Fantasy in Friel

Abstract

This chapter will examine the operation of fantasy in Friel’s plays. The subject has scarcely been commented upon in the extensive critical writing on Friel, and yet there is no getting around the prominence of fantasy in the work. Of the pre-Philadelphia plays, The Francophile is the outstanding example, as the title itself suggests. The figure of Willie Logue, the Catholic post office worker in Derry whose latest cultural obsession is for all things French, is merely the first of a succession of characters in Friel’s drama who prefer to exist in the domain of fantasy rather than submit to their social surroundings and context. As the previous chapter argued, Philadelphia, Here I Come! enabled the Irish stage to go beyond a narrow realism through the self-consciously theatrical device of the two Gars. In the scenes between them in Gar’s bedroom, the dominant mode is fantasy, whether in the series of heroic roles that Public Gar performs (star athlete, concert performer, fighter pilot) or in the sexual fantasies that the duo construct. Friel’s next play, The Loves of Cass McGuire goes even further in the direction of fantasy, especially when the rebellious 70-year-old is confined to the institutional Eden House. That development is aided by the deployment of music — specifically Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde — as a cultural counter-reality and as an important structuring device. The supreme fantasist in Friel’s dramatic oeuvre is Casimir in Aristocrats (1979), the son of a Catholic Big House who devotes much of his verbal and performative energies to peopling his family home with celebrated European writers. The complex and delicate development of fantasy in Aristocrats will be traced not only in relation to the earlier dramatic works but to ‘Foundry House’, the short story on which the play is based and from which it was developed.