Brian Friel by George O'Brien, and: Contemporary Irish Dramatists by Michael Etherton (review)

Book· Reviews theatrical terrain as Veats"; and more of tile same. In the end, even the author seems to recognize how insubstantial most of this must seem, offering an almost apologetic conclusion: "The late plays of W. B. Yeats provide a frail but nonetheless supportive foundation for the early works of Samuel Beckett" and "Only with some difficulty does the analogy with Yeats's drama clarify the later work of art that needs no clarification." When the author turns to Jack Yeats, where we have reason to hope for more, there seems to be even less. II does not help that the author begins by radically mis-stating one of the few actual sources of Beckett's views on the painter; the homage of 1954. We are told that "Beckel! professed that he could submit 'in trembling to the unmasterable ' images that his Irish compatriot assembled on canvas." He said nothing of the sort. It is Yeats's own "final mastery which submits in trembling to the unmasterable ," an admittedly dark fonnulation which nonetheless has nothing to do with Beckett's submitting to Yeats. Once again we are treated to weakly-supported generalizations, "There can be no question that the influence of Jack Yeats was important for the development of Samuel Beckett as an artist," followed by the merest of assertions: "Taking their cue from Jack Yeats, the principal characters, Didi and Gogo, consume time as they wait for GodOl, the absent antagonist of the plot, by telling stories, improvising scenes, [etc.]"; "Beckett's inspiration for Fiu de Partie belonged to Jack Yeats"; "The generation and regeneration of Molloy derived from Yeats's work of the twenties and thirties." If such assertions could indeed be convincingly argued, it would be of profound interest, but they are not. Instead they merely float to the surface from time to time, awaken our interest, and disappear. My own disappointment with this volume is a function of how much I hoped for in it. Perhaps that hope was itself unreasonable. Perhaps it is true that, as Beckett says, "In images of such breathless immediacy as these there is no occasion, no time given, no room left, for the lenitive of comment." BREON MITCHELL, INDIANA UNIVERSITY GEORGE O'BRIEN. Brian Friel. Boston: Twayne Publishers 1990. Pp. xii, 148, illustrated . $21.95. MICHAEL ETHERTON. COfllemporary Irish Dramatists. London: Macmillan 1989. Pp. xvi, 253, illustrated. $25·00. George O'Brien's Brian Friel, like other books in Twayne's English Authors Series, is designed for the universilY student beginning a serious study of an individual author and needing an introduction to the scope of the author's literary achievement and to the range of critical response both to discrete works and to the oeuvre. It usefully provides a detailed account of the short stories with which Friel made his name in the 1950s, of the plays that by 1960 encouraged him to become a professional writer, and of every item of his dramatic output in the next 28 years. This approach gives as Book Reviews much weight to minor plays of the early 19705, such as The Mundy Scheme and The Gentle Is/and, as to such major achievements of the 19805 as Faith Healer and Translations. For obvious reasons, Dancillg af Luglinosa, the huge success of the early 19905, is not discussed. O'Brien begins with a biographical chapler that takes us to Friel's sixtieth year and defines fOT us the imaginative landscape of the short stories and lhe plays - plays that, frequently and nol surprisingly. echo the themes and reinvent the characters of the stories, as O'Brien shows painstakingly. The second chapter deals with the early plays - from A Sorl of Freedom, broadcast by the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958, to Philadelphia Here I Come. staged in the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin in 1964. Here the reader looks in vain for an allempt to assess the imaginative and, especially, the technical influence on Philadelphia of Friel's Minneapolis "schooling" in 1963, when he spent a few months observing Tyrone Guthrie directing plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov. Disappointments of this sort are characteristic, for O'Brien is more committed to story than theory...