Brian Friel Plays 1 Read Free

producing consoling fictions to make life more tolerable. Although he destroys these fictions he does not, with that, destroy the motives that produced them– motives which are rooted in the human being’s wish for dignity as well as in his tendency to avoid reality.
    In addition, these plays are full of what we may call displaced voices, American sociologists, English judges, and voice-overs from the past play their part in the dialogue in set speeches, tape-recordings, through loudspeakers. The discourse they produce is obviously bogus. Yet its official jargon represents something more and something worse than moral obtuseness. It also represents power, the one element lacking in the world of the victims where the language is so much more vivid and spontaneous. Once again, in divorcing power from eloquence, Friel is indicating a traditional feature of the Irish condition. The voice of power tells one kind of fiction – the lie. It has the purpose of preserving its own interests. The voice of powerlessness tells another kind of fiction – the illusion. It has the purpose of pretending that its own interests have been preserved. The contrast between the two becomes unavoidable at moments of crisis. Each of these plays presents us with such a moment, when both sets of voices are pitted against one another in a struggle which leads to a common ruin. Yet within the group of the victims there is another opposition which is perhaps more crucial and is certainly even more tense. It takes the form of a contrast too, between the fast-talking, utterly sceptical outsider and the silent, almost aphasic insider. At first, it seems to be a comic confrontation between a witty intelligence and a dumb stupidity. But it becomes tragic in the end and we are left to reflect that intelligence may be a gift, eloquence may be an attraction but that neither is necessarily a virtue and that the combination of both, in circumstances like these, may be disastrous. These outsiders are, dramatically speaking, dominating and memorable presences. Skinner in The Freedom of the City, Keeney in Volunteers, Ben in Living Quarters, Eamon in Aristocrats, are all men who make talk a compensation for their dislocation from family or society. They see clearly but, on that account, can do nothing. Against them, in the same plays, are ranged, respectively, Lily, Smiler, Ben in his second role of stammering nervousness and Casimir. Surrounding them are the voices of control – fathers, judges, narrators, expert analysts.Friel found in these plays a way to quarantine his central cast, with its tension between eloquence and silence, within a zone of official discourse with its ready-made jargon of inauthenticity. As a result, the plays are even more fiercely spoken plays. Language, in a variety of modes and presented in a number of recorded ways, dominates to the exclusion of almost everything else. The Babel of educated and uneducated voices, of speech flowing and speech blocked, the atmosphere of permanent crisis and of unshakable apathy, is as much a feature of Friel’s as it is of Beckett’s or of O’Casey’s plays.
    Although The Freedom of the City and Volunteers were evidently related, in however oblique a manner, to the troubles in Northern Ireland, it was still surprising to see the ferocity and the blindness with which critics, especially in London and New York, reacted to them. During those years (1973–6), the IRA campaign against the British presence in the North was at its height and the propaganda war was, as a consequence, intensified to an almost unprecedented degree. Friel was accused by some rather hysterical English and American reviewers of defending the IRA by his attacks upon the British Army and the whole system of authority which that army was there to defend. Wisely, he ignored this hack reviewing, although it cost him dear financially, especially in New York. Instead, Friel kept his attention fixed on the evolving form of his own work