Introduction: Friel, Discourse, and Ireland
Brian Friel was born a man divided, doubled. He was born in Killyclogher, just outside of Omagh, County Tyron, in 1929; he grew up in Derry in the newly formed six-county state of Northern Ireland, but spent most of his childhood in Glenties, Donegal: a county part of the Republic, connected to it by a narrow partition of land – Donegal was discarded and disregarded by the British Empire due to its infertility and inhospitable nature.
F. C. McGrath, in Brian Friel’s (Post)Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion, and Politics, states that “Births in Ireland are recorded by both church and state, and their records do not always agree” (McGrath, 1999, p. 14). Brian Friel’s name itself is a chimera of sorts: christened Brian Patrick O’Friel, registered on the Belfast register as Bernard Patrick Friel, he chose his Gaelic Christian name and anglicised surname; he also has two birthdays – the 9th and the 10th of January:
Friel’s self-identification conforms neither to the parish register nor to the Belfast register but is a hybrid of the two. Friel has always celebrated his birthday on January 9, and he uses the Christian name on the parish register, which inscribes him within a Gaelic heritage, and the surname of the Belfast public register, which inscribes him within a British context.
(McGrath, 1999, p. 15.)
McGrath notes that Richard Pine, in Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama (1990), noted that Friel, in his letters, said, “Perhaps I’m twins” (Pine, 1990, page 15). Friel’s name articulates neither the Irish Brian O’Friel nor the British Bernard Friel but “a hybrid of the two that is neither one nor the other” – as the Indian theorist Homi Bhaba would put it, Friel is both “split and doubled” (McGrath, 1999, p. 15).
Brian Friel’s literature depicts an Ireland constantly wrestling with its own identity; Friel constantly sends narratives hurtling into each other as they try to dominate each other or live aside one another (so much like the troubles in Northern Ireland) – but usually failing, whether because of the inadequacies of language, the divisions within society, or the hypocrisy of a newly formed Irish state unable to face up to its inadequacies. Tony Coult echoes this position in About Friel (2003):
Most of Friel’s mature plays deal with struggles for freedom. Escaping – to America, from America, from Dublin to the western Isles to Glasgow, from life to death – his characters are forever wrestling with what freedom is and where it might be found. Invariably they fail either to understand or achieve freedom. Sometimes it is because of their own inadequacy, but always their failure is compounded by the condition of Irish culture. It is that social dimension that seems to well up from Friel’s own feelings of anger and frustration with his homeland.
(Coult, 2003, p. 50.)
Nesta Jones comments that Friel’s “preoccupation with language [in Lughnasa] has developed into the possibility of eliciting and conveying meaning beyond words” (Jones, 2000, p. 11). F. C. McGrath, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, summarises Friel’s writing, his project, if you will, as follows:
What happens when our narratives, individual or collective, are not validated? What happens when the narratives of mutually dependent individuals conflict? What happens when individual narratives conflict with group narratives? What happens when the narratives of two groups sharing the same physical space are mutually antagonistic to each other? These are the central preoccupations of Brian Friel’s writing.
(McGrath, 1999, p. 14.)
In 1980, Friel started the Derry-based Field Day production company with friend and actor, Stephen Rea. It was seen as a heavily nationalistic project – a claim which Friel rejected vehemently – and during the 1980s he produced some of his best and most iconic work: Translations and Making History. However, in 1990 he split from Field Day, complaining that the vein in which he had been writing for the past ten years was severely constraining him; in an interview with John Lahr in 1991, he gave his reasons:
Any life in the arts is delicate... you’ve got to forge rules for yourself, not for the sake of moral improvement but for the sake of survival. Rule number one would be to not be associated with institutions or directors. I don’t want a tandem to develop. Institutions are inclined to enforce characteristics, impose an attitude or a voice or a response. I think you’re better to keep away from all of that. It’s for that reason that I didn’t give Dancing at Lughnasa to Field Day to produce.
(Coult, 2003, p. 104.)
Another reason for his change of heart was possibly purely political: Field Day was heavily male-dominated and was criticised by such people as Edna Longley as one of Ireland’s “Ancient orders of Hibernian Male-Bonding” (Lojek, 2006, p. 87). Spurred on by media stories of the evils of improper mothering, teenage pregnancies, and the abandoning of babies in the 1980s, and political happenings in the 90s, Friel responded to these criticisms and wrote a recourse to the pejorative notion of unwed mothers as being a sign of Catholic lapse and societal decay. Helen Lojek puts the case in a clear context:
Several specific late twentieth-century issues particularly illuminate the text. The 1990s, for example, saw increasing challenges to the assumption that unwed mothers need to be punished. In the 1984 “Kerry babies” case, two (unrelated) murdered babies were found in close proximity in rural Kerry. The same year a Longford teen died under a statue of the Virgin, in labour from a concealed pregnancy. Such cases were widely publicised and imaged in popular film and literature. Dancing at Lughnasa poses an alternative to the culture of cruelty towards unwed mothers and illegitimate children.
(Lojek, 2006, p. 87.)
Referring briefly back to my former point about certain female political happenings in 1990s Ireland, Helen Lojek also outlines the importance of the play in the context of healing old wounds – women were finally participating politically and Lughnasa was a platform for the discussion of women’s roles within society:
Women were suddenly highly visible in Irish politics, especially when Mary Robinson was elected President in 1990 shortly after the play’s premiere. Debate about legal and constitutional restrictions on women, to which Dancing at Lughnasa contributed, was part of the climate for her election.
(Lojek, 2006, p. 87.)
In a deviation that was seen as controversial, he premiered Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Tony Coult, in About Friel: the Playwright and His Work (2003), had this to say:
Dancing at Lughnasa is undoubtedly Friel’s ‘greatest hit’ of the 1990s – perhaps even of his whole career. It has a power to move audiences that transcends national barriers, or familiarity with theatre styles, or political preoccupations.
(Coult, 2003, p. 106.)
Friel is an Ulsterman, and as such he must try to square off several discourses: the history of Ulster, the creation of Northern Ireland in 1921, and the creation of the Republic of Ireland in 1937; however, trying to square off two or more discourses is very problematic – which prevails? And can any one be regarded above others? As a man torn between discourses, embedded in a fluid and inconsistent history, Friel had this to say:
I first began to wonder what it was to be an Irish Catholic; in short, this was when for the first time in my life I began to survey and analyse the mixed holding I had inherited – the personal, traditional and acquired knowledge that cocooned me, an Irish Catholic teacher with a nationalist background, living in a schizophrenic community, son of a teacher, grandson of peasants who could neither read nor write. The process was disquieting – is disquieting because it is still going on.
(Friel, 1972, p. 17-22.)
The majority of Friel’s plays are set in Ballybeg, a fictional town in Donegal that’s explored from the late 19th century to present day. The name comes from the Gaelic ‘baile beag’, which means ‘small town’ – the allusion to its name being anglicised refers to the repression enforced by the English in using language to construct an Ireland that is other from the one conceived by its natives (a theme which is explored in Translations); it could also, as Mel Gussow puts it, refer to a “Ballybeg of the mind” (Gussow, 1999, p. 140-141).
The name of Ballybeg itself suggests the duality of language, in that a small town could be seen in a positive light (as a cohesive community) or in a pejorative light (as a backwards, alienating, alienated place of a rigid mindset).
Nesta Jones, in the Faber Critical Guide (2000), comments that “Ballybeg appears to remain the same, although in each play it is depicted on the verge of change, with its people constantly subjected to differing outside pressures which they either respond to or ignore” (Jones, 2000, p. 7).
And to Ballybeg, those five brave Glenties women, and Lughnasa we now turn....
The play: pain, joy, memory, revolution, expectation and migration
Dancing at Lughnasa depicts the lives of the Mundy family, comprised of five sisters (Kate, Agnes, Maggie, Rose, and Christina), Father Jack Mundy (a disgraced clergyman, it would seem), Gerry Evans (a roguish Welshman), and Michael Mundy, Chris’s son, the boy character of whom appears on stage as a non-entity, occasionally addressed by the sisters, the product of the grown Michael’s reverie as he stands to the side of the stage, shaping the play with his sporadic monologues, voicing the boy Michael’s lines. They live in Ballybeg: a fictional town in rural Donegal.
The play itself, like many of Friel’s other plays (and Chekhov), is played out over two weeks in August during the ‘autumn’ of these characters’ lives, as summer culminates with the festival of Lughnasa - Lugh is the Celtic, pagan god of the Sun and harvest. Even up until 1936, when the play is set, Lughnasa was a common happening throughout the backcountry of Ireland; for hundreds of years, it was celebrated, often more vehemently, with dancing, merriment, and sacrificial offerings of livestock. When Catholic missionaries arrived in the 5th century, the festival of Lughnasa was so widespread and popular it had to be absorbed into tradition.
Lughnasa is regarded as Friel’s most autobiographical play: he had seven aunts (Gussow, 1999, p. 144), two of whom ended up in destitution in London – according to an interview given by Mel Gussow in 1991, Friel gave each of the Mundy sisters the Christian names of five of his real aunts.
Brian Friel’s mother’s maiden name was McLoone – Loone is related to the Irish word for Monday, hence the Mundy sisters in Lughnasa. Friel’s father taught English, like Kate Mundy; finally, Friel grew up in Donegal – he too would’ve been seven in 1936 – and the play seems to mirror his own experiences. Friel dedicates the play to ‘those five brave Glenties women’.
Lughnasa and the unfinished revolution: the politics of sex and disillusionment
The chief theme of the play is unfulfilled promises – the Mundy sisters are all unmarried; they spend their time reminiscing old suitors and idealising potential ones – Kate has Austin Morgan, who’s courting a “wee young thing from Carrickfad” (Friel, 1990, p. 10), an allusion to the lack of moral rectitude of society (which of course the Catholic church is complicit in by failing to address societal issues such as poverty), and Rose has Danny Bradley and his beckoning to come into the back hills of Ballybeg for a Dionysian Lughnasa romp.
Fintan O’Toole has more to say on marriage in the play. All their romances are in the past, and the arrival of figures heralding the past – Gerry Evans, Father Jack, Bernie O’Donnell – serves “not to re-unite them with the past, but to mark their distance from it” (O’Toole, 1992, p. 209). Rather than concrete, eternal marriage, the play presents us with other forms of marriage – ceremonial and metaphorical rituals; marriages such as Gerry and Father Jack’s exchange of hats, the eventual unorthodox marriage of Chris and Gerry, Gerry’s other adulterous marriage, the African marriage customs Father Jack describes, and, of course, the engagement of the sisters in dancing (O’Toole, 1992, p. 209), which so echoes the ceremonies of the Ryangan people.
The 1916 Declaration and the Provisional Irish Constitution of 1922 promised equality to women and a progressive government, but the 1937 Constitution famously “incorporated not only the tenets of Conservative Catholicism, but also a romantic vision of Irish women, a term that clearly meant “wife and mother”” (Lojek, 2006, p. 78).
Helen Lojek, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (2006) cements the play within a clear historical context:
This play is firmly situated within the 1930s Irish Republic and focuses on difficulties facing women struggling to realise themselves in a society whose revolution produced not greater opportunities for women but a codification of secular and religious paternalism.
(Lojek, 2006, p. 78.)
The coming political failure is pre-figured by such characters as Maggie when she sings her ditty about De Valera (the coming president, leader of Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny)); on page four, Maggie sings ‘Will you vote for De Valera, will you vote? If you don’t, we’ll be like Gandhi with his goat.’ Of course, by voting for him they will also put themselves in the same position - the failed Constitution, the abandonment of revolutionary principles, according to Helen Lojek, is widely known as “De Valera’s Constitution” (Lojek, 2006, p. 86) - but the sisters don’t know this. Friel here is also alluding to colonial troubles in India – troubles that are shared by Ireland and troubles that the Field Day project attempted to address, correct, or at least make known.
Tragedy is also prefigured in other ways: cracked mirrors, ghoulish faces painted on kites, single magpies, the release by Maggie of an imaginary dove, the marrying of perfect memory (of Chris and Gerry’s dance) with the interruption of Father Jack’s pagan interruptions, and the killing of the rooster (reminiscent of Ryangan pagan ritual). Maggie is one of the saddest characters in the play; when Agnes raises the idea of going to the dance, Maggie holds up her floured hands and faces the window ‘staring out of the window, seeing nothing’ – she is remembering the fact that she didn’t come first in the county dance, and she is unconsciously berating the state of her condition: enmeshed within a web of convention and paternalism and without a husband. But then the dance comes and it “reveals their deep-seated desire for release from repression from all kinds. [...] The dance has released the life-force and provided a form of expression for their deepest passions which convention has continually denied them” (Jones, 2000, p. 181).
Anna McMullan goes into even more detail about the dance; she highlights its power to release the sisters, though briefly, from the domestic setting of their lives, their corporeality, and their destinies:
The dance of the Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa... defies the corporeal codes of respectable female behaviour. It performs a moment of interconnection not only between the sisters (though the eldest, Kate, keeps to her own space), but also with an earlier time in Irish pagan history when the festival of Lughnasa was an active community ritual, and with other cultures, such as the leper colony of Ryanga, whose public Father Jack praises....
(McMullan, 2006, p. 145.)
Father Jack is also a sad character. He is reminiscent of the colonised (and a perfect example of what can happen to the coloniser in the colonial project): he is lost between discourses, pining for a new tradition and simultaneously displaced and disenfranchised from what he once knew – and this gives the play a sense of suspended, placeless time (O’Toole, 1992, p. 208). But this isn’t necessarily a bleak state of being. Nesta Jones also comments on the significance of Father Jack’s character regarding the affairs of 1980s Ireland:
Friel has Uncle Jack’s return to Ireland coincide with the Lughnasa Festival, thus suggesting analogies between the Ryangan harvest ceremonies and those of Celtic Ireland. It is significant that the play was written towards the end of... the 1980s, when ‘many priests, nuns, and lay missionaries began to return from the Third World imbued with the radical ideas of liberation theology and with the desire to re-establish intellectual and social connections between Ireland and the decolonised world’ [...] The figure of Uncle Jack, therefore, is particularly important with regard to this debate.
(Jones, 2000, p.159.)
Marconi is at once a freer of libidinous and Dionysian energy and a tool of repression: ideas of a nationalist republic had been fed to the Irish for decades through radio – an incredible gesture and powerful and beautiful political story which of course culminated in the estrangement and repression of half the population of the Republic.
Kate Mundy is the figurehead of the family: stoic Catholic figure in the absence of Father Jack’s tenure, chief breadwinner and teacher. However, women in 1930s Ireland did not receive equal wages – Kate is a disillusioned participant in this paternalism, unable to overcome the repressive force of male-dominated Catholic Irish culture; as Lojek says, “When Kate notes that “control is slipping away; [...] It’s all about to collapse”, she is lamenting the decline of ‘good order’, unable to withstand the paternalism with which she is herself allied” (Lojek, 2006, p. 80).
Kate has a heavily nationalistic attitude – she was involved locally (what this entails one can’t be sure) in the Irish War of Independence; she is wrapped up in the romanticism of revolution, not realising the extreme cruelty which is to be meted out to those she loves – as Agnes and Rose dream of Dublin, New York, London – songs of joy and of wonder – they become disillusioned in their domestic setting, in the toil of labour and obscurity. Helen Lojek, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel (2006), embeds this internal conflict in an even deeper historical and cultural context:
The complicity of the older sister, Kate, in upholding patriarchal precepts emphasises the complexity of gender issues. Kate may uphold those precepts partly out of concern for her job as a teacher, but she assumes authority on the basis of her income and dismisses the value of unpaid household work, just as the 1937 Constitution was to do.
(Lojek, 2006, p. 80).
Helen Lojek provides additional historical context, commenting on the political atmosphere circulating around Ireland during that sunny month of Dionysian release in Ballybeg:
The year is 1936. In 1935 the Public Dance Halls Act gad been passed, largely in response to complaints by the clergy that unregulated dancing was lewd and immoral. In 1937 came the new constitution. The Irish political revolution seemed complete. A conservative social revolution was well under way. The industrial revolution was just beginning. Geographic and cultural isolation from Dublin did not insulate Donegal from policies enacted in the capital, and the alliance between church and state produced legislation and cultural expectations particularly oppressive to women.
(Lojek, 2006, p. 79.)
Agnes is the epitome of what a domestic figurehead should be: the angel in the cottage, if you will – she quietly and diligently goes about her domestic chores. Halfway through Act One, on page 24, Agnes reacts against Kate after Agnes offers to buy a new wireless with her five pounds; Kate doesn’t recognise the huge contribution Agnes makes to the household, scorning her, and Agnes reacts like a stoked flame: “I wash every stitch of clothes you wear. I polish your shoes. I make the bed. We both do – Rose and I. I paint the house. Sweep the chimney. Cut the grass. Save the turf. What you have here, Kate, are two unpaid servants.”
The friction is one of piety and propriety versus pagan desire and impropriety: Marconi, which Kate views so pejoratively, is a dangerous release; it has the potential to change the self, to transfigure – but to Kate it is the wrong kind of transfiguring. It is also rather telling how Agnes issues her reproach in short, sharp statements – almost sounding like commands. It could be an allusion to the repressed or colonised mimicking their masters and inspiring discomfort.
Approaches to the play: what is Lughnasa?
Is Lughnasa really a bleak play? The play is a microcosm of Irish history: from the renaming of place-names and anglicising of surnames in the creation - the colonial conception - of Ireland, the politics of paternalism and patriarchy, to the alienation of becoming a changed entity, a homeless entity – an entity bound for foreign realms of both soul and geography.
Brian Friel himself in an interview with Mel Gussow in 1990 said in response to his being homebound that he thinks “exile can be acquired sitting in the same place for the rest of your life. Physical exile is not necessary” (Gussow, 1999, p. 143). Friel talks of the finding of a modus vivendi (a mode of living): his plays a way of addressing this desire, a way of building discourse (one of the key themes, if not the theme, of his work). In the same interview with Mel Gussow, Friel comments on the state of Northern Ireland:
Politics in Ireland is ‘a muddy issue’, he says. ‘I do think the problem will always be exacerbated as long as England is in the country. But if England were to go tomorrow morning, that wouldn’t solve it. We still have got to find a modus vivendi for ourselves within the country.
And, not to go on a long quote barrage, Csilla Bertha then attempts to capture and conceptualise the modus vivendi of his work:
His plays dramatise moments of this search for a modus vivendi, on both sides of the border, showing a constant cultural awareness that keeps the individual and the community conflated. Reflecting the twentieth-century-long tension in Ireland between tradition and (post)modernity, Friel takes a position between the role of the ancient file (poet) and the postmodern artist; between the “diviner” – his own (early) metaphor for the artist – or faith healer of magic, prophetic, healing power and self-reflective, self-ironic, disillusioned observer.
Friel is realistic about Ireland’s political problems: although the colonial situation and disenfranchisement of the Irish of their culture and identity is a purely English story, the failings of the Irish renaissance and political revolution must be addressed: his Ireland is one that has been failed, but one that has also failed itself, and this is part of the core of Lughnasa.
A key issue in a lot of Friel’s work is home – the finding of home. Nostalgia comes from the Greek ‘nostos’ (home) and ‘algos’ (pain); the atmosphere of Lughnasa certainly stays true to the true definition of the word. Friel does not sentimentalise the historical periods he covers; as Mel Gussow says, he comments “sardonically on what in other hands might be regarded as nostalgia” (Gussow, 1999, p. 141) through his use of exterior monologue and narrative: his work is not self-contained; indeed, it cannot be. Csilla Bertha, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, comments on the notion of home in Friel’s work:
In most other plays Friel concentrates more on the identities, the internalised colonial losses, confusions, uncertainties and consequences of those losses the Irish have had to come to terms with. Identity, both personal and cultural, is closely related to the idea of home. There is an ontological need for people to feel at home in their own place, country, village....
(Bertha, 2006, p. 156.)
Friel has said that “we [Northern Irish] aspire to a home condition in some way... And what’s constantly being offered to us, particularly in the North, is the English home and we have been pigmented by an English home.” Csilla bertha goes on to frame the difficult home nature of Ballybeg:
Through simultaneously establishing and destabilising its features as home, Friel makes Ballybeg correspond to the postcolonial situation and consciousness that are positioned on the fault lines between cultures, a space which is at one and the same time center and marginality, authenticity and change.
(Bertha, 2006, p. 157.)
Conclusion
So, is Lughnasa a bleak play? Tony Coult, in About Friel, says that Lughnasa “is, for all the pain involved, an optimistic play, ending in an ecstatic moment of inarticulacy” (Coult, 2003, p. 107). He comments on the crude dance midway through Act 1; this idea could be applied to the play as a whole:
These really are bleak moments. Yet the sweetness of the music and the feeling of release we share with the sisters as their unarticulated anger is temporarily purged in this powerful piece of stage action adds strength to what might be a draining moment.
(Coult, 2003, p. 107.)
Fintan O’Toole highlights the importance – or rather irrelevancy - of history in Lughnasa. Grand narratives, such as Ireland’s independence, the invasion of Ethiopia by Italy, the Spanish Civil War, and the Industrial Revolution, happen on the fringes of the play, rather than the play happening on the fringes of history – the characters are resisting it. “It is the things that are set against them [the grand narratives], the things out of which the play works, which are infinitely more important to the world of Dancing at Lughnasa: memory and ritual.” Rose’s comments on De Valera and Mussolini with ditties, reducing these historical events to farce; Gerry fights in Spain only because he can ride a motorcycle, and Kate’s nationalistic beliefs are entirely vacant from her life.
To me, this reading – that history is mainly the minutiae of seemingly small and unimportant lives, that history is made of memory and ritual – is a very positive and wonderful thing: in other words, history is merely a discourse – we empower discourse, so we can decide which stories – which metanarratives – to believe. O’Toole also says that “the lack of congruity between how things are and how things seem [reality and appearance]... can be a source of fun as much as it is the play’s source of tragedy” (O’Toole, 1992, p. 213). The play turns history into memory, language into movement and sound, and reality into appearance, and it is through this process that Lughnasa works.
O’Toole concludes his thoughts by saying that “The play’s most vibrant moments – the wild dance in the first act – are moments of surrender by the sisters to the force of the dance, a force at once joyous and tyrannical, a dance of grief and liberation” (O’Toole, 1992, p. 214). It is through this dichotomy that the play works: in other words, it is very difficult to say that Lughnasa is one thing or the other.
I feel the play is sad only inasmuch as the Mundy sisters are resigned to their fates: Agnes and Rose end up destitute, Jack dies (which causes the emotional collapse of Kate), Chris finishes her days in a textiles factory, hating her every moment of existence, Kate loses her job, Maggie is resigned to her domestic setting, and Michael emigrates to London, eventually finding his aunts – Kate dead and Rose on her deathbed. Even in Donegal, a place so much in tune with the peasantry romanticism of Yeats, both Ireland and England are absent: to find home, they must first abandon it, but in so doing they become lost in the gyres of terrifying new existences.
Ballybeg is a place torn between worlds, with no defining character: Michael even leaves, so much the fate of so many Irish men after WW2. It seems the only contented or peaceful character is Father Jack, and he is only content because he is like Donegal and so much of Ireland: lost in discourses – lost between home and elsewhere, paganism and Catholic tradition; lost in a strange, peaceful, beautiful trance.
The play in itself is not at all bleak, but rather, in my eyes, hugely optimistic – at least if it is bleak, it is a self-defeating bleak because of the illusion of Michael’s reverie. In one sense, Friel’s oeuvre could be seen as an attempt at political reconciliation, but, as Richard Pine says in Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama, reconciliation cannot happen if a prior conciliation never existed – Ireland is a country whose people stem first from the Gaels, who lived in Ireland from the 4th century BCE, to later invaders, such as Catholic missionaries, Vikings, and Saxons. Ireland is a construction; a construction made outside of the hands and mouths of those who most needed and deserved it. Friel attempts to highlight the fact that Ireland is a creation, and in so doing he allows for the recognition that Ireland can be whatever it wants to be, but first it must acknowledge its historical mistakes, recognise its common identity and heritage, and move forwards into a promising future, not only discovering a rich past as it does so, but potentially redesigning the very nature of what it means to be Irish.
We are free to look back through the golden haze of memory; ultimately, illusion can create happiness, and it can reveal the irrationality of history. Finally, we all live with illusion. In the breakdown of old certainties, in the whirling of modernity, anything goes.
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