by Brian Friel
Wonderful Tennessee could hardly be more different from Dancing at Lughnasa. In some ways it is a bolder, more uncompromising play, closer to Beckett than to Tennessee Williams. A Dublin wit described it as ‘Waiting for Godot meets The Bacchae’, but this, like a lot of Dublin wit, is clever rather than profound. It implies a gauche inability to control the register or level of dramatic communication, whereas Friel’s intertextuality is invariably knowing if not self-reflexive. He is postmodernist at least in that sense: in his adept manipulation of allusion, quotation and style. If there is a clash of styles in Wonderful Tennessee it is very deliberate.
There is a very serious purpose underlying Wonderful Tennessee. It is, in some respects, a harsh condemnation of contemporary Irish society, what Friel had in 1972 scorned as ‘the vodka-and-tonic society’ of ‘permissive Dublin’. This is the stuff of Hugh Leonard’s social satires, for example in The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971) or (more profoundly) in Summer (1974). Friel’s venture into Leonard’s territory is, however, under his own banner: as ever, a palimpsest of social, historical, popular cultural and literary sources. Ballads, tin-pan-alley, negro spirituals, and Roman Catholic hymns vie with aborted stories from a range of traditional motifs to make up a multi-layered text.
Avoiding conventional dramatic plotting, Wonderful Tennessee presents a conflict between a place and a group of people. Out of that conflict certain adjustments and arrivals at decision are made possible among the group. In the course of that process, where no single figure or consciousness dominates or serves as filter of meaning, a range of philosophical, moral and social attitudes is displayed and severely tested. In the end there is a humbling of expectations and a re-charging of moral energies.
This use of a place is poetic in the sense that Seamus Heaney’s use of landscape in, say, Station Island is poetic: the landscape itself seems spiritually possessed. This is altogether different from the usual use of place on stage, even in Chekhov, where all that is required are signs and synecdoche. In other words, space on stage is basically mimetic, as conveyed semiotically, but is usually also representative: this room is all the other possible rooms in society and so is symbolic. Stage design usually tries to combine a sense of the real (the ‘lived-in’) and the metonymic (the representative). Even where the Greeks and the Elizabethans used a skene or physical building as setting the convention was that this structure could assume an identity, a location, at the playwright’s will: now Thebes, now Athens, or now the exterior of Macbeth’s castle in Scotland, now the interior of King Edward’s palace in England. But for Wonderful Tennessee Friel uses an adaptation of the Greek skene which is also and recognizably an old pier by the sea. The designer for the Abbey production, Joe Vanek, spent a week ‘up and down every inlet and pier on the Donegal coast’ before designing a set which was ‘a kind of fusion of parts of them all’. Yet in Friel’s own stage description the stone pier has a history also: ‘It was built in 1905 but has not been used since the hinterland became depopulated many decades ago.’ From the start, the pier has a presence, a personality; it is like a temple in that its solitude emanates a spiritual atmosphere. It is thus not inert, a mere designation of place, but a living, sacred space. Indeed, at the opening of Act II the morning light ‘enfolds’ the pier ‘like an aureole’ or saint’s halo. The emptiness and the silence all around are strongly emphasized in the opening stage direction: ‘Silence and complete stillness … an environment of deep tranquillity and peace’. The conflict in the play is between these established values and the disorder and restlessness of the human party which invades the setting.
For the story of the ‘island of otherness’, Oileán Draíochta (literally, ‘Magic Island’), which the pier silently guards, Friel draws on the long tradition of voyage literature (‘immram’) in early Irish culture, for example The Voyage of Saint Brendan. Subtitled Journey to the Promised Land, this text was written in Latin c. AD 800 and often translated, most recently by John J. O’Meara in 1976. Yet it is the contrast that counts between the meaningful spiritual sea-voyage of Saint Brendan and the absurd non-voyage of Friel’s modern would-be pilgrims. At the same time, the fragile Berna (for in Friel’s later work women are usually both frail and visionary) understands the purpose of pilgrims to the island: ‘To remember again – to be reminded … To be in touch again – to attest.’ Here there is a link back to Dancing at Lughnasa and Michael’s account of dancing as being ‘in touch with some otherness’. It is perhaps the re-definition of ‘only connect’ as an answer to twentieth-century alienation. It is a reminder of the sacred at the root of the simplest, most commonplace routines.
But the six characters in Wonderful Tennessee are in search of whatever healing from the island which the pier oversees. The island is their ‘named destination’, as Spain was for Gerry Evans in Dancing at Lughnasa and as Abyssinia was to be for Frank in Molly Sweeney. In each case the destination is illusory. This party-loving group, so patently ‘lost’ and ‘unhappy’, as they declare from first entrance, find themselves challenged by the landscape, where there is ‘nothing from here to Boston except a derelict church – without a roof’. The placing of a church here, abandoned and roofless, reinforces the motif of religious starvation. The six characters only slowly make any real connection, among themselves or with this landscape and among these ruins.
Although the waiting for the boatman Carlin who never comes appears to echo Beckett, the contrast is far more significant. In Waiting for Godot (1953) the bleakness is emphasized by the repetition in Act II of the pointless routines of Act I. But at the start of Act II of Wonderful Tennessee the stage direction calls for a lighting effect for ‘a new day’, namely, ‘a pristine and brilliant morning sunlight that enfolds the pier like an aureole and renovates everything it touches’. The last phrase is significant. In Beckett there is never renovation (compare also Happy Days [1961]), but rather repetition and entropy. Friel, however, wishes to suggest, in Joyce’s phrase, the sanctification of the ordinary. His characters begin to stir towards renovation. Frank sees and is overwhelmed by seeing the dolphin, whose dance, like Hopkins’s windhover, stirred his heart in hiding. Frank’s experience brings him into silent alliance with Berna. Then Terry’s story, a brief historical excursion into the Ireland of the 1930s, touches everybody. All parody stops. The characters no longer regard the island as Edenic, but rather as readers of Friel will regard the ‘gentle island’ (title of his 1971 anti-pastoral): as a mirror of Ireland’s complex, ambivalent combination of violence and the sacred. Since the island is orientated in the midst of the audience it follows that the audience is involved in the circular process uniting the perspectives from island and pier. Of course, the audience is free, like Angela, to withhold involvement (‘What a goddam, useless, endless, unhappy outing this has been!’), but the final rhythms of the play make this difficult, and Angela herself is affected. She breaks with Terry and makes a pledge in altogether another style with George. All of the characters finally imitate at one remove the ritual practices of their forebears. In a sense they find meaning, although this is certainly a tenuous business. The certainty of George’s death is perhaps the one fixture on the characters’ horizon, and their need for a meaningful future takes its direction from that fact. Although they never get to the holy island there is a sense in which the island comes to them. When they all leave, ‘silence and complete stillness’ descend again and overcome their departing noise. The pier recovers its divine presence. The poetic idea behind this victory of silence over human noise turns the theatre into a place where, in Peter Brook’s terms (in The Empty Space), the invisible can again be made visible. Brook calls that ‘the holy theatre’. It is what Wonderful Tennessee strives to create. It is a far better play than its unhappy failure on Broadway might suggest.
With Molly Sweeney Friel narrows down his social and moral preoccupations to focus – as in Making History but without any overt politics – on a play of ideas. The basic idea is the one Synge explored in The Well of the S
aints (1905): the right of the blind to remain blind even when a cure is offered. As Synge presents it, in his high romantic style, the conflict is virtually a class question, between beggars and bourgeoisie, although for Synge the beggars represent the artist in society. In the end, Synge’s blind couple assert their right to choose inner darkness over socially approved light, and must pay the price of social exclusion. Friel, whose immediate source is less Synge than Oliver Sacks’s essay ‘To See and Not See’, ignores Synge’s broad social and aesthetic argument to centre instead on what one might call the ‘Fathers and Daughters’ theme. At the core of Molly Sweeney is the story of a woman destroyed by patriarchal interference.
It is debatable, however, to what extent the play may be considered allegorical. Is Molly the Irish Everywoman, or even a version of Cathleen Ní Houlihan, the traditional representation of Ireland in female form, as has been suggested? It is likely, however, that such critical approaches are better suited to the novel (compare Molly Bloom) than to drama. Nevertheless, Molly Sweeney is an indirect play, where the drama occurs in the form of narrative, not of action, rather as in the earlier Faith Healer (which is undoubtedly allegorical). Reading between the lines, we find Molly’s mother prefiguring Molly’s own collapse at the hands of a father figure. There are many parallels drawn between Molly’s father (a judge, always an ominous parentage in Friel) and her surgeon Mr Rice, who tries, as it were, to father her a second time. Frank, too, while mainly a comic foil for Rice, shares with him a similar ‘phantom desire, a fantasy in the head’, which propels him into re-making Molly. But whereas her father insisted that Molly had nothing to gain from going through the process of what we may call enlightenment, both Frank and (with less certainty) Mr Rice believe she has ‘nothing to lose’ by changing her blind world for the so-called normal or sighted world. Is this an allegory pointing out the dangers of technologically backed progress as against tradition or nature? In any case, the coercion undermines Molly mentally and in the end she inhabits neither one world nor the other but a ‘borderline country’ where she is, though broken and dying, nevertheless ‘at home there’. She implies a willed retreat, rather like the blind badgers which Frank foolishly tries to move from their habitat.
Because Molly Sweeney is narrated it is a complex memory play. The three narrators, who share only the space provided by the stage in what must be Friel’s least realized location in all of his plays, each recount in turn the story of the fatal operation, before and after. Their lack of interaction suggests that they do not see each other, do not exist for each other, and that only the audience is privy to this tri-partite memory. The form is thus far more experimental than Dancing at Lughnasa, controlled by a single memory. It is, of course, the playwright who, like Sir in Living Quarters, summons up these three dispersed figures and allows their discrete stories to form a continuous discourse. So abstract is this idea that the setting must remain unspecified.
In Act II Rice’s patterned language, ‘And I’ll remember Ballybeg’, refers to ‘the core, the very heart of the memory’, what he calls his own ‘performance’. Once again, the Frielian idea is presented that memory is something constructed through which the individual establishes continuity of identity and thereby a consoling sense of wholeness. Memory, in short, is redemptive. Rice, as artist, finds renovation in the achievement of Molly’s brief sightedness: his own ‘darkness’ is momentarily lifted. The way Rice projects memory forward (‘I’ll remember Ballybeg’) has a strange effect of collapsing time itself. Molly herself is likewise collapsed, sacrificed like Grace in Faith Healer or even Mabel in Making History to male ambition. Frank provides a parody of Rice’s more authentic ambition. Molly’s own memories in the hospital (was she always narrating from the hospital?) reinstate the ‘Fathers and Daughters’ motif. Rice and her father become the same person; her mother is herself. Memory and the present coincide. Molly has reached a plateau where she has won the freedom to let illusion and actuality intermingle. Yet we are told she is dying. Is Friel not finally agreeing with Synge that the price of this kind of freedom, the artist’s freedom, is exclusion, is exile? Though about to die Molly is mistress of her own world and can admit and exclude those she will. In that way, although not just in that way, the play is stunningly theatrical.
Further studies of women as at once victims of male power and pregnant with autonomy appear in Give Me Your Answer, Do!, directed at the Abbey by Friel himself. Here, too, a father and daughter relationship is bound up with mental disturbance. Here, too, the artist is enmeshed in the paradox of symbiotic mastery and destruction. The novelist Tom Connolly in this play has suffered writer’s block ever since his daughter’s descent into schizophrenia several years before the play opens, and he finds release at last only through denial of the obvious though meretricious solution. The search begun in Wonderful Tennessee for answers in a world now cut off from spiritual authority perhaps reaches its true end here, in the clarity of loyalty and the paradox of winning through losing. These are old Frielian ironies, reminted in a new and assured style. Give Me Your Answer, Do! closes the circle first described when Friel, after years of silence, felt enabled to write Fathers and Sons and so entered upon a fresh and exciting period of artistic activity. Its successful new production at the Hampstead Theatre in the spring of 1998 argues that, like Wonderful Tennessee, there is considerably more to this play than may first meet the eye. Like good music, to which Friel’s art always aspires, these plays must be heard (in the mind and in the theatre) more than once before their true power strikes home. Once they are allowed to make their proper impact they haunt the imagination for ever.
Christopher Murray
August 1998
DANCING AT LUGHNASA
In memory of those five brave Glenties women
Characters
Michael, young man, narrator
Kate, forty, schoolteacher
Maggie, thirty-eight, housekeeper
Agnes, thirty-five, knitter
Rose, thirty-two, knitter
Chris, twenty-six, Michael’s mother
Gerry, thirty-three, Michael’s father
Jack, fifty-three, missionary priest
Michael, who narrates the story, also speaks the lines of the boy, i.e. himself when he was seven.
Act One: A warm day in early August 1936.
Act Two: Three weeks later.
The home of the Mundy family, two miles outside the village of Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland.
Set: Slightly more than half the area of the stage is taken up by the kitchen on the right (left and right from the point of view of the audience). The rest of the stage – i.e. the remaining area stage left – is the garden adjoining the house. The garden is neat but not cultivated.
Upstage centre is a garden seat.
The (unseen) boy has been making two kites in the garden and pieces of wood, paper, cord, etc., are lying on the ground close to the garden seat. One kite is almost complete.
There are two doors leading out of the kitchen. The front door leads to the garden and the front of the house.
The second in the top right-hand corner leads to the bedrooms and to the area behind the house.
One kitchen window looks out front. A second window looks on to the garden.
There is a sycamore tree off right. One of its branches reaches over part of the house.
The room has the furnishings of the usual country kitchen of the thirties: a large iron range, large turf box beside it, table and chairs, dresser, oil lamp, buckets with water at the back door, etc., etc. But because this is the home of five women the austerity of the furnishings is relieved by some gracious touches – flowers, pretty curtains, an attractive dresser arrangement, etc.
Dress: Kate, the teacher, is the only wage-earner. Agnes and Rose make a little money knitting gloves at home. Chris and Maggie have no income. So the clothes of all the sisters reflect their lean circumstances. Rose wears wellingtons even though the day is warm. Maggie wears large boo
ts with long, untied laces. Rose, Maggie and Agnes all wear the drab, wrap-around overalls/aprons of the time.
In the opening tableau Father Jack is wearing the uniform of a British army officer chaplain – a magnificent and immaculate uniform of dazzling white; gold epaulettes and gold buttons, tropical hat, clerical collar, military cane. He stands stiffly to attention. As the text says, he is ‘resplendent’, ‘magnificent’. So resplendent that he looks almost comic opera.
In this tableau, too, Gerry is wearing a spotless white tricorn hat with splendid white plumage. (Soiled and shabby versions of Jack’s uniform and Gerry’s ceremonial hat are worn at the end of the play, i.e. in the final tableau.)
Rose is ‘simple’. All her sisters are kind to her and protective of her. But Agnes has taken on the role of special protector.
Dancing at Lughnasa was first performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, on 24 April 1990. The cast was as follows:
Kate Frances Tomelty
Maggie Anita Reeves
Rose Bríd Ní Neachtain
Agnes Bríd Brennan
Chris Catherine Byrne
Michael Gerard McSorley
Gerry Paul Herzberg
Jack Barry McGovern
Directed by Patrick Mason
Designed by Joe Vanek
Lighting by Trevor Dawson
