Abstract
As the Northern Ireland Troubles unfolded in the 1970s, the burden of expectation was great that the poets, playwrights and fiction writers would directly treat of the street violence and the partisan standoffs in their work. In particular, the theatre, with its social focus and its representational immediacy, was under pressure to deliver plays of a documentary verisimilitude, even if the conventions its narrative drew on were close to those of melodrama: love between a young couple from either side of the sectarian divide featured prominently.1 But Brian Friel from the outset resisted such pressure. His first play premiered during the Troubles, The Gentle Island, was staged at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in November 1971. In an interview with Aodhan Madden of The Sunday Press, Friel made it clear that he had no intention of becoming the new Sean O’Casey and situating his drama at the centre of the Northern conflict. Rather, ‘he says, what’s happening in our island provokes tensions in all of us, tensions which the writer will channel indirectly into art’.2 In relation to his new play, Friel notes that ‘we see most facets of Irish life, love, hate, loneliness, tensions in the life of the gentle island […]. It is a serious slice of island life, a metaphor for Ireland.’3
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See ‘The Romeo and Juliet Typos’, in Chapter 8, ‘Playing the North’, in Christopher Murray, Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 192–9.
Brian Friel, ‘In Interview with Laurence Finnegan’ (1986), in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999 (London and New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 125.
Anne Ubersfeld, Reading Theatre, trans. Frank Collins (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 94. The chapter is entitled ‘Theatre and Space’.
Brian Friel, Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 204. The Mundy Scheme has not been republished and is currently unavailable.
Scott Boltwood, ‘“More Real for Northern Irish Catholics than Anybody Else”: Brian Friel’s Earliest Plays’, Irish Theatre International 2: 1 (August 2009), p. 9.
Stanley Vincent Longman, ‘Fixed, Floating and Fluid Stages’, in James Redmond (ed.), The Theatrical Space: Themes on Drama 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 152. I am grateful to Dr Ian M. Walsh for bringing this article to my attention.
Brian Friel, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Plays: One (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 27.
Brian Friel, The Gentle Island (Oldcastle, County Meath: The Gallery Press, 1993), p. 11. All future references are to this edition and will be incorporated in the text.
Frank McGuinness, ‘Surviving the 1960s: Three Plays by Brian Friel 1968–1971’, in Anthony Roche (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 25.
For a fascinating account of how the play draws on the context of the American western, see Helen Lojek, ‘Brian Friel’s Gentle Island of Lamentation’, Special Issue: Brian Friel, Irish University Review 29:1 (Spring/Summer 1999), p. 50.
See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 116. The chapter is entitled ‘Spatial Stories’.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot, The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 19.
On the play’s Brechtian dimension, see Stephen Watt, ‘Friel and the Northern Ireland “Troubles” Play’, pp. 33–4; and Ruth Neil, ‘Non-Realistic Techniques in the Plays of Brian Friel: The Debt to International Drama’, in Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok (eds), Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, Volume 2: Comparison and Impact (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987), pp. 349–59.
Conor McCarthy notes that ‘the [Butler] family consists of “insiders” and “outsiders” […] as well as being “outside” the community itself’. He has a detailed analysis of space in Living Quarters, which extends to consideration of Frank’s prominent placing in the Irish Army: ‘An army is an organization whose function is the control of space, of land and territory. […] It is significant, therefore, that Frank Butler’s service has been in the Middle East, and not on the Border, which can only be a few miles from Ballybeg.’ See Conor McCarthy, ‘Brian Friel: Politics, Authority and Geography’, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969–1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), p. 63.
Copyright information
© 2011 Anthony Roche
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Roche, A. (2011). The Politics of Space: Renegotiating Relationships in Friel’s Plays of the 1970s. In: Brian Friel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305533_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305533_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36635-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-30553-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Theatre & Performance CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)