The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (review)

Commentator Fintan O'Toole has described Brian Friel as "one of those writers whom you could regard not so much as an explorer but as an excavator, someone who has a certain patch of ground and who digs deeper and deeper into it" (Ní Anluain 60). Anthony Roche's Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel may be read as a similarly fruitful excavation of the layers of Friel's dramatic imagination. Certainly Friel is, as Roche's introduction asserts, "[e]xcepting Beckett . . . the most important Irish playwright in terms both of dramatic achievement and cultural importance to have emerged since the Abbey Theatre's heyday" (1), and the Companion provides ample exploration of the subject of Ireland in Friel's work. Yet Roche also sets out to reassess elements of the prevailing narrative of Friel's oeuvre, providing a collection whose pieces build on one another profitably to supply a broader context for understanding the range of Friel's work as a theatre practitioner.

While Friel's Tony Award–winning Dancing at Lughnasa did not premiere until 1990, the writer's early work established him as an innovator on the Irish theatrical scene, distinctive, as Roche's introduction points out, for his additional ability to achieve success abroad. The Companion offers multiple explorations of his output in the 1960s and 1970s that illuminate the literary and theatrical value of work that has often been overshadowed by the success of Lughnasa. This systematic examination complicates the reader's understanding of the value of this body of writing, beginning with a pair of essays by Friel's fellow playwrights Thomas Kilroy and Frank McGuinness, who set out to define Friel's relevance to Irish theatre at the outset of his career. In framing his examination of Crystal and Fox (1968), The Mundy Scheme (1969), and The Gentle Island (1971), for instance, McGuinness claims that these "rough, rabid, devious texts" are "testimony to the craft, the learning, the loneliness of Friel's imagination. He was not in the business of taming monsters here. Rather he unleashed them, and in doing so let himself go through thirty-five more years of writing plays" (28). Similarly, Roche's and Stephen Watt's essays explore different thematic contexts for Friel's work in the 1970s – respectively, his depictions of complex family dynamics and the Northern political conflict – while both also illuminate the influence on Friel's dramaturgy of European theatrical philosophies, including Brechtian epic and the absurd. Such overlaps allow the collection to move beyond defining the particularly Irish elements of Friel's vision to explore his position as an engaged and innovative force in English-language drama of the twentieth century.

From these interlocking textual groupings, the collection moves on to provide individual examinations of Friel's three most well-known plays: Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). Nicholas Grene's reading of Faith Healer and Helen Lojek's examination of Dancing at Lughnasa both open up the textual, dramatic, and cultural complexity of these major works – Grene's by providing a series of refracting lenses through which to reread the text, and Lojek's by exploring how the residual effects of "the unkept promises of revolution" manifest themselves in the play (88). Approaching the task from a different angle, Martine Pelletier's discussion of Translations steps away from a close analysis of the play and instead situates it within the context of the development of the Field Day Theatre. This discussion provides an insightful assessment of a theatrical undertaking that, as Pelletier notes, was for a time able to "set the critical agenda in Irish studies" (74). Taken together, these pieces provide valuable critical perspectives on the diverse strategies and concerns of Friel's most familiar dramatic work.

The later essays in the book frame Friel's drama through a variety of theoretical and performative lenses. Of these, Richard Pine's examination of the influence of Russian theatre on Friel's work and Richard Allen Cave...