2 - Freedom and Power: 1972–1979

Summary

Interviewed in the Irish Times in 1970, Friel responded to questions about the relationship of art to contemporary Irish politics with the observation that he was ‘emotionally much too involved about it; secondly, because the thing is in transition at the moment. A play about the civil rights situation in the North won't be written, I hope, for another ten or fifteen years.’ Friel's statement that there should be a temporal and artistic distance from violent events before they are transformed into art was used against him when The Freedom of the City appeared just a year after Bloody Sunday. However, for the playwright who had explored the gap between truth and the telling of it throughout his career, here was an event of deep political and personal significance that demonstrated the violence of competing truths.

Bloody Sunday was a turning point not only because of the loss of innocent lives but perhaps more enduringly, because of the blatant institutionalization of ‘Establishment’ truth against the experience lived by those who witnessed it. The official inquiry into these deaths conducted by Lord Widgery, the Lord Chief Justice of England, appeared three months later fully exonerating the British army. The report was denounced by Irish and English commentators alike as ‘whitewash’ and a ‘travesty’ almost as soon as it appeared but it took twenty-seven years for the British government to set up a new inquiry into Bloody Sunday. Playwright Frank McGuinness observed that ‘The events of Bloody Sunday ripped Ireland apart. In January 1972, I was in my first year studying at University College Dublin. My adolescence ended that day’. In fact, The Freedom of the City is a ‘coming-of-age’ play for Friel both in its intellectual concerns and in its dramaturgy.

Each of the plays in this period examines the manipulation of truth by public and private discourses – language is heard to be double-edged, less a tool than a weapon wielded by those in power against the powerless. They are also plays about sublimating the self in the interests of a cause, a community or an idealized version of the past.