Friel Brian Friel Plays 2

Dancing at Lughnasa; Fathers and Sons; Making History; Wonderful Tennessee; Molly Sweeney
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30064-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 544 Seiten

This second collection of Brian Friel's plays includes some of his most acclaimed work for the stage. The plays included are Dancing at Lughnasa, Fathers and Sons, Making History, Wonderful Tennessee and Molly Sweeney. The collection is introduced by Christopher Murray.

Brian Friel (9 January 1929 - 2 October 2015) wrote thirty plays across six decades and is widely regarded as one of Ireland's greatest dramatists. He was a member of Aosdána, the society of Irish artists, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Irish Academy of Letters, and the Royal Society of Literature where he was made a Companion of Literature. He was awarded the Ulysses Medal by University College, Dublin. Plays include Hedda Gabler (after Ibsen), The Home Place, Performances, Three Plays After (Afterplay, The Bear, The Yalta Game), Uncle Vanya (after Chekhov), Give Me Your Answer Do!, Molly Sweeney (Winner of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play), Wonderful Tennessee, A Month in the Country (after Turgenev), The London Vertigo (after Charles Macklin), Dancing at Lughnasa (Winner of 3 Tony Awards including Best Play, New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play, Olivier Award for Best Play), Making History, The Communication Cord, American Welcome, Three Sisters (after Chekhov), Translations, Aristocrats (Winner of the Evening Standard Award for Best Play and New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play), Faith Healer, Fathers and Sons, Living Quarters, Volunteers, The Freedom of the City, The Gentle Island, The Mundy Scheme, Crystal and Fox, Lovers: Winners and Losers, The Loves of Cass Maguire, and Philadelphia Here I Come!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Friel, Brian

Leseproben

Introduction

Like so many great dramatists from Shakespeare through Ibsen to O’Neill and Miller, whose later plays reveal both a surprising mature flowering and a shapely inclusion of youthful themes, Brian Friel’s latest work as represented in this volume is at once a new departure and a return to familiar ground. As he is ever the protean playwright, whose work shifts agilely from political to non-political themes, it is always dangerous to be categorical about phases of development in Friel’s drama. And yet 1986, when Fathers and Sons had its première, does seem to mark a new and exciting stage of transition. The achievement of Translations (1980), with its complex and many-layered linguistic, cultural and political themes, was behind him, so it was time, following the farcical and mischievous Communication Cord (1982), to strike out in a new direction.

Not that the process is that simple or automatic. Friel was still closely involved with the Field Day Theatre Company, which he had co-founded in 1980, and was only gradually inching his way to the point where the new kind of play he was to write, best exemplified in Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), was to signal a return to the Abbey Theatre. As Friel himself put it in interview with Ciaran Carty: ‘A play offers you a shape and a form to accommodate your anxieties and disturbances in that period of life you happen to be passing through. But you outgrow that and you change and grope for a new shape and a new articulation of it.’ The artist writes as he must and not by prescription of any kind. The later 1980s thus saw Brian Friel moving away from the preoccupations which had led to the writing of Translations and finding new release in Fathers and Sons. Close personal and family relationships were to become again his major theme, the crises that demand a re-evaluation of a man’s or a woman’s whole mode of being. For the most part the plays of this new phase thus find their centre more in individual trauma than in political crisis, although Friel was to write one other political play for Field Day, namely Making History (1988).

In spite of this development towards a non-political drama, all five plays in this volume are in various ways history plays. They are occupied with time, memory and the imminence of death. Looked at in another way they are plays about collapse of various kinds, historical, social, moral, psychological. Offsetting collapse is transcendence, or the search for a mode of living with dignity which accords with an awareness of the insufficiency of late twentieth-century criteria of success. This opposing theme is spiritual, indeed religious, which appears with quite a positive emphasis in these later plays.

In all five plays, moreover, a powerful theatricalism operates. Friel writes classically, poetically, in images which crystallize meaning symbolically; invariably these images find reflection in Friel’s careful and specific stage directions. His decision to direct the premières of Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) himself may indicate a fear that directors were not always interpreting his work as he would wish. The texts must be seen as designed, lit and choreographed by the playwright. Like Beckett, Friel has a musical concept of dramatic form; all performance features from dialogue to dance are included in ‘scores’ which demand rigorous attention to pacing, intelligent recognition of pattern, shifts in mood, and establishment of atmosphere. The plays are like extended poems, and yet they are ‘actorly’. The roles provided are subtle and deep. The doctor Shpigelsky, in Friel’s version of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1992), says, ‘If the mask fits, wear it,’ and this should alert the reader to the extent to which irony and sub-text govern the plays in general. The ‘private’ and ‘public’ personae are not so patently held apart in the later plays as in Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). In this regard the later plays are more complex. Clearly, here, as always, Friel’s writing is understated but constantly performative; the masks in these plays seem less obvious since they are as likely to be imposed by others as voluntarily assumed by the individual. Nevertheless, the notion of the metaphorical mask is central to the explorations of identity conducted in Making History and Molly Sweeney. Masks and identities interact productively also in Wonderful Tennessee (1993), where the characters seem morally disabled. Seeming is the name of the game; self-possession or repression is equally a brittle pose in these later plays. Of course, the famous dance in Act I of Dancing at Lughnasa provides stunning evidence of Friel’s theatrical power, but one should also be alert to its less flamboyant, more Chekhovian, and more diverse manifestations elsewhere.

Fathers and Sons liberated Friel from writer’s block, which had troubled him following The Communication Cord. That play, perhaps, had drawn a line all too boldly underneath the sort of play Translations was, namely, an exploration at the deepest level of what Friel now mockingly referred to as national ‘pieties’. Yet his future theme had not yet disclosed itself. This was undoubtedly frustrating, for this was the time when Field Day was undertaking a massive cultural revolution. There was even talk of a large-scale anthology of Irish writing which would redraw the map of Irish intellectual history. Perhaps Friel was numbed by the appalling cycle of violence in Northern Ireland at this time. Perhaps he deferred to the Field Day pamphlets which confronted that political situation. In any case, Fathers and Sons represents a joyous victory over silence at a difficult period. Although it was offered to Field Day for production it was beyond the resources of that company and was staged instead by the National Theatre, London.

Fathers and Sons, a most adept transformation of Turgenev’s 1862 novel into a play text, refuelled Friel’s imagination. It sometimes happens that a writer can find in reworking or adapting another writer’s work that he/she is thereby gathering nuts for a lean period. We used, perhaps, to look askance at Shakespeare for turning so readily to Holinshed’s Chronicles or to Plutarch’s Lives or to the Italian novella for his source material, when we should instead have been taking note of how the dramatic process works: parasitically, one might say, and yet in complex and fructifying ways. Chekhov had already lent resonance to Friel’s work in Aristocrats, and he had made a version of Three Sisters in 1981, but Turgenev was new territory, and the task of adapting a novel set him new problems, for he had not done this before. When a few years later he adapted Turgenev’s comedy A Month in the Country, Friel set out (in a preface) the notion that the relationship between Chekhov and Turgenev was ‘metabiotic’. Metabiosis he defined as ‘a mode of living in which one organism is dependent on another for the preparation of an environment in which it can live’. This is a far subtler metaphor than to say one author ‘paved the way’ for another. In effect, Turgenev prepared an environment in which Friel as Chekhovian artist could live or be reborn. Friel could treat Bazarov ironically. Bazarov is the single-minded activist whose untimely death puts into perspective the family values he so loftily scorned. When he falls in love and is scorned for his pains Bazarov clears a space for others to build more fruitful, less intellectual lives. Scene 4 in Act II of Friel’s version has no correlation in Turgenev’s novel; it marks a fresh shoot, a stirring of something new in Friel’s own oeuvre. The scene depicts ‘an annual harvest dance in preparation’. Here, as elsewhere emphasized in Friel’s version of Turgenev’s text, dance becomes an image of order. Even Pavel claims he was ‘an excellent dancer once upon a time’. To Anna’s bleak question, referring to Bazarov’s absurd death, ‘How do you carry on?’, Friel’s imagery of harvest, dance and the double wedding in the offing creates an idea of order and resilience which challenges the disorder inherent in Bazarov’s ironic fall. Dancing at Lughnasa was soon to bring such imagery to fuller and more persuasive fruition.

Meanwhile, Making History was to be Friel’s swan-song for Field Day. By this time Thomas Kilroy had joined the board of Field Day (the only southerner to become a member) and had supplied a challenging play, Double Cross (1986), which Friel admired. The ambiguities of that piece, the emphasis on the role-playing that political involvement demands, and the sense that the roots of betrayal lie historically far back in the psyche must have made their mark on Friel when he decided to write a play about Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and sixteenth-century Anglo-Irish relations. Kilroy had already written on this theme in The O’Neill (1969, published 1995). In the climate of the Field Day pamphlets, the time was ripe for another, more self-conscious look at the O’Neill story. Both authors relied on Sean O’Faolain’s biography The O’Neill (1942). But where Kilroy had shown the tragedy of a man divided between loyalty to the old, communal Gaelic world and...