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Brian Friel: Transcending the Irish National Pastime
- University of Notre Dame Press
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Brian Friel: Transcending the Irish National Pastime 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-acrown ? “How these people blather on!” the London Sunday Times’s drama critic, John Peter, wrote about a recent production of The Plough and the Stars by Seán O’Casey. Irish playwrights have, over the years, confirmed the nation’s reputation for talk by mounting plays that live or die through their characters’ ability Tillinghast pt 3 8/20/08 3:26 PM Page 156 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 hundreds of 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 managed virtually to stamp out the Gaelic language, the Irish went to work on English itself and transformed it into the colorful hybrid, sometimes called HibernoEnglish , 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 to inseminate another linguistic organism with its inventiveness, its evasions and qualifications, its elaborate and ambiguous courtesies . While his focus on language places him firmly within Irish theatrical tradition, Brian Friel’s 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 Celtic Revivals makes the point that Friel, growing up in Londonderry, a Northern city plagued by chronic unemployment and sectarian tensions between the Protestant descendants of British settlers 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 157 Tillinghast pt 3 8/20/08 3:26 PM Page 157 [44.200.144.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:13 GMT) “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 1960s 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 associated with the Field Day Theatre Company have made a point of addressing themselves first to their Irish audience, his plays make clear to the non-Irish playgoer what oceans of sentimentality and prejudice keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity. 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. In a production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) the audience...