Brian Friel Plays 2 Read Online Free

that such critical approaches are better suited to the novel (compare Molly Bloom) than to drama. Nevertheless, Molly Sweeney is an indirect play, where the drama occurs in the form of narrative, not of action, rather as in the earlier Faith Healer (which is undoubtedly allegorical). Reading between the lines, we find Molly’s mother prefiguring Molly’s own collapse at the hands of a father figure. There are many parallels drawn between Molly’s father (a judge, always an ominous parentage in Friel) and her surgeon Mr Rice, who tries, as it were, to father her a second time. Frank, too, while mainly a comic foil for Rice, shares with him a similar ‘phantom desire, a fantasy in the head’, which propels him into re-making Molly. But whereas her father insisted that Molly had nothing to gain from going through the process of what we may call enlightenment, both Frank and (with less certainty) Mr Rice believe she has ‘nothing to lose’ by changing her blind world for the so-called normal or sighted world. Is this an allegory pointing out the dangers of technologically backed progress as against tradition or nature? In any case, the coercion undermines Molly mentally and in the end she inhabits neither one world nor the other but a ‘borderline country’ where she is, though broken and dying, nevertheless ‘at home there’. She implies a willed retreat, rather like the blind badgers which Frank foolishly tries to move from their habitat.
    Because Molly Sweeney is narrated it is a complex memory play. The three narrators, who share only the space provided by the stage in what must be Friel’s leastrealized location in all of his plays, each recount in turn the story of the fatal operation, before and after. Their lack of interaction suggests that they do not see each other, do not exist for each other, and that only the audience is privy to this tri-partite memory. The form is thus far more experimental than Dancing at Lughnasa, controlled by a single memory. It is, of course, the playwright who, like Sir in Living Quarters, summons up these three dispersed figures and allows their discrete stories to form a continuous discourse. So abstract is this idea that the setting must remain unspecified.
    In Act II Rice’s patterned language, ‘And I’ll remember Ballybeg’, refers to ‘the core, the very heart of the memory’, what he calls his own ‘performance’. Once again, the Frielian idea is presented that memory is something constructed through which the individual establishes continuity of identity and thereby a consoling sense of wholeness. Memory, in short, is redemptive. Rice, as artist, finds renovation in the achievement of Molly’s brief sightedness: his own ‘darkness’ is momentarily lifted. The way Rice projects memory forward (‘I’ll remember Ballybeg’) has a strange effect of collapsing time itself. Molly herself is likewise collapsed, sacrificed like Grace in Faith Healer or even Mabel in Making History to male ambition. Frank provides a parody of Rice’s more authentic ambition. Molly’s own memories in the hospital (was she always narrating from the hospital?) reinstate the ‘Fathers and Daughters’ motif. Rice and her father become the same person; her mother is herself. Memory and the present coincide. Molly has reached a plateau where she has won the freedom to let illusion and actuality intermingle. Yet we are told she is dying. Is Friel not finally agreeing with Synge that the price of this kind of freedom, the artist’s freedom, is exclusion, is exile? Though about to die Molly is mistress of her own world and can admit and exclude those she will. In that way,although not just in that way, the play is stunningly theatrical.

    Further studies of women as at once victims of male power and pregnant with autonomy appear in Give Me Your Answer, Do!, directed at the Abbey by Friel himself. Here, too, a father and daughter relationship is bound up with mental disturbance. Here, too,