Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy and the Use of Music in Contemporary Irish Drama

Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy and the Use of Music III Contemporary Irish Drama HARRY WHITE The late John Huston's recent (1988) film adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead clarifies the prominence of music a~ an imaginative resource in modem Irish literature. The succession of musical events contained within Joyce's story and vividly represented in Huston's film might be taken to summarize ways in which music is repeatedly drawn upon by Irish writers as a means of imagining the past and modifying the present. Joyce's use of music has, to be sure, long been acknowledged and documented, but the role of music in modem Irish literature has been otherwise little explored.' The process by which Joyce accumulates musical imagery in The Dead, for example, wherein the varied musical experiences of the story (opera, salon music, and so on) gradually narrow to the prepotent impact of The Lass of Aughrim, a ballad which explicitly encodes the central concern of Joyce's fiction in this instance, is one which may be related to other, similar processes in Irish fiction and drama after Joyce. Music attains to a structural significance on occasion in contemporary Irish literature, above all, perhaps, in the theatre. In this paper, it may prove useful to consider some ways in which this significance is attained in the work of rwo Irish dramatists who dominate the contemporary theatrical landscape: Brian Friel and Thomas Murphy. Seamus Deane writes of Brian Friel that " 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 ~ltematives...2 It is not difficult to consent to this estimation of Friel's achievement (especially if we limit ourselves to the theatre); some may find Deane's expressly political assessment of Friel's major plays rather more problematic, particularly in terms of his provocative assertion that "All of Friel's major work dates from the mid-1970s," a judgement which quite deliberately excludes Philadelphia, Here I Come!.3 Philadelphia, which dates from 1964, precedes the slow disintegration of 554 HARRY WHITE Northern Irish society, and in precise terms the Civil Rights movement of 1968, from which the Derry massacre of Bloody Sunday ensued in 1972. The play is therefore crucially removed in time and place from those events which Deane identifies as the ultimate source of Friel's radical (and politically contingent) re-assessment of his own position as a dramatist with something to say about Ireland and the Irish mind. 4 If The Freedom of the City (1973) and Volunteers (1975) most evidently bear out the truth of Deane's argument (particularly the former play which is effectively based on the 1972 events), our notion of Friel as a writer thus "stimulated" (Seamus Deane's verb) by political breakdown is notably modified and circumscribed by subsequent plays in which Friel either retreats completely from expressly political concerns (as in Faith Healer, 1979) or examines these by means of historical analogy (Translations, 1981). Among Friel's most recent work, a version of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1987) maintains a commitment to the dramatically fertile quest for the relationship between social collapse and individual breakdown (and alternatives to these) in ways which Ulf Dantanus describes as "typically Frielian."5 Nevertheless, it may be that Friel has exhausted that which most distinguishes his work for some commentators (notably Deane): a preoccupation with the exact contours of Irish history visa -vis England and the consequences of that history for the inhabitants of the Northern Irish catholic community, on both sides of the border of British dominion. It would be obviously premature to trace more closely the curve of Friel's dramatic writing. Dramatists remain wonderfully free of the programmatic intent which others discern in their work, and Friel's versatility to date reminds us that generalisations about his plays, however intelligently formulated, are likely to require considerable adjustment in the future. One such generalisation, however, can be advanced here without much fear of contradiction. In many, though not all, of his plays to date, Brian Friel resorts...