Epilogue

Summary

In 2005, Friel produced a new play, The Home Place that takes us back to Ballybeg and to nineteenth-century Ireland. In the threatened home of Anglo-Irish landlord, Christopher Gore, Friel stages another encounter between the native Irish and their internal colonizers at what he calls ‘the doomed nexus of those who believe they're the possessors and those who believe they're dispossessed’ (HP 68). Friel's audience is taught to interpret this nexus through the lenses of history, pseudoscience and personal relationships. It is a Chekhovian play of a dying world with distinctly Frielian themes of belonging, displacement and adaptation.

The Home Place echoes the themes of and the milieu of Aristocrats although it is Friel's first foray into the world of the Anglo-Irish. Set in the summer of 1878, the play opens to the strains of Moore's ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ but the stillness invoked by the melody is soon shattered by intimations of menace. The brutal murder of Lord Lifford, a local grandee, heralds the onset of agricultural unrest and peasant resistance to landlordism. Returning from his funeral, Christopher Gore describes the anger and fear stalking the Anglo-Irish community and his own ambivalent position with ‘no home, no country, a life of isolation and resentment’ (HP 68). His sympathetic listener is Margaret O'Donnell, similarly displaced as the Catholic housekeeper and ‘chatelaine’ of the Big House, desired by both Christopher and his feckless son, David. Like the mediator Owen in Translations, Margaret O'Donnell is the pivotal character in the play. Although she has seemingly abandoned her native roots and her alcoholic father, the ethereal sound of Clement O'Donnell's choir provides an insistent undermusic of loss and hope, drowned out by the exigencies of class and colonial hierarchies.

Exacerbating the tensions of the Gore household is Dr Richard Gore, Christopher's ethnologist cousin who arrives from the ‘home place’ in Kent armed with anthropometrical instruments and putative theories of social Darwinism. Christopher's complacency as the good landlord is challenged by Richard's imperial condescension and brutish assumption of racial superiority. He lines up his native ‘volunteers’ and proceeds with cranial measurements and anthropological platitudes that codify the ‘primeval’ natives.