5.0 out of 5 stars
an useful scholarly resource, December 22, 2008
This review is from: Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1998 (Paperback)
When this edition appeared, it was the first collection of Friel's essays and interviews (and there is only one other since); before that, any student of Friel's drama would have needed to chase down these pieces in obscure and hard-to-find newspapers, magazines, and books. In general, the thirty selections that Murray has chosen include about a dozen of the most important essays and interviews taken form about thirty-five years of Friel's career (1965-1999).
Ultimately, this work has not been superseded by "Brian Friel in Conversation," edited by Paul Delaney, which has a much more comprehensive Artist Bibliography and more interviews. Delaney and Murray do not always include the same interviews, and only Murray includes such important articles as "Self-Portrait" and "The Theatre of Hope and Despair"; moreover, only Murray includes excerpts from Friel's writer's diaries and a really interesting, unpublished interview with Laurence Finnegan. So, this volume provides the more representative survey of Friel's writings and interviews.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Emperor's Old Clothes, April 28, 2000
This review is from: Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1998 (Paperback)
Brian Friel is undoubtedly the most acclaimed living Irish playwright. His work has an ambition, an appeal and a historical imagination which neither his peers nor the younger generation have yet rivalled. He has continued to reinvent himself over the forty-odd years of his career, trying out different forms and different identities, always aiming to articulate as clearly as possible whatever was on his mind at the time. It's becoming clearer and clearer that, as he enters his seventies, his muse is drying up; he hasn't had a major commercial _and_ critical success since Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), but the way playwrights eventually lose the plot is intimately linked to changing fashions in (and approaches to) theatre itself. Friel's verbal talent is undiminished; his sense of theatricality is what seems increasingly redundant.
It has to be said that this collection of interviews, articles and diary entries does the man no favours at all. Christopher Murray's research and dedication to his subject are exemplary, but starry-eyed ain't the word for it. The ostensible narrative here is that of a great writer sailing majestically from modest youthfulness to a secure berth in the cultural pantheon, but the real story, at least for those of us who've followed Friel's career over the last ten years, is about a writer increasingly out of touch with both the theatre and his own place in it.
Murray shows his hand right at the start. Friel likes to cite the ideas of TS Eliot as a model of his own sense of his role as a writer, and this helps us to see that Friel's stance is distinctly old-fashioned. Friel conceives theatre as a kind of agora (the place where Athenians would debate issues of the day), a neutral space accepted by the polis as a zone for reasoned debate. He seems never to have dealt with the extent to which his own work is recuperable as a sentimental dream of a potentially organic Ireland. He practically never writes about urban experience (for the very good reason that, as he says himself, he doesn't know much about it) - but this is a serious threat to any attempt to define him as central to contemporary Irish experience. Murray's commentary doesn't even try to treat this as a deficiency in Friel's work. The majority of the population of Ireland live in large towns. (A good third live in the greater Dublin area.) Friel's status is less to do with his daring as a writer and more to do with the prestige conferred upon him by foreign acclaim. (Although his real daring is exemplified by his own work, even when he discounts it; for example, after writing the monumental "Translations" about the British effort to recast Irish geography in its own image, he then thoroughly sent up the issues of the earlier play in his rollicking farce "The Communication Cord".) Theatre has by now become such a commodity, attendance to it such a badge of prestige for the consumer of culture, that only work that departs radically from the Frielian scriptural economy has a chance of making the kind of intervention that Friel values - and of course, the kind of intervention that gets made is not the kind that Friel admires. (He's getting a bit cantankerous in his old age.)
More recently, Friel has publicly dismissed the role of the director in theatre. With characteristic assurance, he's even tried directing his own work, albeit with less than happy results. Friel's work is more or less over; if his appreciation is deserved, which it surely is, it's happening much too late. Irish theatre has moved on, and the ultimate effect of Murray's book is to show just how far behind Friel has found himself.
A useful resource for scholars. A less than helpful guide to whatever in the world might happen to be the cutting edge of Irish theatre, right now.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
