9 - The late plays

Summary

The truism that the Friel canon has two fundamental characteristics, thematic continuity and formal diversity, naturally facilitates links between the late plays - Wonderful Tennessee (1993), Molly Sweeney (1994), Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) and The Home Place (2005) - and their predecessors. Moreover, the post-Lughnasa works sustain the enduring presence of Ballybeg as a lieuthé atrale, extend Friel's repertoire of pivotal roles for women, continue probing the politics of private life - that is, of the distribution of power and authority within the domestic sphere - and reveal an increasingly refined formal interest in parable. But Friel's late quartet is also discontinuous with his earlier works, not least because the plays in question have discontinuity as a theme. Friel's work overall is noteworthy for the consistency with which nothing goes according to plan, as well as for its concern with the quality of those frameworks (including language itself) whereby plans seem viable. The result is a conflicted recognition that the value of plans is not commensurate with the results of their being carried out. Terry's excursion in Wonderful Tennessee, Molly Sweeney's operation, the sale of Tom Connolly's archive in Give Me Your Answer, Do! and Richard Gore's anthropometric initiatives in The Home Place give such incommensurateness a more conscious focus.