Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel's Drama

Translations

145 4 Translations Lamenting and Accepting Modernity There is no knowing or sensing a place except by being in that place, and to be in a place is to be in a position to perceive it. —Edward Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time” John O’Donovan was “aware . . . that ghosts of the old Gaelic Order still haunted the landscape he was naming and he wrote of those apparitions with understanding and affection.” —Brian Friel, “Where We Live” Friel had long sought the “redemption of the human spirit” through creating community, which he argues is the dramatist’s function in his 1967 essay “The Theater of Hope and Despair.”1 His subsequent search for a community theater group led him to create the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 with actor Stephen Rea, who had been in the initial 1973 production of The Freedom of the City. Understanding this company and its aims, which cohere with Friel’s philosophy of place, helps us fully appreciate the rich significance of place in Translations that I will explore in this chapter. Friel had already committed himself to reaching the “collective mind” of his audience as he turned fully toward writing drama and away from short fiction in the 1960s.2 He had been looking to expand and redefine that audience for some time while still keeping his work in the regional context of northwest Ireland. For instance, Friel remarked in a 1970 interview with John Boyd that “[i]f a new theatre is to be started in the North of Ireland, a 146 M O D E R N IT Y, CO M M U N IT Y, P L AC E I N F R I E L’S DR A M A new theatre audience has got to be created.”3 D. E. S. Maxwell has pointed out that Friel had pressed the Arts Council of Northern Ireland repeatedly for creation of a national theater, ideally located outside Belfast, and that “[i]n March 1970 he adjudicated a drama festival presented by the four Derry grammar schools, two Catholic and two Protestant.”4 In his adjudication of this festival, Friel’s ideal of an ecumenical theater company based in Derry can be seen in embryo. Finally, Friel formed the theater company he had wanted for some time with Rea, the Belfast-born actor who would star in Field Day’s first three plays, all by Friel. Rea had approached Friel with the idea of touring a play because he felt culturally dislocated working in English theater. Friel had just finished Translations and agreed to form the company as a populist project, touring with it across the province and even at the Gate in Dublin.5 The play was a wild success, and the company became more established. Field Day soon came to provide a perfect venue for new Friel plays. He seems to have already envisioned something like Field Day the previous year. There is something uncanny about how Faith Healer—a drama about a talented faith healer who travels all over Scotland, Wales, and Ireland— premiered only a year before the debut of Field Day, a company of superbly talented group of artists dedicated to touring plays all over the province.6 Field Day took as its central image the fifth province of Ireland. Richard Pine notes that Field Day’s work was meant to both demonstrate and overcome traditional political polarities on the island: [It was intended] both to demonstrate the dualities (indeed polarities ) of life in Northern Ireland and to encourage a closer understanding between the “state of two nations” as Friel put it. The “fifth province” was a place beyond these divisions. . . . Friel called it “a place for dissenters, traitors to the prevailing mythologies in the other four provinces,” and elsewhere he said that he and Rea “felt there was some tiny little space we might fill that we could focus the whole North thing on.”7 T R A NSL ATI O NS 147 Traditionally, as Pine points out earlier, the four provinces were known by the Irish word for “fifth,” coicead, to indicate the presence of a fifth province. Pine sees Field Day as occupying “an experimental field in which the qualities and conditions of being Irish can be examined and discussed. One vital physical property which has metaphysical significance is...