Brian Friel Plays 1 Read Free Page A

and in 1979, at the Longacre Theatre in New York, with José Quintero as director and James Mason in the leading part, he presented one of his most important, if also one of his most unexpected plays – Faith Healer.
    Faith Healer has no political background. It is the story of Frank Hardy, the faith healer, his wife Grace, and his manager Teddy. The play is composed of four monologues, the first and last spoken by Frank, the second and third spoken by Grace and Teddy in turn. A ramshackle caravan, patrolling the remote villages of England, Scotland and Wales, offering to the chronically ill the prospect of a miracle cure at the hands of the faith healer; within that, another story, of a drastic event, the death of Frank’s and Grace’s child, or of Frank’s mother, or of something which both of these are emblems of; and beyond that,the final return to Donegal and Ballybeg, where Frank’s treacherous gift will finally betray him into the brutal death he has begun to long for and expect. We have here a complex metaphor of the artist who is possessed by a gift over which he has no control. A travelling showman, putting on his little theatrical production night after night, waiting for the miracle to happen, for the moment at which the audience will be cured, energized by a miracle, he is also, very clearly, the artist as playwright. However, the return to home and death out of exile, often inspected by Friel before (as in The Laves of Cass McGuire ) reinstitutes the social and political dimension which had been otherwise so subdued. Home is the place of the deformed in spirit. The violent men who kill the faith healer are intimate with him, for their savage violence and his miraculous gift are no more than obverse versions of one another. Once again, Friel is intimating to his audience that there is an inescapable link between art and politics, the Irish version of which is the closeness between eloquence and violence. The mediating agency is, as always, disappointment, but it is a disappointment all the more profound because it is haunted by the possibility of miracle and of Utopia. Faith Healer is the parable which gives coherence to the preceding four plays. With them, it marks the completion of another passage in Friel’s career. It is his most triumphant rewriting of his early work and stands in a peculiarly ironic, almost parodic relationship to Philadelphia , of which it is both the subversion and the fulfilment.
    With the new decade of the 1980s, Field Day was born. It is a theatre company, founded by Friel and Stephen Rea, the Irish actor, and it is a cultural group embracing three poets, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and the present writer as well as the broadcaster and musician, David Hammond. It was founded to put on plays outside the confines of the established theatre and, through that, to begin to effect a change in the apathetic atmosphere of the North. Although Field Day will not be an exclusively theatrical venture, that aspect of its activities is the only one pertinent here. Derry was chosen as the centre of its operations. All the plays have their world première there. The first of these was Translations , widely acclaimed both in Irelandand abroad as Friel’s masterpiece. It was first produced in Derry, in the Guildhall, on 23 September 1980. Since then, it has had long runs in London and New York. However, the play is best seen in relation to the third Field Day production (the second was Friel’s translation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters in 1981), The Communication Cord (produced 1982, published 1983). For this most recent play is an antidote to Translations , a farce which undermines the pieties sponsored by the earlier play, a defensive measure against any possible sentimentality in its predecessor. Translations is not, in fact, sentimental, but it treats of a theme which is powerfully emotive in the Irish context and one which has been subjected to a great deal of vulgarization and hypocrisy. That