Brian Friel Plays 2 Read Online Free Page A

the artist is enmeshed in the paradox of symbiotic mastery and destruction. The novelist Tom Connolly in this play has suffered writer’s block ever since his daughter’s descent into schizophrenia several years before the play opens, and he finds release at last only through denial of the obvious though meretricious solution. The search begun in Wonderful Tennessee for answers in a world now cut off from spiritual authority perhaps reaches its true end here, in the clarity of loyalty and the paradox of winning through losing. These are old Frielian ironies, reminted in a new and assured style. Give Me Your Answer, Do! closes the circle first described when Friel, after years of silence, felt enabled to write Fathers and Sons and so entered upon a fresh and exciting period of artistic activity. Its successful new production at the Hampstead Theatre in the spring of 1998 argues that, like Wonderful Tennessee, there is considerably more to this play than may first meet the eye. Like good music, to which Friel’s art always aspires, these plays must be heard (in the mind and in the theatre) more than once before their true power strikes home. Once they are allowed to make their proper impact they haunt the imagination for ever.

    Christopher Murray
August 1998

Characters
    Michael , young man, narrator
    Kate , forty, schoolteacher
    Maggie , thirty-eight, housekeeper
    Agnes , thirty-five, knitter
    Rose , thirty-two, knitter
    Chris , twenty-six, Michael’s mother
    Gerry , thirty-three, Michael’s father
    Jack , fifty-three, missionary priest
    Michael, who narrates the story, also speaks the lines of the boy, i.e. himself when he was seven.

    Act One: A warm day in early August 1936.
    Act Two: Three weeks later.

    The home of the Mundy family, two miles outside the village of Bally beg, County Donegal, Ireland.
     
    Set: Slightly more than half the area of the stage is taken up by the kitchen on the right (left and right from the point of view of the audience). The rest of the stage – i.e. the remaining area stage left – is the garden adjoining the house. The garden is neat but not cultivated.
    Upstage centre is a garden seat.
    The (unseen) boy has been making two kites in the garden and pieces of wood, paper, cord, etc., are lying on the ground close to the garden seat. One kite is almost complete.
    There are two doors leading out of the kitchen. The front door leads to the garden and the front of the house.

    The second in the top right-hand corner leads to the bedrooms and to the area behind the house.
    One kitchen window looks out front. A second window looks on to the garden.
    There is a sycamore tree off right. One of its branches reaches over part of the house.
    The room has the furnishings of the usual country kitchen of the thirties: a large iron range, large turf box beside it, table and chairs, dresser, oil lamp, buckets with water at the back door, etc., etc. But because this is the home of five women the austerity of the furnishings is relieved by some gracious touches – flowers, pretty curtains, an attractive dresser arrangement, etc.

    Dress: Kate, the teacher, is the only wage-earner. Agnes and Rose make a little money knitting gloves at home. Chris and Maggie have no income. So the clothes of all the sisters reflect their lean circumstances. Rose wears wellingtons even though the day is warm. Maggie wears large boots with long, untied laces. Rose, Maggie and Agnes all wear the drab, wrap-around overalls/aprons of the time.
    In the opening tableau Father Jack is wearing the uniform of a British army officer chaplain – a magnificent and immaculate uniform of dazzling white; gold epaulettes and gold buttons, tropical hat, clerical collar, military cane. He stands stiffly to attention. As the text says, he is ‘resplendent ’ , ‘magnificent’. So resplendent that he looks almost comic opera.
    In this tableau, too, Gerry is wearing a spotless white tricorn hat with splendid white plumage. (Soiled and