Studies on the contemporary Irish theatre

Jacqueline Genet and Elizabeth Hellegouarc’h (dir.)

Publisher : Presses universitaires de Caen

Year of publication : 1991

Published on OpenEdition Books : 20 December 2012

Serie : Littérature et civilisation irlandaises

Electronic ISBN : 9782841334575

http://books.openedition.org

Electronic reference:

GENET, Jacqueline (ed.) ; HELLEGOUARC’H, Elizabeth (ed.). Studies on the contemporary Irish theatre. New edition [online]. Caen: Presses universitaires de Caen, 1991 (generated 09 November 2013). Available on the Internet: <http://books.openedition.org/puc/599>. ISBN: 9782841334575.

Printed version:

ISBN : 9782905461605

Number of pages : 94

© Presses universitaires de Caen, 1991

Terms of use:
http://www.openedition.org/6540

Ce livre commence par l’un des plus illustres représentants du théâtre contemporain irlandais, Brian Friel, chez qui Nicholas Grene explore différents modes de vérité à travers une analyse de quelques-unes de ses plus grandes pièces comme The Freedom of the City, Faith Healer ou Dancing at Lughnasa. Terence Brown étudie le rôle de la musique dans le théâtre de Stewart Parker, sa vision de Belfast, la ville natale, qui s’élargit à l’histoire de la province et à celle de l’Irlande. Lynda Henderson souligne les relations problématiques qui, dans les premières pièces de Tom Murphy, relient le monde intérieur et le monde extérieur jusqu’au moment où, à partir de The Gigli Concert, le premier l’emporte clairement. L’abnégation est, dans le théâtre de Thomas Kilroy, nous explique Barbara Hayley, le seul moyen qui permette à certaines personnalités de s’affirmer. Quant aux thèmes de l’œuvre de Frank McGuinness, ce sont, selon le dramaturge lui-même, perte, désespoir, échec, violence, damnation, Heaney, The Cure at Troy, donne lieu de la part de Colin Meir à un compte rendu de la représentation au Lyric Players Theatre de Belfast en octobre 1990, suivi d’une analyse du texte. Christopher Murray choisit enfin d’étudier les thèmes de dramaturges moins célèbres, pour la plupart des jeunes, qui seront peut-être les grands noms de demain. Ainsi cet ouvrage nous offre un large panorama de la production théâtrale dans l’Irlande contemporaine.

Table of contents

Avant-propos

Jacqueline Genet

Truth and indeterminacy in Brian Friel

Nicholas Grene

Let’s go to Graceland: the drama of Stewart Parker (1941 - 1988)

Terence Brown

Tom Murphy: the artist as informer

Lynda Henderson

Self-denial and self-assertion in some plays of Thomas kilroy: The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre

Barbara Hayley

An Irishman’s Theatre

Frank McGuinness

Irish poetic drama: Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy

Colin Meir

Some themes in recent Irish drama

Christopher Murray

Publications de l’équipe Anglo-Irlandaise de l’université de Caen et du groupe de recherches du CNRS (GO 929)

EN PRÉPARATION

Avant-propos

Jacqueline Genet

1Le GDR d’Études anglo-irlandaises du CNRS (GO 929) a organisé un Colloque international les 11 et 12 janvier 1991 à l’Université de Caen. Les communications de la deuxième journée, consacrées à l’Ulysses de James Joyce, ont été publiées dans l’ouvrage Studies on Joyce’s Ulysses. Ce volume-ci rassemble les conférences de la première journée. On y trouve des articles de critiques, spécialistes du théâtre, tant en République d’Irlande qu’en Ulster, mais aussi le point de vue d’un créateur en la personne de Frank McGuinness. Ce livre, qui explore un domaine encore mal connu en France, entend révéler au public de notre pays des auteurs de tout premier plan et faire prendre conscience aux lecteurs anglophones de la richesse de la production théâtrale dans l’Irlande contemporaine.

Truth and indeterminacy in Brian Friel

Nicholas Grene

1Philadelphia Here I Come (1964)1, Brian Friel’s first major play, contains two mirroring illustrations of the workings of deceptive memory, the stories that the mind tells itself. There is one moment of happiness from his childhood which Gar O’Donnell clings on to, as it represents the possibility of a fulfilled relationship with his father which is so crucially lacking in his present life. Private Gar, the inner part of the play’s split persona, recalls it in an imagined conversation with S.B.:

Do you remember – it was an afternoon in May oh, fifteen years ago – I don’t remember every detail but some things are as vivid as can be: the boat was blue and the paint was peeling and there was an empty cigarette packet floating in the water at the bottom between two trout and the left rowlock kept slipping and you had given me your hat and had put your jacket round my shoulders because there had been a shower of rain. And you had the rod in your left hand – I can see the cork nibbled away from the butt of the rod – and maybe we had been chatting – I don’t remember – it doesn’t matter – but between us at that moment there was this great happiness, this great joy – you must have felt it too – although nothing was being said – just the two of us fishing on a lake on a showery day – and young as I was I felt, I knew, that this was precious, and your hat was soft on the top of my ears – I can feel it – and I shrank down into your coat – and then, then for no reason at all except that you were happy too, you began to sing: (Sings)

2All round my hat I’ll wear a green coloured ribbono2.

3Late in the play, on the point of parting from his father, Gar finally gathers up courage, and very diffidently reminds S.B. about this incident. But the father, in no unkind spirit, denies that it happened. He never knew that song – “‘All Round My Hat’? – that was never one of mine.” A blue boat? No he cannot remember a blue boat: “There was a brown one belonging to the doctor, and before that there was a wee flat-bottom – but it was green – or was it white3? ”. To Gar the failure to remember is devastating: with memory denied, meaning is destroyed. Very shortly after, however, when Gar has left the stage to hide his humiliation, S.B. recounts his treasured memory of his son’s childhood to the housekeeper Madge, a morning when Gar had refused to go to school, determined to stay behind and mind the shop in his father’s business:

You tried to coax him to go to school, and not a move you could get out of him, and him as manly looking, and this wee sailor suit as smart looking on him, and – and – and at the heel of the hunt I had to go with him myself, the two of us, hand in hand, as happy as larks – we were that happy, Madge – and him dancing and chatting beside me – mind? you couldn’t get a word in edge-ways with all the chatting he used to go through4....

4But Madge refuses to corroborate S.B.’s memory just as S.B. had been unable to corroborate Gar’s. “A sailor suit? He never had a sailor suit”. The parallel episodes show us the freight of value memory carries for each individual, and the poignant failure of such memories to meet in a shared reality.

5All through his career as a playwright Friel has dramatised the fluid, shifting, indeterminate shape of memories, narratives, histories. Is it ever possible to tell life as it really was? Who can tell the truth of their own life? Who can truly represent the lives of others? The questions are asked again and again in Friel’s drama, at the level of the individual, of the family, and of the nation. The individual, like Gar O’Donnell in Philadelphia or the many other fantasisers in Friel, turns memory into consoling fiction. Gar, even at the point of leaving Ballybeg, his home village that so stifles and paralyzes him, knows that he is accumulating a treasure-trove of recollections: “Just the memory of it – that’s all you have now – just the memory; and even now, even so soon, it is being distilled of all its coarseness; and what’s left is going to be precious, precious gold5... ”. Frequently in Friel’s plays the focus has been on individuals as family members and their competing, conflicting or overlapping stories of themselves. In Aristocrats (1979), for example, Friel’s most Chekhovian play, the Big House fills with the accumulated reveries of the family, the oral folklore of its own past. In later plays Friel has turned from the life of the family to the national life. What for the family are memories, rewriting the shared consciousness of past experience each according to his or her prescription, for the nation becomes myth, the legends which misremember history for political purposes. Archbishop Lombard defends his idealised version of the life of the sixteenth-century Irish leader Hugh O’Neill in these terms in Friel’s 1988 play Making History:

People think they just want to know the facts; they think they believe in some sort of empirical truth, but what they really want is a story.... I am offering Gaelic Ireland two things. I’m offering them this narrative that has the elements of myth. And I’m offering them Hugh O’Neill as a national hero. A hero and the story of a hero6.

6The play as a whole exposes the fictive, fabricated quality of history, analogous to the fictiveness of the individual or the collective family memory.

7Friel is a characteristically modern playwright in his representation of indeterminate fictions. Chekhov has been an important influence on him, Chekhov with his vivid realisation of the self-sealed, colliding worlds of his characters’ egos. Other precedents for Friel’s practice are Pirandello’s sceptical illusionism and Eugene O’Neill’s piercing scrutiny of self-deception. Like so many modern writers, Friel sets up a radical doubt as to what true truth might be, whether such a thing exists. Perhaps there never can be anything but narratives, discourses, the fabrications of human beings fashioned by their own compelling needs. The most striking example of this comes in what many people regard as his most outstanding play, Faith Healer (1979). The four monologues by the three characters are each completely self-contained – there is no dialogue between them – and as it turns out, two of the three people are dead. First Frank the faith healer, then Grace his wife, Teddy his friend and business manager, and finally Frank again tell the story of their lives together. Each version is persuasive, each of the characters draws us into his or her narrative, and yet the continual discrepancies between the several stories expose the constructedness of the truths they purport to tell.

8Faith Healer could be taken to represent some sort of ultimate extreme of a scepticism that is everywhere in Friel’s drama. There are and can be, Friel seems to suggest, only competing narratives, nothing which can be determined or verified as demonstrably true. Yet there is also a strain in Friel which resists this principle of indeterminacy. His plays recurrently, in a variety of ways, crave the authority of truth. It is this need for truth and the different sorts of truth sought which I want to explore. Three types of truth, in particular, seem to me to figure in Friel’s drama as possible stays against the shape-changing relativities of narrative. The first is truth based on objective fact, documentary truth; the second is the truth of tragedy; and the third is mythic or poetic truth. Let me look at a number of illustrations of each of these verities to see how they function within the plays.

9Story-telling is fundamental to Friel’s dramatic world. He took over from his first literary metier as short story writer many of the themes and techniques of fiction. Thus the monologuing characters of Faith Healer are what in a novel we would call unreliable narrators. The refractions and distortions of their unreliable narratives are used as the measure of the bends in the characters’ minds. But Friel has also experimented quite often with the device of reliable narrator figures, figures who supply an objective narrative counterpointing the subjectivities of the characters’ experience. In the first play of the two short pieces which make up Lovers (1967), for example, we watch the central young couple of the drama, Joe and Mag, flanked by a Man and a Woman who act as what Friel calls Commentators. They read from a script a scrupulously factual account of the actions of the lovers as it might be a court deposition. “Their reading, the stage direction specifies, is impersonal, completely without emotion: their function is to give information. At no time must they reveal an attitude to their material7.” The designed effect of the drama is to afford a continuing contrast between the bleak, clinical, fact-based narration of the Man and Woman, and the living, spontaneous, volatile action of Joe and Mag in love. A somewhat similar technique is used in Aristocrats where the upper-middle-class Catholic family of the Big House is observed by Tom Hoffnung, an American historian, who is writing a dissertation on just exactly this sort of social class. Tom is constantly consulting his notebook, checking his facts as a good researcher should, and trying with some bewilderment to verify the accuracy of the rich array of family anecdote he is served. He acts as a control in the play, a means of marking off the wilder of the characters’ fictions as fictions. The contrast here, as in Lovers, is between the sort of truth which history or chronicle tells, dispassionate, neutral, true to verifiable facts, and the shifting and elusive textures of human experience. The documentary truth-telling is made to seem inadequate to the understanding of the human action; and yet there is a presupposition that such objective truth-telling, limited as it may be, is possible, that it does represent truth of a sort.

10The fullest development of the device of a trustworthy controlling narrator is to be found in the play Living Quarters (1977). Living Quarters is subtitled “After Hippolytus”, and there is a recollection of Euripides’s play in so far as the plot turns on a love affair between Ben, the son, and Anna the young stepmother of the central character Commandant Frank Butler. But in Euripides the tragedy is controlled by the warring goddesses Aphrodite and Artemis to whose wars Hippolytus, Phaedra and Theseus fall victim. In Friel’s play we have instead the character of Sir, the neutral stage manager of the action, who is, according to the stage direction “always in full control of the situation, of the other characters, of himself. His calm is never ruffled. He is endlessly patient and tolerant, but never superior. Always carries his ledger with him8.” This ledger is the true and accurate record of what happened in the one tragic day in the life of the Butler family which began with a hero’s welcome home for the soldier father Frank and ended with his suicide. The drama is a drama of memory as the characters relive the events of this day governed by Sir, whom the characters have invented, as they have invented the ledger. Sir himself explains:

In their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived this (ledger) – a complete and detailed record of everything that was said and done that day, as if its very existence must afford them their justification, as if in some tiny, forgotten detail buried here – a smile, a hesitation, a tentative gesture – if only it could be found and recalled – in it must lie the key to an understanding of all that happened. And in their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived me – the ultimate arbiter, the powerful and impartial referee, the final adjudicator9.

11Part of the strategy of the play is to show us how each of the characters tries to revise his or her part in the story, only to be forced back to the truth as recorded in Sir’s ledger. The device is not altogether successful theatrically, but it is significant in terms of Friel’s concern with dramatic truth. There is in Living Quarters a true story of what actually happened; all the characters know that, even though equally all of them try to retell it to improve or revise their roles in it. The true story has the relentless inevitability of the unchangeable past. In place of gods and goddesses, Friel substitutes narrative itself as fate, a narrative of interlinked family self-destructiveness leading to tragic catastrophe.

12Nothing in this life is certain, the old saying goes, but death and taxes. Friel does not show much interest in taxes, but he is much preoccupied by death as the one certainty we know and never know. In The Freedom of the City (1973), the play Friel wrote in anger and indignation after Bloody Sunday, the day in 1972 when thirteen unarmed civilians were killed by the British Army in Derry, death is the starting-point. The play opens with three dead bodies, the bodies of the three central characters, and then cuts to the tribunal investigating their deaths. At the time of first production the tribunal represented a vitriolic satire on the British judicial enquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday conducted by Lord Widgery, which many people in Ireland felt produced a travesty of justice in exonerating the soldiers responsible for the shooting. It was Friel’s first fully political play, and it was very severely criticised in England as polemical propaganda. However, there is much more to it than merely a political protest at a specific event. The play tells the story of three unrelated marchers on a Civil Rights demonstration, Lily, Skinner and Michael, who acciden-tally end up in the Guildhall – Derry’s equivalent of a French mairie – and get shot because it is assumed they are revolutionary terrorists. This is the reality which is enacted on stage, the actuality which is there before us, contrasted with the various political misappropriations to which it is subject.

13We see not only the tribunal judge blatantly prejudiced in his enquiry, but also the republican balladeer who turns the characters and their misadventure into instant legend, the journalists who make headlines out of them, the priests and the politicians who manipulate the deaths for their own ends. And for good measure, Friel adds in a totally extraneous professor of sociology giving a lecture on the sub-culture of poverty whose academic remarks make for an ironic commentary on the realities of these three Deny people’s lives. The play exposes the inauthenticity of a whole range of interpretative languages against the elusive realities of lived experience.

14And yet Friel wants there to be some final truth, gives to his characters at the point of death insights into their lives which they could never have had. As they face annihilation, they are each allowed to sum up, in non-naturalistic speeches marked off in the text by their lack of resemblance to their normal speech: “they speak calmly, without emotion, in neutral accents10.” Lily’s...