Near the end of one of Brian Friel’s greatest plays, Translations, the old schoolmaster Hugh, whose world has fallen apart, proposes an ironic toast: “Confusion is not an ignoble condition.”
Brian Friel’s great achievement was indeed to give the confused their own nobility. The people he conjured so vividly on the stage can feel all the certainties of their lives being pulled from under their feet.
In his biggest international success, Dancing at Lughnasa, Kate speaks for most of Friel’s characters when she says that “hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile, it can’t be held together much longer”.
Friel’s gift was that he could salvage human dignity from the wrecking ball of history.
No country needed that gift more than the Ireland of his times.
The pillars in which he traced the hair cracks widening into fatal fissures were those that once buttressed an official Irish identity: Catholicism, nationalism, rural values.
He had tried (and failed) to be a Catholic priest, and taught for a decade in a Christian Brothers’ school in Derry.
He briefly followed his father into the Nationalist Party that represented Catholics in Northern Ireland before it was torn apart by the Troubles.
He identified most strongly with his mother's native village of Glenties in Co Donegal and insisted that the Irish remained at heart "a peasant people".
It was because he had felt an affinity with this identity that he could also feel – and make his characters feel – the full force of its unravelling.
His genius lay in his ability not to mourn the loss of these certainties, but to transform their broken forms into a kind of beauty.
From the failure of his vocation for the priesthood, he made Frank Hardy, the eponymous Faith Healer of his masterpiece, who has "a ministry without responsibility, a vocation without a ministry" that serves as an image for the artist's own quest.
Explorations of language
From the shattering of an old nationalism in the violence and despair of the Troubles, he made the explorations of language, myth and identity of such plays as Translations, Making History and The Communication Cord.
From the tearing apart of the rural order by emigration and modernity, he made those great dramas of leavetaking Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa.
In these dramas, history is cruel and relentless. It disposes of superfluous people. But those are Friel’s people.
In his best plays, people discover that the world they think is theirs has (often literally) no place for them. They are about to disappear. But the magic of the theatre in the hands of a magus like Friel is that this disappearance can be delayed indefinitely.
People can be held, in all their confusion, in a kind of suspended animation that defies their doom.
Brian Friel was very fond of a Russian folk tale in which a village, threatened by marauders, vanishes into a mist. The only thing that remains of it is the sound of its church bell, which never stops ringing. Now that he, like the village, is gone into the mist, Friel's own language, clear and hard and musical as a bell, will continue to ring out through the world for as long as theatre survives.
