Monoogue as dramatic action in Brian Friel's 'Faith Healer' and 'Molly Sweeney.'

The Irish playwright Brian Friel has always been skeptical of the capabilities of language to convey truth. As a citizen of post-Gaelic Ireland, his suspicion is both political and philosophical: he finds himself in the ironic position of writing about native Irish culture in the language of Ireland's colonizer. His plays, especially Translations (1980) and its companion piece The Communication Cord (1982), serf-consciously dissect the political and epistemological implications of this imperialist's language. While Friel simply has no choice but to write in English if he is to reach a broad audience, he does so ironically and in order to point out the enforced nature of his choice. His dialogue in isolation, then, cannot be understood as the transparent medium of his meaning.

To an extent, of course, this is true of all playwrights, whose works must be seen as scripts susceptible to a range of choices by directors, actors, designers, and audiences. As David Hare wrote, "the play is in the air." Yet more often than not, critics of Friel have come closer to Richard Pine's dismissal of stagecraft as "contrivance" than to a rich understanding of the many ways a theater piece makes meaning (Ireland's Drama 138).(1) Richard Tillinghast's 1991 New Criterion article is a rare exception to this tendency. He places other critics' focus on language within the Irish theatrical tradition: "From The School for Scandal by Sheridan . . . to Beckett's Waiting for Godot, we remember the great Irish plays for their dialogue rather than for the inventiveness of their dramatic structure." "Talk," quips Tillinghast, "is the national pastime" (35).(2) Tillinghast reminds us that often for the stage Irishman, to speak is to act, a "pastime" as engrossing as fishing or pub crawling. For him, Friel goes beyond his predecessors by firmly grounding his dialogue in the theatrical experience. Indeed, Friel is often called "the father of contemporary Irish drama," allowing such recent talents as Frank McGuinness, Marina Carr, and Tom Murphy to flourish in the often hostile genre of theater (Pine, "Irish Drama" 190).(3)

These factors make two of Friel's plays especially worth study. Both Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) are monologic. Their status as theater pieces demands that we respect them as performance, but their form encourages us to treat them as prose poems. Their lack of conventional stage action is, however, through a sort of logical hairpin curve, exactly what makes them so dramatic. By replacing action with narration, Friel not only critiques the Irish penchant for oratory, but he also dramatizes his contention that events are meaningful mainly insofar as they become stories, fictions told by their participants. Their meaning resides not in what actually happens but in how they are narrated by and to the people who participated in them. This is not, after all, so very far from the way that naming becomes the exercise of naked power in Translations. The difference in that play between the Gaelic "Baile Baeg" and the English "Ballybeg" is important precisely because it transcends mere language. The eventual dominance of "Ballybeg" represents the political dominance of the English. It is a meaningful sign simply because it is the sign of the powerful. (And in Translations, these words will be made into literal signs: road signs.) Because naming is an action, as meaningful and full of conflict as conventional stage action, the theater space and the human voices of actors are both indispensable to Friel. Their voices embody, in all these plays, the power struggles over reality, in a way that escapes critics looking only at the words on the page.

Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney are united both by their monologic form and by their contention that truth is subjective, a matter of perception and recall. Sight becomes a metaphor in both Faith Healer and Molly Sweeney for knowledge. Yet the easy equation of sight and insight is troubled by the unreliability of perception and memory. The sighted characters in Molly are the least insightful, and in Faith Healer, faith in the impalpable is more valuable than knowledge of the necessarily palpable. "Seeing" is not necessarily "believing," because authentic faith depends on trust in the unseeable. The unreliability of sight extends to the audience as well; both plays admit of a truth beyond the physically realized world that we see onstage. So it is not surprising that Friel manipulates and alters theatrical conventions in both these plays. While the use of soliloquy is hardly shocking - after Beckett, little is - it is unusual for Friel, whose staging is more commonly realistic. Although these plays are of a piece thematically with other of Friel's works, they differ in interesting ways in their stage techniques. What makes them unique as a pair is precisely Friel's willingness to play with his form, to take meaningful risks, confident in his own ability to make his risks pay off. And what Friel gains recompenses both him and us for losing the stage conventions of traditional dialogue, character-to-character interactions, and the thrilling but reassuring undulations of plot.