1 - Public and Private: 1964–1971

Summary

Friel's dramatic turning point came in 1963 when he spent six months working with Tyrone Guthrie at the new Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, a period which Friel called ‘his first parole from inbred claustrophobic Ireland’. Friel returned invigorated to Ireland to produce Philadelphia, Here I Come!, a play described as the ‘theatrical equivalent of splitting the atom, releasing a new kind of energy onto the Dublin stage’. This chapter will explore Friel's construction of the fictional world of Ballybeg traversed by a cast of idealists, cynics, dreamers, disillusioned lovers, and searchers. Friel saw the first three of these plays as an inquiry into ‘different kinds of love’ but the plays also set the agenda for his examination of ‘images of the past embodied in language’. The invention and manipulation of language through stories is the central theme of this chapter and we will concentrate here on the plays which dramatize the interplay between inner truth and outer ‘reality’.

The protagonists in each of these plays enact various versions of themselves in a bid to transcend the limitations of their personal and culturally determined conditions of existence. From Gar and Cass to Mag and Fox, the characters struggle against reality by attempting to invent and narrate different lives for themselves. In order to do this, they may, like Gar, create an alter ego, but more frequently, they create a parallel time and space through language which defies the strictures of destiny.

Elmer Andrews also situates Friel in the tradition of Synge and O'Casey in his exploration of this ‘tension between a reality of crisis and the eloquence of the characters, which is a way of avoiding facing up to a crisis’. Hence, the very lyricism of the characters is a way of avoiding the crisis of reality – language itself becomes a ‘potent crutch’ assisting the characters in their escapist project. Such escape attempts seem increasingly futile against the corrupt machinations of The Mundy Scheme and the violent tensions of The Gentle Island. Located between real and imagined pasts and already lost futures, Ballybeg has to be a fictional ‘small town’ because it is a place of multiple inventions. However, whether the projected future is in Philadelphia, Glasgow, Inishkeen or the wall onto which Andy's binoculars are trained, we know it will be a disappointment.