Theatre review: Grace under fire for as long as identity politics play out

Come, Friel the noise – now is a good time to reflect on on playwright Brian’s legacy

April 25 2021 12:53 AM

When Brian Friel died in 2015, I wrote that “he held the mirror up to the Irish psyche and Irish identity, stripping away our posturing pretence at internationalism and cosmopolitanism.” For Friel, all politics was indeed local as he examined and passed judgement on the world through the prism of an invented town in Donegal called Ballybeg.

And that world remained shadowy even as it projected the Irish soul worldwide, in plays that were and are accepted as works of universal genius, a fulcrum of human experience, recognisable wherever they are staged. Translations holds the world record in modern times as the most performed and translated play in English.
And Friel’s voice has been acclaimed as compassionate enough to be without rancour: generous and cosmopolitan.
His people, dispossessed and isolated, were the best of us, by the very issue of dispossession, as he saw it. Even the few privileged Catholics (as in Aristocrats) were a separate cohort, never part of the rest of privileged society, because of their faith. Indeed, their definition of being aristocratic was “stepped”: in Protestant Irish society, or on the UK mainland (well, England), they would have been far from aristocratic, merely upper-middle class professionals.
So Brian Friel’s plays never reflected an experience beyond Ireland, but it is an Ireland overshadowed by its complicated history with the neighbouring island. Even so, the works have never been criticised as embittered, despite Friel’s leading involvement in the 1980s in the Field Day experiment, the Derry theatre company established with Stephen Rea to interrogate Irish identity.
Along with his friend Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel has always been credited with cultural generosity. The two are acclaimed in this country as exemplars of the way the differing cultures of the two islands can be the bridge of friendship, rising above divisive politics, and recognising the enrichment of a melting pot.
And that also represents the diasporic view.
So it’s possible to wonder if the vicious verbal battles concerning Northern Ireland, (involving both Brexit and the Protocol) currently raging between our two islands, would have seen playwright and poet standing outside, their outlook a temperate middle ground?
Maybe.
Except that acclaim for Friel’s plays has sometimes been muted among those who want our cultural heritage fed by – and owning – many influences rather than being defensively Gaelic and (culturally at least) Catholic.

We could find an answer in recent years to help us see the Brian Friel legacy as one of inclusion and generosity. The UCD academic (and Friel scholar), Anthony Roche came across something Friel wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 1972.
“It is time we dropped from the calendar of Irish dramatic saints all those playwrights from Farquhar to Shaw… and that includes Steele, Sheridan, Goldsmith and Wilde… who no more belong to the Irish drama than John Field belongs to Irish music or Francis Bacon to Irish painting.”
He may have had a point about Bacon, whose Irishness was more a geographic accident of birth rather than a nationality, but there’s a spiteful antipathy towards the others, implying that a willingness to accept an international outlook and indeed to live somewhere other than Ireland to pursue one’s life and work is treachery, a betrayal of Irishness. One could also note that all of them with the part exception of the giant figure of Shaw, lived and worked at a time when Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. So it’s possible to suggest that Friel’s belief was that no intrinsically Irish dramatic work was produced until the establishment of the Irish state.
And that is not an attitude conducive to the notion of inclusion of the unionist identity, or even toleration of it.
Just as Heaney’s anger at being included in the Penguin Book of British Poetry could be considered justified: he had made a political choice of Irishness early in his career.
But there was neither grace nor generosity in his rebuttal (it followed his turning down of the post of Poet Laureate in the UK), when he wrote the doggerel poem ‘An Open Letter’:
“Don’t be surprised if I demur, for, be advised/ My passport’s green/No glass of ours was ever raised/To toast the Queen.”
Yet, he was able to sit at the top table for the State Banquet in honour of the Queen in Dublin Castle in 2011. If we don’t have grace and inclusivity from our leading artists, there’s little hope of finding it further down the human chain, as we’ve been seeing recently.