘it can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in linguistic
contour which no longer matches the landscape [...] of fact’ (p.43.)
‘We must learn those new names [...] We must learn where we live.
We must learn to make them our own. We must make them our new home.’
(p.66.) Jimmy Jack: ‘don’t expect too much. I will provide you
with the available words and the available grammar. But will that help
you to interpret between privacies? I have no idea.’ (p.67; also
cited in Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland, 1998, p.198.) Jimmy Jack,
‘do you know the Greek word endogamein? It means to marry
within the tribe. And the word exogamein means to marry outside
the tribe. And you don’t cross those borders casually - both sides
get very angry. Now the problem is this, Is Athene sufficiently mortal
or am I sufficiently Godlike for this marriage to be acceptable to her
people and to my people?’ (p.68.) Manus: ‘I’m employed
as a part-time, underpaid, civilian interpreter. My job is to translate
the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King’s
good English’ (CP, pp.404.) [ENG310 Student citations.]
Making History (1988), Lombard [in answer to Hugh O’Neill’s insistence that he should ‘tell the truth’: ] ‘I don’t believe that a period of history – a given space of time– my life – your life – that it contains withint it one “true” interpretation just waiting to be mined. But I do believe that it may contain within it several possible narratives. The life of Hugh O’Neill can be told in many different ways. And those ways are determined by the needs and demands and the expectations of different people and different eras.’ (MH, p.15-6.) ‘an impromptu alliance of squabbling tribesmen [...] grabbing at religion as a coagulant only because they have no other idea to inform them or give them cohesion’ (MH, 38.) O’Neill [wants included] ‘the schemer, the leader, the liar, the statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, the soured, bitter emigré’ (MH, 63.) ‘you are going to embalm me in - in - in a florid lie’ (p.63.) [even after Kinsale] ‘my brother Gaels couldn’t wait to strip me of every blade of grass I ever owned’ (MH, 66.) Lombard: ‘I’m not talking about falsifying, about lying, for heaven’s sake. I’m simply talking about making a pattern [...] offering a cohesion to that random catalogue of deliberate acheivement and sheer accident that constitute your life. And that cohesion will be a narrative that people will read and be satisfied by’ (pp.66-67.) Lombard [seeing Ireland as] ‘reduced as it has never been reduced before [...] this isn’t the time for critical assessment of your ploys [...] Now is the time for a hero’ (MH, 67).
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Stage directions: ‘[...] there is a sense of order being consciously subverted, of the women consciously and crudely caricaturing themselves, indeed of near-hysteria being induced’ (Lughnasa, p.22.) (Kate:) ‘And they’re savages! I know those people from the back hills! I’ve taught them! Savages - that’s what they are! And what pagan practices they have are no concern of ours - none whatever. It’s a sorry day to hear talk like that in a Christian home, a Catholic home! All I can say is that I’m shocked and disappointed to hear you repeating rubbish like that, Rose.’ [When the dancing begins Kate dances] ‘totally concentrated, totally private; a movement that is simultaneously controlled and frantic; a weave of complex steps that takes her quickly round the kitchen, past her sisters, out to the garden, round the summer seat, back to the kitchen; a pattern of action that is out of character and at the same time ominous of some deep and true emotion. [The others] make no sound. [Lughnasa, 1990, p.62]; ‘Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.’ (p.71.) ‘... the heart seemd to go out of the house [...] and when my time came to go away, in the selfish way of young men, I was happy to escape.’ (p.70-71). Further [the author is visited by a memory] “which owes nothing to fact”; ‘When I remember it, I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes half-closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.’ (Dancing at Lughnasa; q.p.)
Wonderful Tennessee (1993): ‘remembering becomes a synonym for healing’; [on Lough Derg:] ‘But years ago people went there to be cured? ‘To remember again - to be reminded.’ ‘To remember what? ...’; ‘to be in touch again - to attest.’ (Tennessee, 31.) ‘In touch with what?’ ‘Whatever it is we desire bt can;t express. What is beyond Language. The inexpressible/ The ineffable’ (Tennessee, p.52).
“Self-Portrait” (1972): ‘[A]n Irish Catholic teacher with a nationalist background, living in a schizophrenic community’; explores the ‘mixed holding I had inherited’ (p.41.) illustrates ‘how difficult it is for an Irish writer to find his faith’; (p.45.) ‘our Irishness’; ‘the generation of Irish writers immediately before mine took their genetic purity for granted’; ‘For us today the situation is more complex. We are more concerned with defining our Irishness than with pursuing it. We want to know what the word “native” means, what the word “foreign” means. We want to konw whether the words have any meaning at all.’ (p.45). [The foregoing quoted in Scott Boltwood, draft study 2000.] Further, ‘I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at the moment.’ (Quoted in Stella McCuskar, ‘Emigration, Love & Relationships: Themes in the Work of Brian Friel’, UUC UG Diss., 2002.)
Remembering St Columb’s: Brian Friel ‘never tried formally to recall St Columb’s’, but ‘remember[s] [the teachers] with great respect, a respect they earned by their hard work and their fair-mindedness and their dedication to their job - the acknowledged virtues of that era. further, ‘[W]hen I think of St Columb’s, I think of those teachers, and my fading memory of school-life there finds clarity and definition in their worthy lives.(The Irish Times, Education sect., (11 May 1999 [online])
Remarks
‘Wordsworth [...] no. I’m afraid we’re not familiar
with your literature, Lieutenant. We feel closer to the warm mediterranean.
We tend to overlook your island.’ (Hugh to Lt. Yolland). [Translations,
p. 49; quoted by Terence Brown, ‘British Ireland’, in Edna Longley,
ed., Culture in Ireland, Division or Diversity? (QUB 1991) [pp.19-27pp.],
p.78; also cited in Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, 1993, where
it is dismissed as ‘grandiose self-delusion’ (p.31). NOTE, In
Prince of the Quotidian (?1994), Muldoon refers to Friel’s
link with Field Day and its outcome as ‘old whine in new bottles’.
[see under Muldoon, RX].
Peasant mind: ‘... to understand anything about the history or present health of Irish drama, one must first acknowledge the peasant mind.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 1972, p.305.) Note also: ‘I think I am a sortof peasant at heart. I’m certainly not “citified” and I never will be. There are certain atmospheres which I find totally alien to me and I’m much more at ease in a rural setting.’ (Quoted in Ulf Dantanus, Brian Friel: A Study, p.17).
English words: Friel has said in interview that he has taken English words and tried to ‘make them distinctive and unique to use’ (Magill, 1980, p.59.) and note Francis Hardy in Friel’s Faith Healer, ‘I’d recite the names to myself just for the mesmerism, the sedation of the incantation.’ [See Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature, 1989.]
Cultural identity: [a culture] ‘can provide an identity to those who share it and constraint that identity’s freedom and autonomy’ (quoted in George O’Brien, Brian Friel, Gill & Macmillan, 1979, p.19.
Friel/O’Friel: ‘perhaps I’m twins’ (Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Irish Drama, 1990), p.15; ‘I am not aware of having any theatrical pedigree’ (‘Brien, 1979, p.30.) ‘I would like to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and indeed material, flux that this country is in at the moment.’ (DES Maxwell, Friel, Jersey: Assoc. UP 1973, p.84.) [after Bloody Sunday: ] ‘I have no objectivity in ths situation; I am too involved emotionally to view it with calm’ (Pine, 1990, p.105; also Dantanus, 1988, p.36). NOTE also that Friel has decided views about play directing, which he has called ‘a bogus career’; also, on Jennifer Johnston, ‘the Mills & Boon of Irish writing’.
Modern Ireland: ‘Ireland is becoming a shabby imitation of a third-rate American state ... We are rapidly losing our identity as a people and because of this, that special quality an Irish writers should have will be lost. A writer is the voice of his people and if the people are no longer individuals I cannot see that the writer will have much currency.’ (Interview, Hickey & Smith, A Paler Shade of Green, 1972, p.224; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000, p.46.) Friel declares that he knows ‘no reason why Ireland should not be ruled by its poets and dramatists’; ‘if Yeats and Lady Gregory were alive today, they whould be unimportant people.’ (Ibid., pp.224-25; McCarthy, op. cit., idem). Further, ‘I have no objectivity in this situation [the Troubles]; I am too involved emotionally to view it with calm’ (Ibid., p.222; McCarthy, op. cit., p.51.)
“Translations Journal”: ‘Translations is set in a hedge school in Ballybeg, Co. Donegal, in the year 1833. The British army is engaged in mapping the whole of Ireland, a process which involves the renaming of every place in the country. It is a time of great upheaval in Ballybeg, their hedge-school is to be replaced by one of the new national schools, there is a recurring potato blight, they have acquired a new language (English), and because their townlan is to be renamed, everything that was familiar to them is becoming strange.’ (Cited in Terence Brown, ‘Have we a Context: Transition, Self and Society in Theatre of Brian Friel’, in Alan Peacock, The Achievement of Brian Friel (1993), p.195; Friel, ‘the play has to do with language and only language; if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost’ (cited in Dantanus, 1988, pp.199-200). Also Making History, Friel’s explanatory note in Derry premier programme, ‘Making History is a dramatic fiction that uses some actual and some imagined events in the life of Hugh O’Neill to make a story. I have tried to be objective and faithful – after my artistic fashion –to the empirical method. But where there was tension between the historical “fact” and the imperative of the fiction, I’m glad to say I kept faith with the narrative. For exampe, even though Mabel, Hugh’s wife, died in 1591, it suited my story to keep her alive for another ten years. Part of me regrets taking these occasional liberties. But then I remind myself that history and fiction are related and comparable forms of discorse and that an historical text is a kind of literary artefact. and then I am greateful that these regrets were never inhibiting. (Cited in Sean Connolly, ‘Translating History, Brian Friel and the Irish Past’, in Alan Peacock, ed., The Achievement of Brian Friel, 1993, pp.158-59).
Staging history: ‘... writing a historical play [...] imposes particular responsibilities. The apparent advantages are the established historical facts or at least the received historical ideas in which the work is rooted and which gives it its apparent familiarity and accessibility. The concomitant responsibility is to acknowledge those facts or ideas but not to defer to them. Drama is first a fiction, with the authority of fiction.’ (‘Translations, and A Paper Landscape [... &c]’, Crane Bag, Vol. VII, No. 2 (1983), p.123; cited in Gerald Fitzgibbon, Historical Obsession in Recent Irish Drama’, in Geert Lernout, ed., The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama [Costerus Ser. Vol. 79] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1991), pp.41-59; p.51.
Flirting with English: ‘We flirt with the English language, but we haven’t absorbed it [...] It’s accepted outside the island, you see, as “our great facility with the English language” [...] that’s all oul’ rubbish. A language is much more profound than that. It’s not something we produce for the entertainment of outsiders. And that’s how Irish theatre is viewed, isn’t it?’; ‘I think that is how the political problem of this island is going to be solved. [...] It’s going to be solved by the recognition of what language means for us on this island [...] Because we are in fact talking about accommodation or marrying of two cultures here, which are ostenisbly speaking the same language but which in fact aren’t.’ (Interview with Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Man from God Knows Where, In Dublin, No. 165, Oct. 1982, pp.20-23; p.21, 23; cited in Ginete Verstraete, ‘Brian Friel’s Drama and the Limits of Language’, in Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature [Conference of 9 April 1986; Costerus Ser. Vol. 71] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988), pp.85-96, pp.87, 95.)
Irish National theatre: ‘No reason for it at all, for its existence. [...] I’m merely saying that I don’t understand what a national theatre is any more. I don’t understand the need for a national theatre because it would imply that there is some kind of national voice.’ (‘Interview by Laurence Finnegan, in Essays, p.131.) ‘I don’t know what a national culture is, really’ (Idem; quoted in Scott Boltwood, draft study 2000.)
Irish flux: ‘[I] would like to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and indeed material flux that this country is in at the moment. This has got to be done, for me anyway, at a local, parochial level, and hopefully this will have meaning for people in other countries.’ (Cited in D. E. S. Maxwell, Brian Friel, 1973, p.109.)
Field Day Co.: ‘We are a Northern accented group with a strong political element and that would concern itself with some sense of disaffection most of us would feel at the state of the two nations, which is strongly reflected in the work we are doing this year. I would say that all six of us ould probably not be at home in the twenty-six counties. (Irish Times interview, 8 Sept. 1984).
St. Jim: Friel equates sanctity with [artistic] integrity and deems Joyce ‘a saint’ because he turned ‘his back on Ireland and on his family’ (Interview, Guardian, 18 Oct. 1984).
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)