Brian Friel: Quotations

Friel once said: “You delve into a particular corner of yourself that’s dark and uneasy, and you articulate the confusions and unease, then you acquire other corners of unease and discontent.” (Quoted in Richard Pine, obituary notice, The Guardian, 2 Oct. 2015 - available online; accessed 7.04.2017.)

‘Watch her carefully, every movement, every gesture, every little peculiarity, Keep the camera whirring; for this is a film you’ll run over and over again - Madge Going To Bed On My Last Night At Home [...].’ (Philadelphia, Here I Come!.)

[ top ]

The Enemy Within (1962), Columba: ‘A man’s enemies – they of his own household’ (Collected Plays, ed. Seamus Deane, p.20.) ‘Don’t wedge my frailties betwen my soul and its maker!’ (CP, p.30.) ‘... Get out of my life! Go back to those damned mountains and seductive hills that have roobed me of my Christ! You soaked my sweat! You sucked my blood! You stole my manhood, my best years! What more do you damned of me, damned Ireland? My soul? My immortal soul? Damned, damned, damned Ireland. [stage direction: ‘His voice breaks’; ‘Soft, green Ireland – beautiful green Ireland, my lovely green Ireland. Oh my Ireland.’ (CP, p.70).

Philadelphia, Here I Come, Gar Private: ‘I’ve stuck around this hole far too long. I’m telling you, it’s a bloody quagmire, a backwater, a dead-end! And everybody in it goes crazy sooner or later! Everybody!’ (CP, p.79.) ‘Now, even though you refuse to acknowledge the fact, Screwballs, I’m leaving forever [...] And you know why I’m going, Screwballs, don’t you? Beacuase I’m twenty-five and you treat me as if I were five – I can’t even order a dozen loaves with getting your permission [...] But worse, far worse than that Screwballs, because we embarrass one another [...] and even though I’ll be on that plane tomorrow morning I’ll have doubts; maybe I should have stuck it out; maybe the old codger did have feelings; maybe I have maligned the old bastard. So now, Screwballs, say [...] say, “Gar son – ” say “Gar, you bugger you, why don’t you stick it out here with me for it’s not such a bad aul bugger of a place.” Go on. Say! Say it! Say it!’ (CP, p.49.) ‘Say –oh, my God –say – say – something’ (CP, p.92.) [Of Madge: ] ‘Watch her carefully, every movement, every gesture, every little peculiarity, Keep the camera whirring; for this is a film you’ll run over and over again – Madge Going To Bed On My Last Night At Home ...’ (CP, p.99.)

Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1965), Gar Private: ‘You know what you are doing, don’t you, laddybuck? Collecting memories and images and impressions that are going to make you bloody miserable; and in a way tat’s what you want, isn’t it? (Philadelphia, p.16.) (Gar Private to Canon O’Byrne:) ‘...because you could translate all this loneliness, this groping, this dreadful bloody buffoonery into Christian terms that will make life bearable for us all. And yet you don’t say a word. Why, Canon? Why, arid Canon? Isn’t it your job? - to translate?’ (Philadelphia, p.88; Coll Plays, p.88). Gar: ‘Impermanence - anonymity - that’s what I’m looking for; a vast restless place that doesn’t give a damn about the past. To hell with Ballybeg, that’s what I say!’ [79].

Loves of Cass Maguire (1966), Cass: ‘What’s this goddam play called? The Loves of Cass Maguire. Who’s Cass Maguire. Me! Me! And they’ll see what happens in the order I want them to see it; and there will be no going back to the past!’ (LCM, p.12).

The Mundy Scheme (1969): ‘Ladies and Gentelmen: What hppens when a small nation that has been manipulated and abused by a huge colonial power for hundreds of years wrrests its freedom by blood and anguish? What happens to an emerging country after it has emerged? Does the transition fro dependence to independence induce a fatigue, a mediocrity, an ennui? Or does the clean spirit of idealism that fired the people to freedom augment itself, grow bolder, more revolutionary, more generous? / The answer to many of these questions can be found in Ireland, a little island in the Atlantic Ocean, 350 miles long, 150 miles broad, and with a population of about four million people. For seven hundred years this little island was occupied and oppressed by the English, who treated the natives as serfs and who even tried to supplant the Catholic religion, which was beloved by the natives, by the Protestant faith, which - which wasn’t really suited to the moist and temperate climate. Many times the people rose up against their overlords but each time they were beaten down and reduced to even greater serfdom. Eventually, however, in the year 1916, led by a [xiv] handful of idealists they rose again and this time they overthrew the English. / After their rebellion, it was a strange experience for these hardy island people to find themselves their own masters; and they were so confused that for a time they squabbled among themselves. But they soon realized that they had better put their little green isle in order if they hoped to create the nation that the idealists of 1916 would have been proud of. (In Two Plays by Brian Friel: Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme, NY: Farrar & Straus 1970, pp.157-58; quoted in Richard Pine, The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and the Post-Colonial World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014, pp.xiv-v; also [in part] in Munira Mutran, Munira Mutran, ‘The Two Mirrors of Brian Friel in The Munday Scheme and Dancing at Lughnasa’, in Ritual Remembering: History, Myth and Politics in Anglo-Irish Drama, ed. C. C. Barfoot & Rias van den Doel, Amsterdam: Rodopi 1995, p.137.

Freedom of the City (1973) - Judge: ‘We are not conducting a social survey (CP, p.108) [...] our only function is to form an objective view of the events which occurred in the City of Londonderry,m Northerin Ireland, on the tenth day of February, 1970 [...] It is essentially a fact-finding exercise [...] The facts we garner over the coming days may indicate that the deceased were callous terrorists ...’ (CP, p.109.) Dodds: ‘with a culture of poverty [...] [they] only know their own troubles [...] but they don’t have the knowledge or vision or the ideology to see their problems are also the problems of the poor in the ghettoes of New York and London and Paris and Dublin – in fact all over the Western world’ (CP, p.111.) Lily: ‘I knew I was going to die, instinctively, the way an animal know.’ (p.150.) Skinner [in reply to the question‘Why did you march today?’]: ‘Because you live with eleven children and a sick husband in two rooms that aren’t fit for animals. Because you live on state subsistence that’s about enough to keep you alive but too small to fire your guts. [...] you were outraged. That’s what it’s all about. [...] It’s about us – the poor – the majority – stirring in our sleep. And if it’s not what it’s about, then it has nothing to do with us.’ (CP, p.154.) [Michael wants] ‘a decent job, a decent place to live, a decent town to bring up our children in [...] And we want fair play, too, so that no matter what our religion is, no matter what our politics are, we have the same chances and the same opportunities as the next fella’ (CP, p.161.) Stage directions: ‘The air is filled with fifteen-second burst of automatic fire. It stops. The three stand as before, staring out, their hands behind their heads.’ (CP, 169).

See also Friel’s remarks on the writing of the play - in interview with Fintan O’Toole (In Dublin, 1982): Q: ‘With The Freedom of the City, which was obviously a very complex play, are you afraid that in certain circumstances an audience might take a very crude and a very blunt political message from it? A: ‘That wouldn’t worry me anyway. “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men [the English shot]?” - that sort of thing wouldn’t worry me at all. I think one of the problems with that play was that the experience of Bloody Sunday wasn’t adequately distilled in me. I wrote it out of some kind of heat and some kind of immediate passion that I would want to have quieted a bit before I did it. It was really - do you remember that time? - it was a very emotive time. It was really a shattering experience that the British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot 13 people. To be there on that occasion and - I didn’t actually see people get shot - but, I mean, to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is a very terrifying experience. Then the whole cover-up afterwards was shattering too. We still have some kind of belief that the law is above reproach. We still believe that the academy is above reproach in some way, don’t we?’ (O ‘toole, op. cit., ep. in Irish Times, 2 Sept. 2015 [obituary article - available online].)

Volunteers (1974): ‘Archaeology is the scientific study of people and their culture ... What you have around you is encapsulated history, a tangible précis of the story of the Irish man ... the more practical our information about our ancestors, the more accurate our deductions about his attitudes, the way he thought, what his philosophy was, in other words ... the more we learn about our ancestors ... the more we discover about ourselves ... a thrilling voyage in self-discovery ...’ (Volunteers, London: Faber 1979, pp.31-32.)

Volunteers (1974), Keeney [on Leif, the Viking skeleton]: ‘Maybe the poor hoor considered it an honour to die – maybe he volunteered [...] of course acceptance of either hypothesis would indicate he was [...] a victim of society.’ (p.28.) ‘And as I keep insisting to my friends here, the more we learn about our ancestors, children, the more we discover about ourselves – isn’t that so? So that what we are all engaged in here is really a thrilling voyage of self discovery.’ (Volunteers, Gallery 1989, p.37.)

[ top ]

Living Quarters (1978) [Narrator:] ‘But reverie alone isn’t adequate for them. And their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived [the ledger] - a complete and detailed record of everything that was said and done that day, as if its very existence must afford them their justification, as if in some tiny forgotten detail buried there - a smile, a hesitation, a tentative gesture - if only it could be found and recalled - in it must lie the key to an understanding of all that happened. And in their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived me - the ultimate arbiter, the powerful and impartial referee, the final adjudicator, a kind of human Hansard who knows those tiny details and interprets them accurately. And yet no sooner do they conceive me with my authority and my knowledge than they begin flirting with the idea of circumventing me, of foxing me, of outwitting me. Curious, isn’t it? (Selected Plays, 1984, pp.177-78; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000, pp.60-61.) the domestic life must have been bruised, damaged, by the stern attitudes that are necessary over - I suppose what I am saying is that I am not unaware of certain shortcomings in my relationships ...’ (Selected Plays, 1984, p.194; McCarthy, op. cit., p.59.) Sir: ‘But reverie alone isn’t adequate for them. And in their imagination, out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived this (ledger) - a complete and detailed record of everything that was said and done that day, as if its very existence must afford them their justification, as if in some tiny, forgetten detail buried here - a smile, a hesitation, a tentative gesture - if only it could be found and recalled - in it must lie the key to an understanding of all that happened. And in their imagination. out of some deep psychic necessity, they have conceived me - the ultimate arbiter, the powerful and impartial referee, the final adjudicator, a kind of human Hansard who knows those tiny little details and interprets them accurately. And yet no sooner do they conceive me with my authority and my knowledge than they begin flirting with the idea of circumventing me, of foxing me, of outwitting me. Curious, isn’t it? (Friel, 1984, p.177-78; here pp.60-61.) [Dram. pers.: Frank Butler; second wife Anna (first wife Louise); Ben, a son; Helen, a dg.; Miriam, a dg., m. Charles Donnelly; Tina, a dg.; Fr. Tom, Army chaplain and friend of Frank.]

Aristocrats (1979), ‘Well, when we talk about the Big House in this country, we usually mean the Protestant Big House with its Anglo-Irish tradition and culture; and the distinction is properly made between that tradition and culture and what we might call the native Irish tradition and culture which is Roman Catholic.’ (Friel, Aristocrats, in Selected Plays, London: Faber 1987, p.281; quoted in Claude Fièrobe, contrib. to Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.)

Faith Healer (1979), Frank: ‘Those were nights of exultation, of consummation ...because the questions that undermined my life then became meaningless and I knew that for those few hours I had become whole in myself, and perfect in myself. [...] But they persisted right to the end, those nagging, tormenting, maddening questions that rotted my life. When I refused to confront them, they ambushed me. And when they threatened to submerge me, I silenced them with whisky.’ (Coll. Plays, p.333.) Grace [about Frank: ] ‘he kept remaking people according to some private standard of excellence of his own, and as his standards changed, so did the person’ (CP, pp.346.) ‘I knew he had some sense that Ireland might somehow recharge him, maybe even restore him’ (CP, p.351.) Frank, ‘There was no sense of homecoming. I tried to stimulate it but nothing stirred. Only a few memories wan and neutral’ (CP, p.338.) ‘And as I moved across the yard towards them and offered myself to them, then for the first time I had a simple and genuine sense of homecoming. Then or the first time there was no atrophying terror and the maddening questions were silent. At long last I was renouncing chance.’ (CP, p.376). [Grace:] ‘It wasn’t that he was simply a liar ... it was some compulsion he had to adjust, to refashion, to re-create everything around him. Even the people who came to him ... yes, they were real enough, but not real as persons, real as fictions, extensions to himself that came into being only because of him. And if he cured a man, that man became for him a successful fiction and therefore actually real, and he’d say to me afterwards, “Quite an interesting character that, wasn’t he? I knew that would work.” But if he didn’t cure him, that man was forgotten immediately, allowed to dissolve and vanish as if he had never existed.’ (Selected Plays, 1984, p.345; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Four Courts Press 2000, p.68.) ‘O my God I’m one of his fictions too, but I need him to sustain me in that existence - O my God I don’t know if I can go on without his sustenance.’ (Ibid., p.353; McCarthy, op. cit. 2000, p.69.)

[ top ]

[ top ]

Making History (1988) - Lombard [in answer to Hugh O’Neill’s insistence that he should ‘tell the truth’:] ‘I don’t believe that a period of history – a given space of time– my life – your life – that it contains withint it one “true” interpretation just waiting to be mined. But I do believe that it may contain within it several possible narratives. The life of Hugh O’Neill can be told in many different ways. And those ways are determined by the needs and demands and the expectations of different people and different eras.’ (p.15-6.) ‘an impromptu alliance of squabbling tribesmen [...] grabbing at religion as a coagulant only because they have no other idea to inform them or give them cohesion’ (p.38.) [Cont.]

Cont. (Making History): O’Neill [wants to be included in his biography as] ‘the schemer, the leader, the liar, the statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, the soured, bitter emigré’ (p.63.) ‘you are going to embalm me in - in - in a florid lie’ (p.63.) [After Kinsale:] ‘my brother Gaels couldn’t wait to strip me of every blade of grass I ever owned’ (p.66.) Lombard: ‘I’m not talking about falsifying, about lying, for heaven’s sake. I’m simply talking about making a pattern [...] offering a cohesion to that random catalogue of deliberate acheivement and sheer accident that constitute your life. And that cohesion will be a narrative that people will read and be satisfied by’ (pp.66-67.) Lombard [seeing Ireland as] ‘reduced as it has never been reduced before [...] this isn’t the time for critical assessment of your ploys [...] Now is the time for a hero.’ (p.67).

Cont. (Making History) [Peter Lombard to Hugh O’Neill]: ‘In the big canvas of national events - in your exchanges with popes and kings and queens - is that where Mabel herself thought her value and her importance resided? Is that how she saw herself? But she had her own value, her own importance. And at some future time and in a mode we can't imagine now I have no doubt that story will be told fully and sympathetically. It will be a domestic story, Hugh; a love story; and a very beautiful love story it will be. ’ (p.69; quoted in Helen Lojek, ‘Brian Friel’s Plays and George Steiner’s Linguistics: Translating the Irish’, in Contemporary Literature, Spring 1994, pp.83-99; p.95.)

Cont. (Making History) [Peter Lombard]: ‘I have tried to be objective and faithful - after my artistic fashion - to the empirical method. But when there was tension between historical “fact” and the imperative of the fiction, I’m glad to say I kept faith with the narrative ... history and fiction are related and comparable forms of discourse and ... an historical text is a kind of literary artifact.’ (?Idem; quoted in Lojek, op. cit., p.95.)

Cont. (Making History) [Hugh O’Neill]: ‘And then when I could endure that humiliation no longer, I ran away! If these were “my people” then to hell with my people! The Flight of the Earls - you make it sound like a lap of honour. We ran away just as we ran away at Kinsale. We were going to look after our own skins! That’s why we “took boat” from Rathmullan! That's why the great O’Neill is here - at rest - here - in Rome. Because we ran away’. (Making History, p.66; quoted in Rachel Boyd, UG Diss., UUC 2012.)

[ top ]

Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Stage directions: ‘[...] there is a sense of order being consciously subverted, of the women consciously and crudely caricaturing themselves, indeed of near-hysteria being induced’ (Lughnasa, p.22.)

(Kate:) ‘And they’re savages! I know those people from the back hills! I’ve taught them! Savages - that’s what they are! And what pagan practices they have are no concern of ours - none whatever. It’s a sorry day to hear talk like that in a Christian home, a Catholic home! All I can say is that I’m shocked and disappointed to hear you repeating rubbish like that, Rose.’ [When the dancing begins Kate dances:] ‘totally concentrated, totally private; a movement that is simultaneously controlled and frantic; a weave of complex steps that takes her quickly round the kitchen, past her sisters, out to the garden, round the summer seat, back to the kitchen; a pattern of action that is out of character and at the same time ominous of some deep and true emotion. [The others] make no sound. [Lughnasa, 1990, p.62].

‘Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.’ (p.71.)

‘... the heart seemd to go out of the house [...] and when my time came to go away, in the selfish way of young men, I was happy to escape.’ (p.70-71).

[The narrator is visited by a memory] ‘which owes nothing to fact’: ‘When I remember it, I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes half-closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement - as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements.’ (Complete Plays, Vol. 2, p.108.)

[ top ]

Wonderful Tennessee (1993): ‘remembering becomes a synonym for healing’; [on Lough Derg:] ‘But years ago people went there to be cured? ‘To remember again - to be reminded.’ ‘To remember what? ...’; ‘to be in touch again - to attest.’ (Tennessee, 31.) ‘In touch with what?’ ‘Whatever it is we desire but can’t express. What is beyond Language. The inexpressible / The ineffable.’ (Tennessee, p.52).

[ top ]

“The Theatre of Hope and Despair” (lecture of 1967; printed 1968): ‘[Modern dramatist’s only real concern is with] individuals, isolated, separated, sick and disillusioned with their inheritance, existing in the void created by their rejection, waiting without hope for a new social structure that will give a meaning to their lives [... When the modern dramatist] depicts man as lost, groping, confused, anxious, disillusioned, he is expressing the secreat and half-formed thoughts of all our hearts.’ (Rep. in Christopher Murray, Brian Friel, pp.21-23; cited in Richard Pine, ‘Friel’s Irish Russia’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel, ed. Anthony Roche, CUP 2006, p.108 [Pine’s interpolations].)

[ top ]

“Self-Portrait” (1972): ‘[A]n Irish Catholic teacher with a nationalist background, living in a schizophrenic community’; explores the ‘mixed holding I had inherited’ (p.41.) illustrates ‘how difficult it is for an Irish writer to find his faith’; (p.45.) ‘our Irishness’; ‘the generation of Irish writers immediately before mine took their genetic purity for granted.’ [Cont.]

Cont.: ‘For us today the situation is more complex. We are more concerned with defining our Irishness than with pursuing it. We want to know what the word “native” means, what the word “foreign” means. We want to konw whether the words have any meaning at all.’ (p.45). [The foregoing quoted in Scott Boltwood, draft study 2000.]

Further (“Self-Portrait”, 1972), ‘I am married, have five children, live in the country, smoke too much, fish a bit, read a lot, worry a lot, get involved in sporadic causes and invariably regret the involvement, and hope that between now and my death I will have acquired a religion, a philosophy, a sense of life that will make the end less frightening than it appears to me at the moment.’ (Quoted in Stella McCuskar, ‘Emigration, Love & Relationships: Themes in the Work of Brian Friel’, UUC UG Diss., 2002.)

[ top ]

Sundry Comments

[ top ]

Identity (1): ‘perhaps I’m twins.’ (Quoted in Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Irish Drama, 1990), p.15; also in Pine, The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and the Post-Colonial World, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014, p.503ff. [chapter title; explains the origin of the phrase in a letter from Friel to the author.)

Pedigree: ‘I am not aware of having any theatrical pedigree.’ (Quoted in George O’Brien, Brian Friel, 1989, p.30.) See also his remark that the play-wright’s is a ‘bogus profession’ (q. source).

Identity (2): ‘[...] for people like ourselves, living close to such a fluid situation, definitions of identity have to be developed and analysed much more frequently. We’ve go to keep questioning until we find some kind of portmanteau term or until we find some kind of generosity that can embrace the whole island. Of course, there is no better, no more fluid, place to develop and to analyse identity than the theatre, where actors transform themselves every night.’ (Interview, Sunday Independent , 5 oct. 1980; quoted in Christopher Morash, History of Irish Theatre 1601-2005, Cambridge UP [2005], p.241.

Identity (3): [a culture] ‘can provide an identity to those who share it and constraint that identity’s freedom and autonomy’ (quoted in George O’Brien, Brian Friel, Gill & Macmillan, 1979, p.19.) Also: ‘I don’t know what a national culture is, really’ (‘Interview by Laurence Finnegan, in Essays [&c.,. ed. Christopher Murray, 2000], p.131; quoted in Scott Boltwood, draft study, 2000.)

Identity (4): ‘[...] However, I think that for the first time this is stopping, that there is some kind of confidence, some kind of coming together of Irish dramatists who are not concerned with this, who have no interest in the English stage. We are talking to ourselves as we must, and if we are overheard in America, or England, so much [the] better.’ (In Paddy Kilroy, ‘Talking to Ourselves [interview with Brian Friel], in Magill, Dec. 1980, p.60.)

Peasant mind: ‘... to understand anything about the history or present health of Irish drama, one must first acknowledge the peasant mind.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 17 March 1972, p.305.) Note also: ‘I think I am a sort of peasant at heart. I’m certainly not “citified” and I never will be. There are certain atmospheres which I find totally alien to me and I’m much more at ease in a rural setting.’ (Quoted in Ulf Dantanus, Brian Friel: A Study, p.17).

The English language: ‘We flirt with the English language, but we haven’t absorbed it [...] It’s accepted outside the island, you see, as “our great facility with the English language” [...] that’s all oul’ rubbish. A language is much more profound than that. It’s not something we produce for the entertainment of outsiders. And that’s how Irish theatre is viewed, isn’t it?’; ‘I think that is how the political problem of this island is going to be solved. [...] It’s going to be solved by the recognition of what language means for us on this island [...] Because we are in fact talking about accommodation or marrying of two cultures here, which are ostenisbly speaking the same language but which in fact aren ‘t.’ (Interview with Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Man from God Knows Where, In Dublin, No. 165, Oct. 1982, pp.20-23; p.21, 23; cited in Ginete Verstraete, ‘Brian Friel’s Drama and the Limits of Language’, in Joris Duytschaever and Geert Lernout, eds., History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature [Conference of 9 April 1986; Costerus Ser. Vol. 71] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1988), pp.85-96, pp.87, 95.)

English words: Friel has said in interview that he has taken English words and tried to ‘make them distinctive and unique to use.’ (Magill, 1980, p.59.) Vide Francis Hardy in Friel’s Faith Healer, ‘I’d recite the names to myself just for the mesmerism, the sedation of the incantation.’ (See Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature, 1989.)

Modern Ireland: ‘Ireland is becoming a shabby imitation of a third-rate American state ... We are rapidly losing our identity as a people and because of this, that special quality an Irish writers should have will be lost. A writer is the voice of his people and if the people are no longer individuals I cannot see that the writer will have much currency.’ (Interview, Hickey & Smith, A Paler Shade of Green, 1972, p.224; quoted in Conor McCarthy, Modernisation: Crisis and Culture in Ireland 1969-1992, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000, p.46.) Friel declares that he knows ‘no reason why Ireland should not be ruled by its poets and dramatists. [...] if Yeats and Lady Gregory were alive today, they would be unimportant people.’ (Ibid., pp.224-25; McCarthy, op. cit., idem). Further: ‘I have no objectivity in this situation [the Troubles]; I am too involved emotionally to view it with calm.’ (Ibid., p.222; McCarthy, op. cit., p.51.)

Irish flux: ‘[I] would like to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and indeed material flux that this country is in at the moment. This has got to be done, for me anyway, at a local, parochial level, and hopefully this will have meaning for people in other countries.’ (Cited in D. E. S. Maxwell, Brian Friel, D. E. S. Maxwell, Friel, Jersey: Assoc. UP 1973, p.84 [var. p.109].)

[ top ]

Bloody Sunday: ‘It was really a shattering experience that the British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot thirteen people. To be there on that occasion and - I didn’t actually see people get - shot - but I mean, to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is a very terrifying experience. The whole cover - up afterwards was shattering too. We still have some kind of belief that the law is above reproach.’ (Interview; quoted in F.C. McGrath, Brian Friel’s (Post) Colonial Drama: Language, Illusion and Politics, Syracuse UP 1999, p.99.) Also [after Bloody Sunday:] ‘I have no objectivity in ths situation; I am too involved emotionally to view it with calm.’ (aquoted in Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama,London: Routledge 1990), p.105; also in Dantanus, Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist, NJ: Humanities 1986; London: Faber , p.36).

“Translations Journal”: ‘Translations is set in a hedge school in Ballybeg, Co. Donegal, in the year 1833. The British army is engaged in mapping the whole of Ireland, a process which involves the renaming of every place in the country. It is a time of great upheaval in Ballybeg, their hedge-school is to be replaced by one of the new national schools, there is a recurring potato blight, they have acquired a new language (English), and because their townlan is to be renamed, everything that was familiar to them is becoming strange.’ (Cited in Terence Brown, ‘Have we a Context: Transition, Self and Society in Theatre of Brian Friel’, in Alan Peacock, The Achievement of Brian Friel (1993), p.195; Friel, ‘the play has to do with language and only language; if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost’ (cited in Dantanus, 1988, pp.199-200). Also Making History, Friel’s explanatory note in Derry premier programme, ‘Making History is a dramatic fiction that uses some actual and some imagined events in the life of Hugh O’Neill to make a story. I have tried to be objective and faithful – after my artistic fashion –to the empirical method. But where there was tension between the historical “fact” and the imperative of the fiction, I’m glad to say I kept faith with the narrative. For exampe, even though Mabel, Hugh’s wife, died in 1591, it suited my story to keep her alive for another ten years. Part of me regrets taking these occasional liberties. But then I remind myself that history and fiction are related and comparable forms of discorse and that an historical text is a kind of literary artefact. and then I am greateful that these regrets were never inhibiting. (Cited in Sean Connolly, ‘Translating History, Brian Friel and the Irish Past’, in Alan Peacock, ed., The Achievement of Brian Friel, 1993, pp.158-59).

Staging history (on Making History): ‘... writing a historical play [...] imposes particular responsibilities. The apparent advantages are the established historical facts or at least the received historical ideas in which the work is rooted and which gives it its apparent familiarity and accessibility. The concomitant responsibility is to acknowledge those facts or ideas but not to defer to them. Drama is first a fiction, with the authority of fiction.’ (‘Translations, and A Paper Landscape [... &c.]’, Crane Bag, Vol. VII, No. 2 (1983), p.123; cited in Gerald Fitzgibbon, Historical Obsession in Recent Irish Drama’, in Geert Lernout, ed., The Crows Behind the Plough: History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Poetry and Drama [Costerus Ser. Vol. 79] (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1991), pp.41-59; p.51.

Identity (1): ‘perhaps I’m twins.’ (Quoted in Richard Pine, Brian Friel and Ireland’s Irish Drama, 1990), p.15; also in Pine, The Disappointed Bridge: Ireland and the Post-Colonial World, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2014, p.503ff. [chapter title; explains the origin of the phrase in a letter from Friel to the author.)