14 - Brian Friel as postcolonial playwright

Summary

Brian Friel wrote postcolonial drama before the term was coined or theoreticians and critics discovered its potential. The question with which he begins The Mundy Scheme (1969) points to the core of postcolonial discourse: “What happens to an emerging country after it has emerged?” He is postcolonial in the sense that, feeling in his nerves the responsibility for the community he comes from, and worrying about the survival not only of individual but also of cultural values in the value-free modern/postmodern world, Friel continually faces the consequences of colonization, the experience that so deeply determined the formation of modern Irish history, society and identity. His writing has been concerned with the nuances of both personal and cultural-national identity and its relation to colonial dispossession and confusion, issues of home, language, tradition, the workings of private and public memory - all issues that inform postcolonial consciousness. Apart from thematic considerations, Friel has also experimented with the techniques of fragmenting, subverting and destabilizing conventional stage realism favored by postcolonial drama.