The Politics of Space: Renegotiating Relationships in Friel’s Plays of the 1970s

Abstract

As the Northern Ireland Troubles unfolded in the 1970s, the burden of expectation was great that the poets, playwrights and fiction writers would directly treat of the street violence and the partisan standoffs in their work. In particular, the theatre, with its social focus and its representational immediacy, was under pressure to deliver plays of a documentary verisimilitude, even if the conventions its narrative drew on were close to those of melodrama: love between a young couple from either side of the sectarian divide featured prominently.¹ But Brian Friel from the outset resisted such pressure. His first play premiered during the Troubles, The Gentle Island, was staged at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in November 1971. In an interview with Aodhan Madden of The Sunday Press, Friel made it clear that he had no intention of becoming the new Sean O’Casey and situating his drama at the centre of the Northern conflict. Rather, ‘he says, what’s happening in our island provokes tensions in all of us, tensions which the writer will channel indirectly into art’.² In relation to his new play, Friel notes that ‘we see most facets of Irish life, love, hate, loneliness, tensions in the life of the gentle island […]. It is a serious slice of island life, a metaphor for Ireland.’³