Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist by Ulf Dantanus (review)

434 Book Reviews Confidence of another sort - in the plays as performable - is what is required if this important aspect of Yeats's Jifeworkis to be redeemed from the limbo to which his plays have been almost universally consigned. ERIC DOMVILLE, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO ULF DANTANUS. Brian Friel: The Growth ofan Irish Dramatist. Gothenburg Studies in English 59. Gothenburg, Sweden: Acta Universitatibus Gothoburgensis 1985· Pp. 235. 100 Swedish Crowns. Though not the first, this book must be the most comprehensive study published of an author whom Dantanus dubs "Ireland's best known and masi important contemporary dramatist" (p. 207). Confronting the complexity of Friel, it attempts, with considerable success, to focus on his literary work, but is forced - with something of the same inevitability that ultimately besets Friel's drama - to take account of social, political and historical factors of at least equally challenging complexity. Dantanus's status as "outsider" might imply an initial advantage of objectivity (a term whose validity Friel's work frequently assails), but such status has its inherent hazards; not least the outsider's inclination to impose on intractable material a spurious coherence. Dantanus, to give him his due, al1 but avoids the slippery slope of simplification. Perceiving "the circumstance of place" as a pertinent consideration to any discussion ofIrish literature, Dantanus frames his study of Friel with "two important dichotomies of place", East-West and North-South, both originating in the gradual and deliberate onslaught of British colonialism on the political and cultural integrity of the island. The East-West dichotomy he finds reflected in Friel's work from its beginnings; the North-South, in his more recent plays. Neither, however, is the overt subject-matter of Friel's writings, which focus rather on the lives of individuals exposed to those forces. The playwright's acute sensitivity to the essential loneliness of the individual, to the difficulty or impossibility ofcommunicating private emotion, to the fragility of various fonns of human love, and to the capriciousness of Fate suggests "a basically tragic sensibility" that, the humour and wit ofthe plays notwithstanding, finds its characteristic expression in irony. Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) Dantanus regards as a watershed in Friel's career as a dramatist. Until then he had enjoyed recognition primarily as a writer ofshort stories although, between 1958 and 1964. two of his plays had been produced in Dublin theatres, another in Belfast, one on Irish television, and three on BBC radio. (Friel has disparaged those plays as ·'tedious. tendentious and terribly boring", but Dantanus gives them and the short stories substantial attention as significant stages of Friel's literary and dramatic growth.) In 1963, Friel had spent about three months with Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis. learning, as he himself puts it, "a great deal about the iron discipline of theatre", but mainly, Dantanus suggests, acquiring a more comprehensive awareness of theatre audiences and of how to reach them. Book Reviews 435 Friel regarded Philadelphia and its immediate successors, The Loves ofCassMaguire (1966), Lovers (1967) and Crystal and Fox (1968), as "attempts at analysing different kinds of love". Dantanus finds in all four "a sad awareness of the precariousness of individual life and love, the inevitable passing of time and the arbitrary workings of Fate" (p. 131). Lovers comprises two short plays, "Winners" and "Losers": the fonner, "tragic in conception, fragile and poetic in style"; the latter, "a bold farce with tragic undercurrents"; in both. "the prevalent mode of writing is ironic" (p. 134). In its approaching the same subject from different directions, Lovers is typical ofFriel's craft. Earlier, Dantanus, noting that the predominantly serious Translations (1980) is soon qualified by the farcical absurdity of The Communicatioll Cord (1982), had suggested, "There are no simple solutions or conclusions in Friel's work. Each statement automatically pennits its own opposite" (p. 44). This and similar observations, all well documented, may prompt one to recall Larry Slade's lines from O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh: "I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides ofa question ... the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer," Dantanus sees in The Freedom a/the...