More on Irish Drama

THIS REVIEW continues coverage of recent books on Irish drama, following my review in ELT, 57.4 (2014), 579–83, of Anthony Roche’s Synge and the Making of Modern Irish Drama (2013) and Brian Friel: Theatre and Politics (2011). Christopher Murray, Professor Emeritus in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, has written two pioneering monographs—Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (1997) and Sean O’Casey: Writer at Work (2004)—and has edited volumes devoted to the theatre of Samuel Beckett, Tom Murphy, and Brian Friel. His latest study, The Theatre of Brian Friel, a volume in the Methuen Drama Critical Companions series, contributes to the fast-growing literature on Ireland’s most esteemed living playwright. What sets this monograph apart from others devoted to this key playwright are its many illuminating, nuanced, surprising “framings” of Friel’s plays by other plays from the Irish, English, and European stage. Murray’s most provocative insights arise from his imaginative juxtapositions, for example, of Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Miller’s Death of a Salesman; The Loves of Cass McGuire and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author; Crystal and Fox and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night; and Volunteers and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Murray’s fluency with theater history beyond the twentieth-century Irish stage gives his survey its flavor and edge.

Murray’s study generally follows the chronological trajectory of Friel’s output and argues for a view of the playwright as less conventional and more aesthetically and politically revolutionary than is often thought (Murray cites Friel’s admission that playwrights today must be “devious” rather than transparent in their revolutionary purpose). As much as Murray makes a convincing case for the ever-evolving, protean nature of Friel’s output, his study also reveals a number of the themes and strategies that persist across Friel’s corpus. Many if not all of his plays explore the “lack of communication” between people as “a major philosophical theme,” are fundamentally “allusive” in nature, and sport a style that is at once “understated, ironic and poetic.” As the book’s subtitle, “Tradition and Modernity,” promises, Murray is invested in revealing the variously innovative and backward-looking themes and forms of Friel’s plays. It is this concern that animates Murray’s opening chapter, “Situating Friel”; this is followed by eight more, making up the heart of the volume, in which Murray critically analyses the Friel plays, usually in groupings of two. The volume closes with three critical essays penned by other authors in accordance with the “editorial design” for the series—“Placed Identities for Placeless Times: Brian Friel and Postcolonial Criticism” by Shaun Richards; “The Failed Words of Brian Friel” by David Kraus; and “Memory, Art, Lieux de Memoire in Brian Friel’s Home Place” by Csilla Bertha. Perhaps not surprisingly these essays feel randomly tacked on to the end of Murray’s thoughtful and comprehensive monograph.

In a chapter on Friel’s early masterpiece, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Murray clarifies how Philadelphia became the “threshold through which Friel advanced” as a modern dramatist. It was in completing this 1964 play, set in the fictional Donegal village of Ballybeg, that Friel first “discovered, with that kind of leap of Faith in creativity which transforms the craftsman into an artist, the joy and liberation of ‘play.’” Murray astutely observes a connection between Philadelphia and Friel’s masterpiece of fifteen years later, Faith Healer: both works “explore the theatre of the inner self in conflict with different kinds of determinism”; “reveal the indeterminacy in which performativity subsists”; and “launch the audience into an intimate sharing in a modern dilemma of being and non-being.” Although Philadelphia is often taken as Friel’s chief exploration of Irish emigration, a subject touched upon in much Irish theatre of the period, and in particular in the work of Friel’s single most esteemed colleague, Tom Murphy, Philadelphia is best understood for Murray as “a...