3 - Language and History: 1979–1988

Summary

According to Paul Ricoeur, ‘History begins and ends with the reciting of a tale’. We have traced Friel's development as a dramatist in terms of the predominant themes of public and private, belonging and displacement, subjective truth and objective fiction. In each phase and in each play, we have noted the predominance of storytelling and the fore-grounding of narration in all its reliable and unreliable modes. With the plays of the 1980s, Friel broadens the scope of his storytelling plays to question the nature of language itself as a tool of communication. As Richard Kearney states, these are plays ‘not just of language but about language’. This chapter will trace Friel's radical departure from conventional dramatic techniques in Faith Healer through the phenomenal success of Translations and its less compelling antidote, The Communication Cord, to the ambitious drama about historical revisionism, Making History.

Thomas Kilroy has said of these plays, ‘Friel has always had an interest in different narrative modes. But these are plays that attempt to transfer to the stage the kind of density and complex inter-changes which we normally associate with the best prose fiction’. In dramatizing the doubts, gaps and fissures between ‘reality’ and ‘story’, Friel again asks his audiences not just to adjudicate between versions of the ‘truth’ but to recognize the implausibility of truth as an absolute concept. The plays of the 1980s display Friel's suspicion of politics, history and language but they also show his adherence to Ricoeur's claim that ‘our future is guaranteed … by our ability to possess a narrative identity, to recollect the past in historical or fictive form’.

FAITH HEALER (1979)

Faith Healer begins with Frank Hardy's litany of place names, sounds that are a superstitious ritual, recited ‘just for the mesmerism, the sedation, of the incantation’ (SP 332). The ‘indistinguishable’ Welsh and Scottish names signify Hardy's dislocation, his restless insistence on ‘no fixed abode’ as he stands before his audience, like Fox Melarkey, daring us to be charmed.

Friel 's use of the monologue form seems to privilege the narrative rather than dramatic mode of address, leading early critics of the play to describe it as a lost radio play and Friel as a short story writer who had strayed onto the stage.