Brian Friel and the Three Pamphleteers

In Derry on the evening of sept 20 six bombs exploded in a local fertiliser factory and Field Day launched its fourth dramatic productiuon in the stately Guildhall. In this city, as in most of Northern Ireland, it is impossible to separate politics and culture. Brian Friel and the five other directors of the three-year od Field Day Theatre Company, all writers or arttists from the north, sem subtly aware of this fact. THeir current choice of Boesman and Lena, Athol Fugard's play on the evils of apartheid in South Afriica, is entirely consistent with teir policy of artist commitment.

Fugard, an outspllen South African author, has declared that theatre's major importance in an oppressice society is "to break the conspiracy of silence that always attends an unjust system". Boesman and Lena is crafted in the light of such scruples.; but it is more than a political manifesto. The play describes what happens after the laws of apartheid have deprived a coloured couple of everything tha  they possess. Outcast, childless and destitute, Boesman and his wife Lena, (admirably pplayed by Stephen Rea and Deirdre Donnelly), wander like Beckettian nomads) on the mudflats of marginality. While the play is set in South Africa and the idioms and accents bear the marked characteristics of its local origins, the appeal is universal. Dispossessed people are in some fundamental sense the same everyywhere, sharing the same existential condition of love, featr, loyalty, and betrayal. When every human right of habitation, identity and survival has been stripped away, one is confroonted, as Fugard puts it with those same "unanswerable little words... why? how? who? what?".  

What is particularly disquieting in Fugard's treatment of political of political oppression s the way in which the oppressed rail not only against their oppressors but also and more poignantly against themselves. Boesman's sense of outrage is so frustrated and suppressed bu white society, that his ultimately violent response is vneted on his wife Lena, on the old man she generously befriends (a "coon" from the even more dispossessed black class) and of course on himself.

Wathcing the play in the Guildhall, it was impossoible not to ponder all sorts of parallels between this South African scenario of social oppression and corresponding Irish ones. At moments I felt tempted to wonder why Field Day hadn't taken off the kid gloves and transported character, plot and speech into more identifiable "home" setting. How appropriate it might have been to portray these scapegoats of apartheid as victims of the violence in Ulster, of gerrymandering, job discrimination, internment, torture or indiscriminate bombing; or in the all-Ireland context as itinerante, heroin-addicts, homeless alcoholics and so on. In other words, if Field Day is indeed committed to the creation of a new kind of discourse and awareness in the Irish cultural scene, why focus on the oppressed in Africa rather than in Derry or Dublin's Inner-City?

I think several of those who went to the Guildhall on the opening night, expecting perhaps another Field Day performance as festive as Translations or The Communiication Cord, may have been as surprised as myself when they saw the bleak stage light up and witnessed the first scenes unfolding in alien tones, at times a little like Beckett's Endgame delivered in broken Dutch. But such initial feellings of reservation were soon dispelled as Deirdre Donnelly, Stephen Rae and Des McAleer gallantly mastered this strange and estranging scenario and brought the action powerfully home to us. So that when the lights finally fell on Lena following Boesman back onto the dark mudtrack from which they'd first arrived, one was left with the implacable suspicion that this journey into alien terriitories of feeling was not so alien after all. The mirror had in fact been held up to us all the while. Of course, it remained for us the audience to make the associations and parallels. For Field Day to have done this "translating" for us would have severely limited our options of imaginative and ideological response.

Field Day have taken a risk with this play. Their whistleestop tour of Ireland, North and South, playing in sixteen venues from Armagh to Tralee, is not likely to be a commerrcial success. But by altering their audience's expectations and by shifting the centre of focus from the native idioms of Irish cultural history, set down in Translations and The Communication Cord, to the more international idiom of "third world" struggle, Field Day have taught us the innvaluable lesson that we may learn as much about our preedicament by looking outside of ourselves as inside. The drama of Boesman and Lena opens new perspectives on our own particular experiences of upheaval and dispossession. With this "foreign" play, Friel's company have not, as might first appear, departed from their project of creating new and alternative voices for the community.

The "community" responded warmly and were in more than genial spirits by the time the post-performance recepption in the Mayor's Council Chamber of the Guildhall got underway towards midnight. In this traditional bastion of Unionist supremacy, Orangeman and Teague now locked in merry embraces, the effects of free Bushmills and Paddy erasing the divisive tribal connotations of their own tradeemarks: Nell McCafferty perched on the Mayor's throne, under the Derry emblem of an heroically starving Apprenntice Boy, benignly patting .Official Unionists; SDLP counncillors cajoled with those who in other circumstances would refer to them as the Stoop Down Low Party; while poets and intellectuals from the two cultures and confessions were almost a nation once again (in Wolfe Tone's rather than The Wolfe Tones' sense). Even the fires of the bombed fertiliser factory that lit up the night sky as we finally stumbled out of the Guildhall seemed, then, for a few mistaken moments, like torches of celebration rather than flames of division.

BUT BRIAN FRIEL HAS DONE MORE THAN DESpatch his Field Day troop to the foreign legions of Africa; he has also enlisted the intellectual swordsmanship of three pamphleteers: Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane.

More or less coinciding with the opening of Boesman and Lena was the launching of Field Day's first set of three pamphlets (to be repeated henceforth at bi-annual periods). In the first of these, entitled A New Look at the Language Question, Tom Paulin shows how the history of a language can become a story of possession and dispossession. Even the ostensibly innocuous act of compiling dictionaries, the author convincingly argues, epitomises the way in which the language question is ultimately a question about nationnhood, about one's sense of political and cultural affiliation. Thus, for example, Webster's American Dictionary aimed to provide a sense of linguistic self-respect and separatism for his people just after the American Revolution. As Webster himself put it: "Let us then seize the present moment and establish a national language, as well as a national government."

After several pages of fascinating scholarly analysis Øperhaps a little too scholarly for pamphlet purposes ˜Paulin raises the vexed question of our lack of a Dictionary of Irish English. In the absence of any such institutional lexicon the richness of Irish speech lives freely at a provinncial or local level but forfeits what Paulin calls the "written instrument of a complete culltural idea", by which he means "the all-Ireland context which a federal concept of Irish English would necessarily exxpress". One of the most strikking consequences of the failure to provide such a recognisable lexicon of "Irish Engglish" is, the author concludes, a fragmented and at times derelict cultural discourse with untold numbers of "homeless" words. (Our linguistic displaceement, this pamphlet seems to suggest, is not altogether un-Seamus Heaney-like the political displacement of Boesman and Lena.)

In the second of the pamphlets, Seamus Heaney pens An Open Letter in Burns stanzas to the editors of the recent Penguin Book of Contemporary British Verse. The letter is prefaced by a telling quotation from Gaston Bachelard to the effect that the source of our first suffering "lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak . . . accumulating silent things within us". Blake Morrison, one of the Penguin editors has praised "silence" as one of Heaney's most abidding poetic inclinations. Now Heaney ripostes, mischievously but firmly, that it is time to end the equivocation and speak out:

"
For weeks and months I've messed about,
Unclear, embarrassed and in doubt,
Footered, havered, spraughled, wrought,
Like Shauneen Keogh,
Wandering should I write it out
Or let it go.
"

Heaney's open letter reads as a considered, and let it -be said courageous, protest against the uncritical attribution of the term "British" to his poetry. It avoids the temptaation of testy resentment and comes across rather as a gooddhumoured rebuke to those who would overlook the historiical and affective charges of our language (in this case the word "British": Britannia referring to England, Scotlandand Wales as opposed to Hibernia which referred to Ireland).

Rehearsing the story of a man who stood up in a cinema during the screening of a film to protest, in spite of emmbarrassment, against the misnaming of a beaver as a muskrat, Heaney sums up the moral of his own letter of dissent as follows:

Names were not for negotiation. Right names were the first foundation For telling truth.

In the third of the pamphlets, Seamus Deane writes with customary incisiveness and eloquence of another misuse of language: the ideological manipulation of the terms "civiilian" and "barbarian" to keep the conqueror above the law and the conquered beneath it. From the sixteenth century to the present day, "barbarism" has been deployed as a synonym of anarchism and primitivism to "demonise" those who threatened the legitimising rule of the British colonial empire. "Races like the French and the Irish, in their resistance to the English idea of liberty", argues Deane, "had now become criminalised - inferno-human beings".

Thus, for example, one could cite the strategic invocaation of such racial stereotypes as the lascivious, libertine French or the drunken, feckless Irish. The author ends his penetrating survey of the history of the political rhetoric of "civilian" and "barbarian" in the Anglo-Irish conflict, with this arresting comment on the recent dirty-protest in the Maze prison in Belfast: "the conspiracy between the degraded and the degraders became so close at that time that the filthy nakedness of the prisoner and the spaceesuited automatism of the dissinfecting jailers seemed to be an agreed contract in their respective images of what they represented - vulnerable Irish squalor, impervious, impersoonal English decontamination" .

Even this summary account of the three pamphlets should suffice to underscore the overrriding common concern of their respective authors all of whom are directors of Field Day: the use and abuse of language as a powerful, if all too often ignored, means of remembering our past, defining our present and projecting new images for the future. Without such critical attention to the worlds we inhabit, no political reshaping of the world can be totally successful. Already in Translations, Friel had sounded the note for his three pamphleteers when he wrote: "It is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but the images of the past embodied in language ... We must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, we fossilise" .

To be sure, these are not "penny pamphlets" written for the man in the street; they are two-pound-fifty pamphhlets written by intellectuals for intellectuals. But it is an auspicious beginning nonetheless. For the translation of these high-minded and crucial debates into idioms more available to the wider public, there are, of course, the Field Day plays. If the playwright needs his pamphlateers, the reverse is equally true.