NOTES: ON BRIAN FRIEL

The tools that are available to the playwright to tell his story are few enough—words, action, silence. In the theater that has engaged me words are at the very core of it all. The same words that are available to the novelist, to the poet. … But there is a difference. The playwright’s words aren’t written for solitary engagement—they are written for public utterance. They are used as the story-teller uses them, to hold an audience in his embrace and within that vocal sound. So, unlike the words of the novelist or poet, the playwright’s words are scored for a very different context. And for that reason they are scored in altogether different keys and in altogether different tempi. And it is with this score that the playwright and the actor privately plot to work their public spell. …

                                                          --Brian Friel, "Seven Notes for a Festival Program" (1999),
                            in Christopher Murray, Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999, 1999.

The consolations and distortions which memory provides, and the consequences, destructive and creative, which flow from these processes, are obviously a central concern of Friel’s plays. … A great deal of his dramatic writing demonstrates the way his characters either retrieve or reconstruct a past sometimes in order to indulge and absolve the characters, sometimes to expose and judge them, but mostly in order to exercise judgement and absolution at the same time. Friel is intent upon showing how easy it is for them to evade reality by taking the wrong memory-turn; and he is also intent upon confronting audiences and readers with the possibility that they too have been prone to the same evasions and false trails. But his effort is by no means all negative, since he also wishes to show that there are vitally necessary resources to which memory alone, in its true operations, will give access; so the problem which Friel, his characters, and his audiences face constantly is this: how to decide between a tender-minded allowance of memory’s authentic reinforcements and a tough-minded disallowance of its self-serving deceptions.

                                     --Seamus Heaney, "For Liberation: Brian Friel and the Use of Memory,"
                                                                                       The Achievement of Brian Friel, 1993.

More than any dramatist since Beckett, Friel has made a career out of expressing the inexpressible—of giving voice via words, music and, most crucially, silence to those vast reaches which language cannot fill.

                                                                                 --Matt Wolf, "Epiphany’s Threshold," 
                                                                                                American Theater, April, 1994.

In his plays, there are no real villains, or indeed heroes, but simply characters dreaming of what is, what was and what might have been, but in so wondering the tragedy of their lives looms, a darkness which the audiences see, but for the fated dimly seen, hence the delicacy of their tragedy.

                         --Kieran Flanagan, "Brian Friel: A Sociological Appreciation of an Irish Playwright," 
                                                                                        Contemporary Review, April, 1995.

Perhaps the important thing is not the accurate memory but the successful invention. And at this stage of my life I no longer know what is invention and what "authentic." The two have merged into one truth for me. … Ballybeg is a village of the mind, more a depository for remembered or invented experience than a geographical location.

                                                                               --Brian Friel, interview with D.E.S. Maxwell,
           Images: Arts and the People in Northern Ireland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, no date.

There is a Russian folk-tale about a mythical town called Kitezh.

The story goes that when Kitezh sensed that marauders were approaching, it encased itself in a mist and shrank into it and vanished from sight. But even as it disappeared, even after it had disappeared, the church bell never stopped ringing and could be heard through the mist and over the whole countryside.

I suppose like all folk-tales this story can be interpreted in whatever way your needs require. But for me the true gift of theater, the real benediction of all art, is the ringing bell which reverberates quietly and persistently in the head long after the curtain has come down and the audience has gone home. Because until the marauders withdraw and the fog lifts, that sacred song is the only momentary stay we have against confusion.

                                                         --Brian Friel, "Seven Notes for a Festival Program" (1999),
                            in Christopher Murray, Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964-1999, 1999.