Home, Exile, and Unease in Brian Friel’s Globalized Drama since 1990: Molly Sweeney, The Home Place, and Hedda Gabler (after Ibsen)

The Irish playwright Brian Friel has often explored the same dynamic and unique event of place as phenomenologist Edward Casey explored in his writings. In Molly Sweeney (1994), Friel shows how this supposedly “disabled” woman gains agency through creating conversations between the living and the dead and thus populating her mind with a rich community. In The Home Place (2005), Friel elegizes the dislocated landlord Christopher Gore and suggests that Margaret and the local singers are briefly liberated from their poverty while singing Thomas Moore’s music. In his Hedda Gabler (after Ibsen) (2008), Friel affirms the imagination through the emplaced collaboration between Thea Elvsted and George Tesman, a collaboration that will help them recreate Eilert Loevborg’s manuscript (even as Hedda kills herself, representing the death-dance of frenetic modernity). In these plays written during Ireland’s rapid globalization, Friel privileges dynamic, often heterogeneous communities that transcend time, space, and gender through the imagination.