Brian Friel article by Paul R. Hyde. Brian Friel is hailed as Ireland's greatest living playwright with gems like Translations, Faith Healer, The Saucer of Larks.

Brian Friel

"It is not the literal past, the "facts" of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language." Brian Friel.

". . . the problem which Friel, his characters and his audiences face constantly is . . . how to decide between a[n] . . . allowance of memory's authentic reinforcements and a . . . disallowance of its self-serving deceptions." Seamus Heaney.

Friel is a tragi-comedian who, in his long career, has explored the Irish psyche and the relation between public/private life and the historical origins of these. In much of his earlier work, he was the chronicler of Ireland before the ravages of the Celtic Tiger, U2 and the computer boom. But those explorations of 'Irish' identity were paradoxical; the playwright was in fact revealing disintegration of historical identity and the improvisation of a makeshift bogus identity.

Recurrent in Friel's work is his dwelling on the spirit of place and the place of spirit. What binds people into a community is their participation in the 'spirit' of a place. Naming places and the recital of place names is to summon the spirit which invests the place with shared meaning.

Hence the arrival of a gramophone in a remote Donegal village – his axis mundi Ballybeg - is a cosmic event rather than a merely symbolic event. A cosmic event is such by its capacity to re-determine the contours of possible experience; it is thus an ontological event for it is that sudden intrusion of the modern into the archaic, an intrusion which shatters the spiritual integrity of the place in which identity grows and develops its meanings.

In Translations, Friel touched upon the hidden nerve which unconsciously activates every single dimension of the complex relations between Ireland and England: that nerve is language. Friel himself confirms this: "Because the play has to do with language and only language." It was the so-called 'Liberator', Daniel O'Connell, who said; "the old language is a barrier to modern progress..." This despite the fact that O'Connell himself was a fluent speaker of Kerry Irish and his own aunt Eibhlin O Laoire (née O'Connell) was author of the ravishingly beautiful Lament for Art O'Leary.

The Ordinance Survey of 1833, which is at the centre of Translations, was indeed the birth of 'modern' Ireland, of the deracinated pseudo republic now 'governed' by shopkeepers, solicitors and accountants, much more than 1916 or what emerged from that event. Translations is about the ontology and topology of imperialism and not about a language barrier. It is about realities remote from one another and the play is as misunderstood as it is beautiful. Atavism plays against young-love sentimentalism and innocence is sacrificed upon the altar of ethnic cleansing. It is a play about language and betrayal and the betrayal of language and the erosion of the spirit that is enshrined in language. The widespread and popular success of Translations is due more to its Irish Romeo and Juliet dimension than to any deeper perception of what the play articulates.

But what must be said is that Faith Healer is unquestionably the greatest and most profound work Brian Friel has produced. And lest we forget - Ireland's greatest living playwright also wrote that forgotten gem A Saucer of Larks more than forty years ago.

Further reading:

Brian Friel; A Study by Ulf Dantanus, Faber & Faber, 1988.

Celtic Revivals by Seamus Deane. Faber & Faber, 1985.