Brian Friel "Talking to ourselves"

Brian Friel, born 1929, has been an important writer on the Irish scene for the last twenty years. The success, in Ireland, London and especially on Broadway of his 1965 play, Philadelphia Here I Come helped establish him as an Irish playwright. Since then he has had further success, at home and abroad, with plays like Lovers, Freedom of the City, Volunteers, Living Quarters and the recent Faith Healer.

All Friel's work has concerned itself with Ireland and/or Irish themes. His latest play, Translations, which was premiered at the Guildhall, Derry in September and which subsequently toured the North as well as appearing in the Dublin Theatre Festival, has been very enthusiastically received. Set in a Co. Donegal village of the 1830s, the play's action revolves around the arrival in the Irish speaking community of an Ordinance Survey team of British soldiers who intend to remap the area and, in the process, rename or Anglicize the Irish place names.

The tension of the play is created by the juxtaposition and finally direct violent opposition of the two cultures, Irish and British. Hugh, the local hedge schoolmaster, observes the advent of the English language and the consequent decline of Irish language and mores with poignant clarity. The two characters, Hugh's son Owen and one of the British soldiers, Yolland , who attempt to move between cultures, suffer in the attempt. In the end the British take the attitude that" it is easier to destroy learning than to recall it".

However, the play is neither a nostalgic look back to a Celtic Ireland past nor a modern day denunciation of the British occupation. For Friel the important aspect of British colonization is to learn how to deal with one of its main historical legacies - the English language. This will still be a priority even when the British finally pull out of Ulster.

Like many important works, Translations is open to a variety of interpretations. In this interview, Brian Friel gives his own commentary on the play.

In the programme notes for Translations you cite a quotation from Martin Heidigger about the nature of language. This same quotation appears as the foreword to George Steiner's After Babel, a scholarly work about aspects of translation and language. How and why did you come to read Steiner?

I came to After Babel because I was doing a translation of Three Sisters. Although I do not speak a word of Russian, I had been working on this play with the help of five standard English translations. It was a kind of act of love, but after a while I began to wonder exactly what I was doing. I think Three Sisters is a very important play, but I feel that the translations which we have received and inherited in some way have not much to do with the language which we speak in Ireland.

I think that the versions of Three Sisters which we see and read in this country always seem to be redolent of either Edwardian England or the Bloomsbury set. Somehow the rhythms of these versions do not match with the rhythms of our own speech patterns, and I think that they ought to, in some way. Even the most recent English translation again carries, of necessity, very strong English cadences and rhythms. This is something about which I feel strongly - in some way we are constantly overshadowed by the sound of English language, as well as by the printed word. Maybe this does not inhibit us, but it forms us and shapes us in a way that is neither healthy nor valuable for us...The work I did on Three Sisters somehow overlapped into the working of the text of Translations.

The fact that you opened the play in Derry would imply that you felt the play had a relevance to the North, in general, and to Derry, in particular, which it does not have to the rest of Ireland, or to anywhere else for that matter?

Not really, no. The reason that we wanted to rehearse in Derry was because the town of Derry is close to the fictional location of the play. When the director, Art O Briann, came here he felt this was the obvious place to rehearse this play. So we looked around Derry and to our surprise the Guildhall were enthusiastic about the venture.

Do you feel then that the play has a relevance to places like Belgium or Quebec, where there is a problem of two cultures?

Yes, I think so. Those are two places where I would love to go with this play. I am sure there are areas of

Russia, perhaps Estonia or Southern Russia, where their languages have faded, as has Irish. . . Of course a fundamental irony of this play is that it should have been written in Irish.

The old schoolmaster, Hugh, at one point says that "certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax, acquisitive energies entirely lacking in their material lives ". Do you feel that, in a sense the loss of our Celtic background means that we have lost a vital energy?

What Hugh is saying there is that societies which do not have material wealth or material stability are inclined to compensate for this by the invention and use of a language which is more ostentatious and opulent than the language of an economically secure society. . . What I am talking about however is the relationship of this island to the neighbouring island. We have all been educated in an English system, we are brought up in school reading Wordsworth, Shelly and Keats. These are formative influences on our lives and there is no possibility of escaping from this. We must accept this. But we must make this primary recognition and it is a recognition which we must never lose sight of: that there is a foreignness in this literature; it is the literature of a different race. If we assume that we have instant and complete access to that literature, we are unfair to it and to ourselves. And we constantly make that assumption because of the common language error.

If I can quote from the play, "we must make them our own". We must make them (English language words) distinctive and unique to us. My first concern is with theatre and we certainly have not done this with theatre in Ireland. The only person who did so in this country was Synge. Nobody since him has pursued this course with any persistence or distinction and indeed this is one of the problems of the theatre in this country. It is a new and young discipline for us and apart from Synge, all our dramatists have pitched their voice for English acceptance and recognition. This applied particularly to someone like Behan. 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.

Does the same principle apply to other areas of Irish life, namely that we have not found our own voice?

I suppose so, but probably the voice can only be found in letters, in the arts. Perhaps this is an artist's arrogance, but I feel that once the voice is found in literature, then it can move out and become part of the common currency.

Is the English which we speak still "full of mythologies of fantasy, hope and self-deception"?

I think so, certainly in our political lives.

Is it wrong then to suggest that this is a political, polemical play?

I really do not know. I am the last person to ask, really. Apparently An Phoblacht did a piece on it which says that the character of Doalty is the central figure, that a man who does not know the seven times table, can still have a deep instinct which is true and accurate.

Because he says "I have damn little to defend. . . but what I have got, they'll not get without a fight"?

Something like that, I suppose. But someone else suggested to me that the key figure is Owen, who was described to me as a typical SDLP man, but people are entitled to take their own interpretation out of the play. Perhaps there is some kind of validity in that, that the figure of Owen is an SDLP man and that if he is, then the task upon which he embarked was done with some kind of honour.

In the end, in terms of the narrative, the colonial presence is malign. This would suggest that simply there will be no solution to the Irish problem until the British presence removes itself or is removed?

We are not just talking about the present time and I am no expert in matters political, but in the long run of course I think that that is going to be true. There will be no solution until the British leave this island, but even when they have gone, the residue of their presence will still be with us. This is an area that we still have to resolve, and that brings us back to the question of language for this is one of the big inheritances which we have received from the British. In fact twenty miles from where we are sitting, you can hear very strong elements of Elizabethan English being spoken every day. The departure of the British Army will have absolutely no bearing on the tongue that is spoken in that area. We must continually look at ourselves, recognize and identify ourselves. We must make English identifiably our own language.

When Yolland describes his initial impressions of the Baile Beag community as being somewhere "at its ease and with its own conviction and assurance ", does that not imply some sort of nostalgia for Celtic Ireland?

I have no nostalgia for that time. I think one should look back on the process of history with some kind of coolness. The only merit in looking back is to understand, how you are and where you are at this moment. Several people commented that the opening scenes of the play were a portrait of some sort of idyllic, Forest of Arden life. But this is a complete illusion, since you have on stage the representatives of a certain community - one is dumb, one is lame and one is alcoholic, a physical maiming which is a public representation of their spiritual deprivation.

You talk of looking back on history with some sort of coolness. Is that what is implied by suggesting that "it is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. "?

In some ways the inherited images of 1916, or 1690, control and rule our lives much more profoundly than the historical truth of what happened on those two occasions. The complication of that problem is how do we come to terms with it using an English language. For example, is our understanding of the Siege of Derry going to be determined by MacCauley's history of it, or is our understanding of Parnell going to be determined by Lyons' portrait of Parnell This is a matter which will require a type of eternal linguistic vigilance.

"Confusion is not an ignoble condition" says Hugh, but in the Irish context can we afford to be confused?

I think most of us live in confusion, I live in confusion. Hugh's words are perhaps a fairly accurate description of how we all live, specifically at the present time. Other countries perhaps have access to more certainties than we have at the moment. I was talking specifically about Ireland.