| This study explores Irish playwright Brian Friel's attempts to use the extra-lingual communicative possibilities of performance to sidestep problems of linguistic aporia and effect meaningful communication. I argue that, at a time when the ability to say anything at all was (and still is) being questioned and in a place where dialogue had been stagnant for years, Friel tries to communicate, to transcend the gap between stage and audience, by melding Stanislavskian identification, Brechtian detachment, and Irish comic performativity. His Brechtian techniques break the fourth wall only to have it partially reconstructed through a more dominant Stanislavskian world of emotional realism yet with the rupture incorporated---a sort of crippled transcendence which appeals to the emotions even while it challenges the intellect. With an analysis of four pairs of Friel's plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa, Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney, Freedom of the City and Making History, and Translations and The Communication Cord, I examine how Friel particularly creates his own form of crippled theatrical transcendence to interrogate, and attempt to transcend, received notions and stereotypes of Irish identity, myth, and history. Trapped by narratives of personal and public (historical) memory and the colonial language in which he is forced to write, Friel examines the creative and destructive potential in his own role as the healer/artist to destabilise untenable received notions of identity and place and to suggest newer more fractured yet more fluid, and therefore tenable, personal and communal notions of them. To do so, he paradoxically insists on the immense difficulty individuals have in communicating with each other while, at the same time in performance, trying actively to "forge...300 imaginations into one perceiving faculty" (Friel). Of course Friel's attempts to control this interaction also reveals that the uncertainty of ephemeral performance remains. I suggest that Friel insists upon precisely these elusive qualities. In Ireland, where certainty has for centuries equalled death and stultification, uncertainty, however tenuous and anxious, can at least offer a qualified hope. |
