Brian Friel(1929-)
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Write a paper of 800 words about Friel. use the information below and write a list of your sources at the end of your paper.
1. Life (Friel)
Born in Omagh, Tyrone County, Northern Ireland in 1929. Catholic. Lived and studied in (London)Derry to become a priest, but changed his mind and worked as a teacher between 1950-1960.
Starts writing short stories and radio plays.One of the founders of Field Day Theatre, together with among others Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. Apart from writing his own plays Friel has 'translated' i.e. compiled an Anglo-Irish version of five Brtitish translations of Russian drama. See also Greek Drama. See also reviews.
Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel. Neither Reality Nor Dreams
Friel resists the apocalyptic tendencies of the Postmodern, advancing instead what we might call a 'New Humanism,' an existensialist aesthetics which is critical of , as well as informed by, certain aspects of Postmodernism.. . . He views the fragmentation of value in the modern world and, specifically in Ireland, as creating conditions where, far from destroying our powers of ethical self-determination, actually offers them new opportunities, new forms and contexts, new possibilities for reshaping the world and renegotiating identity in the ways which, without completely abandoning traditional moral value may release us from the prison houses of outworn myths and stereotypes. . . It is about time we put aside the idea of essence— . . .that Hegelian ghost looking for a stereotype to live in (63) See Field Day Theatre: Fifth Province
[Friel] is concerned with exploring new positions or spaces that may be occupied in the interstices of the existing discourses(64)
Friel recognizes the way myths survive and continue to inform human attitudes and behaviour(64) See Context: Pagan Elements
Friel, however subscribes to a more modern concept of translation propounded by such thinkers as Geroge Steiner ( passages from whose book After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation are echoed in Friel's play Translations) which regards all communicationa—not just between individuals—as an act of translation. Friel understands both the resistance to translation and the failure to translate(69). See. Concepts and Definitions: Translation
Friel's concept of 'translation' acknowledges the tension between what Bakhtin calls 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' forces(centre and periphery, my comment). Bakhtin sees the 'centripetal' as a way a culture and a language always work in the direction of the establishment of 'sociopolitical and cultural centralization . . i.e. in the direction of a closed system; the attempt to establish an officially recognized 'unitary' or ' monoglossic' language . . which goes hand in hand with an officially recognized set of national values. In dynamic tension with this is the 'centrifugal' the forces of disunification and decentralization endlessly developing new forms which parody, criticize and generally undermine the unitary ambitions of language.(70) See Language: heteroglossia
2. Plays
Friel's first play was Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964) theme: emigration to America. It was performed on Broadway 326 times
Friel has since written many plays.The following plays vary the themes of Dancing at Lughnasa: :Translations (1981), The Communication Cord (1982), Making History(1988) and Molly Sweeney (1994)
Dancing at Lughnasa, is Friel's fictionalized memory of his childhood. Read the link memory play.Drama is, according to Friel, "not to defer facts and ideas, Drama is first a fiction with the authority of fiction."(51). .
Katharine Worth, "Translations of History: Story-telling in Brian Friel's Theatre,"
Dancing at Lughnasa is set in Ballybeg,a fictional landscape that Friel has created based on his experiences from Northern ireland around Donegal.
3. Volunteers
Friel's interest in the early history of Ireland, Lugh, in Dancing at Lughnasa, is repeated inVolunteers (1979).Friel uses deliberately contemporary idioms to describe 'imagined history.'and explore contemporary conflicts such as — what is a volunteer? An independent choice or rhetoric for an order by those in power?
Richard Pine,Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama, 24, quoting Friel commenting on his:
archaeological approach to the past in his play Brian Friel,Volunteers (London: Faber, 1979)31-32.
Volunteers is about an archaeological excavation in Dublin, where the a house and a skelton, apparently executed from the time of the raids of theVikings in Dublin was found
Friel's interest in the-history of Ireland is explained by him as follows::
Archaeology is the scientific study of people and their culture . . . What you have around you is encapsulated history, a tangible Précis of the story of the Irish man . . . the more practical our information about our ancestors, the more accurate our deductions about his attitudes, the way he thought, what his philosophy was, in other words . . . the more we learn about our ancestors . . . the more we discover about ourselves . . . a thrilling voyage in self-discovery . . .Brian Friel, Volunteers (London: Faber, 1979)31-32.
The conclusion that the "diviner or the archaeologist stands on the threshold of both past and present, a metaphor that we shall meet often when exploring Friel's work,"is important to have in mind when analyzing why the African and Irish pagan elements appear in Dancing at Lughnasa.
a viking that was executed and Friel's plays reveal his interest in comparisons and analogues with Russian drama and prose particularly Chekhov, Turgenev and Gogol
an analogy between the rhythms and pulses of primitive Ireland and Russia before the revolution.
There is an assumed continuity between them(vikings) and us (now)
Gerald Fitzgibbon, " HIstorical Obsessions in Recent Irish Drama," Lernout, Geert, ed. "The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama (Rodophi: Amsterdam, 1991) 49-56.
Christopher Murray, " Brian Friel's Making History and the Problem of Historical Accuracy," Lernout, Geert, ed. "The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama (Rodophi: Amsterdam, 1991)
Making History (1988) the process by which people and events are translated(sic!) into a coherent story
History is mediation, represented as a story that we individually and collectively tell ourselves. The erasting of the past and re-inscribing a new version as carried out by the British map-maker in Translations is analogous with revisng history
Katharine Worth, "Translations of History: Story-telling in Brian Friel's Theatre"
Andrews, Elmer The Art of Brian Friel. Neither Reality Nor Dreams (London: MacMillan, 1995)
Bertha, Csilla, "'The Harmony of Reality and Fantasy*: The Fantastic in Irish Drama,""A Small Nation's Contribution to the World: Essays on Anglo-Irish Literature and Language, eds. Donald E. Morse, Scilla Bertha and István P´lffy(Debrecen; Lajos Kossuth University, 1993)28-42.
Burke, Patrick, "'Both Heard and Imagined': Music as Structuring Principle in the Plays of Brian Friel,"A Small Nation's Contribution to the World: Essays on Anglo-Irish Literature and Language, eds. Donald E. Morse, Scilla Pertha and István P´lffy(Debrecen; Lajos Kossuth University, 1993) 43-52.
Dantanus, Ulf, Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist (Gothenburg: Acta Universitas Gothoburgiensis, 1985)
Deane, Seamus, The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991)
Kiberd, Declean, Inventing Ireland
Lee, Josephine, "Linguistic Imperialism, the Early Abbey Theatre, and the Translations of Brian Friel, Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama and Performance, ed.J. Ellen Gainor(London: Routledge, 1995)164-181.
Lernout, Geert, ed. "The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama (Rodophi: Amsterdam, 1991)
O'Brien, George, Brian Friel
Peacock, Alan, ed. The Achievement of Brian Friel ( Gerrads Cross: Colin Smyth, 1993)
Pine, Richard, Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama(London: Routledge, 1990).
Worth, Katharine, "Translations of History: Story-telling in Brian Friel's Theatre"
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