Brian Friel Plays 1 Read Free Page B

theme is the death of the Irish language. Friel locates the moment of its final decline in the Donegal of the 1830s, the years in which the British Army Engineer Corps carried out its famous ordnance survey of Ireland, mapping and renaming the whole country to accord with its recent (1800) integration into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The crisis of the language is expressed in terms of the crisis in a family. Owen, the son of a hedge-school master, who teaches Latin and Greek through Irish, arrives home from Dublin with the British Army corps to help them in the mapping and renaming of his native territory. He is the recognizable Frielian outsider who has the intimacy of an insider, the man who is betraying his ancestral and anachronistic community into the modern, Anglicized world. The subsequent events demonstrate once more the salience of the connection between language (its loss and its mastery) and politics (its violence and its authority). It states with unprecedented clarity and force much that had been implicit in Friel’s work since the beginning. The crisis he is concerned with is a crisis both of language and of civilization and it is experienced directly by people who are trapped within the confines of a place and an attitude of mind from which there is no escape. It is, thus, a tragic play. Military and cultural imperialism, provincial rebellion and cultural fantasy collide with such force that the worst aspects of each are precipitated into a permanent and deadly confrontation. It is a play about the tragedy of Englishimperialism as well as of Irish nationalism. Most of all, it is a play about the final incoherence that has always characterized the relationship between the two countries, the incoherence that comes from sharing a common language which is based upon different presuppositions. The failure of language to accommodate experience, the failure of a name to fully indicate a place, the failure of lovers to find the opportunity to express their feeling whether in words or deed, are all products of this political confrontation. In Translations, Friel has found a sequence of events in history which are transformed by his writing into a parable of events in the present day. Paradoxically, although his theme is failure, linguistic and political, the fact that the play has been written is itself an indication of the success of the imagination in dealing with everything that seems opposed to its survival. What is most characteristically tragic about the play is the sense of exhilaration which it transmits to the audience. Language lost in this fashion is also language rediscovered in such a way that the sense of loss has been overcome. In that strange, contradictory triumph, Brian Friel has reached a culmination in his dramatic career. No Irish writer since the early days of this century has so sternly and courageously asserted the role of art in the public world without either yielding to that world’s pressures or retreating into art’s narcissistic alternatives. In the balance he has achieved between these forces he has become an exemplary figure.
    SEAMUS DEANE
    January 1984

CHARACTERS
    MADGE
Housekeeper
GAR O’DONNELL ( PUBLIC )
Son of the house
 
GAR O’DONNELL ( PRIVATE )
S. B . O’DONNELL
Gar’s father
KATE DOOGAN/MRS KING
Daughter of Senator Doogan
SENATOR DOOGAN
 
MASTER BOYLE
Local teacher
LIZZY SWEENEY
Gar’s aunt
CON SWEENEY
Lizzy’s husband
BEN BURTON
Friend of the Sweeneys
N ED
 
T OM
The boys
J OE
 
C ANON M ICK O’B YRNE
The parish priest

First Performance and Set
    The first performance of Philadelphia, Here I Come! was given at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on 28 September 1964 by Edwards-MacLiammoir : Dublin Gate Theatre Productions Ltd in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival and Oscar Lewenstein Ltd. The cast was as follows:
     
    
MADGE
 
Maureen O’Sullivan
 
GARETH O’DONNELL
in Public
Patrick Bedford
 
 
in Private
Donal Donnelly
 
S.