'The disquiet between two aesthetics': Brian Friel's plays and the Field Day Theatre Company

This dissertation traces the plays of Brian Friel through the foundation of the Field Day Theatre Company to his final Field Day play in 1988. I contrast the cultural politics of Field Day's theatrical productions with the equivalent gesture of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Each branch of the Field Day Company attempts to narrate the nation by recognizing a cultural community that reaches across sectarian and state boundaries. I argue that while this position is informed by postcolonial approaches to literature, Field Day reclaims cultural authority from England through cultural criticism as well as through artistic creation. Friel's renovations of traditional historical narratives actively construct cultural texts that resist codification into any of the narrowly defined existing Irish identities. Rather, like the anthology, Friel's plays represent Irishness by dramatizing the "play" among Irish texts, both historical texts and cultural stereotypes.;Like Translations, The Communication Cord and Making History, the anthology presents narratives which often allow for contradictory interpretations. Each of the plays is based on, or in dialogue with, a source text that engaged Friel while he wrote the play. Each play is also centered around a text: the Name Book, Tim's unfinished D.Phil. thesis, Lombard's history. In each play, the characters' dialogue, gestures, and unexplained motives complicate the concrete materiality of the text at the center of the action. By encouraging this multiplication of meaning, Friel's plays perform a complex negotiation of the betrayal through language and cultural appropriation that characterizes the postcolonial condition. The central text in each case provides a "logo-center" around which meaning circulates and consequently, the action produces competing narratives that call the legitimacy of the original text into question. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing performs a similar task of exemplifying the extent to which Irish writers represent their Irishness through writing. Field Day and Friel do not effect utter polyphony however, but rather they establish textual parameters within which the "disquiet between two aesthetics" in Ireland gets represented without hybridization.