Drama North and South: The Irish plays of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy

This comparative study of Brian Friel and Tom Murphy analyzes the relationship between their plays and their cultural conditioning as a Northern Irish writer and a Southern Irish writer respectively. The differences in these authors' cultural backgrounds are then drawn upon to illuminate the complexities of contemporary Ireland's status as a post-colonial culture.;The first chapter details Friel's early development from his beginnings as a short story writer to his first triumph as a playwright, Philadelphia, Here I Come! This phase, the pre-Troubles period, is contextualized by looking at Friel's own disorientation as a Northern nationalist who feels no communal identification with other nationalists, and who, as a result of his identification with life across the Northern Irish border in the Republic, often conforms in his work to traditional theoretical understandings of how post-colonial cultures operate. Friel's ideas of political community are then connected to his notion of community as it relates to the genres of fiction and drama.;Chapter Two analyzes the cultural mobility and restraint which Murphy experienced as a post-colonial writer in the then-maturing Republic of the 1960s. These include the freedom to focus on existential rather than national issues, and the restraint imposed by the English dramatic and critical tradition which continues throughout this period to view Murphy with colonial prejudice, as a comparison with Pinter demonstrates.;Chapter Three resumes my examination of Friel with a look at the changes rendered in his work by the outbreak of the Troubles, with special attention to The Freedom of the City, and then examines the forms of what I term Friel's "post/colonial" notions of cultural transcendence in two late plays, Translations and Faith Healer.;The fourth and final chapter also looks at forms of cultural transcendence, but notes how in Murphy's plays such transcendence is informed by a very clear Southern Irish aesthetic which is also at work in much contemporary Southern Irish poetry.;Locating Friel and Murphy within the specific Northern and Southern cultural, historical and political contexts appropriate to their plays limits and illuminates the ways in which post-colonial theory can be applied, not only to these playwrights, but to contemporary Irish writing generally.