October 16 - 18, 2007 

Staging History: Language, Colonialism and Post-Colonialism on the Irish Stage

Tony Crowley

Scripps College (California)

(Estados Unidos)

In the 1980s Brian Friel, Ireland’s most successful dramatist, produced two plays which were based on major events in his country’s colonial history. Given that Northern Ireland, that part of the island of Ireland which remains under British rule, was in a state of war – the nationalist forces of Irish Republicanism were pitted against the British State and those who supported it – the playwright’s choice of topic was both significant and contentious. In Translations (1980), Friel dealt with the introduction of an English-language education system in Ireland in 1831, a measure which was designed to consolidate colonial rule and to hasten the death of Gaelic, the native language of Ireland. In Making History (1989), he treats the events surrounding the defeat of the Irish forces (in alliance with Spain) in the Nine Years War (1592-1601), a failed revolt against colonial rule which became a turning point in the fortunes of the native Gaelic culture. Given the context in which Friel’s plays were produced and performed (the IRA’s war in Northern Ireland from 1969-1996 was Europe’s most sustained military campaign in the twentieth century), and the subject matter that he chose, it is possible to imagine that these works would be a simple exploration of the struggle of Irish people in the face of colonial power. Yet although this is a possible reading of Translations and Making History, such an interpretation would not do justice to the complexity of Friel’s staging of two of the most significant events in Irish colonial history. It will be the aim of this paper therefore to demonstrate how Friel’s major concern in these plays is both with the impact of colonialism upon Irish history and the lives of Irish people, and with how that history is understood and represented in the post-colonial moment. In Translations for example, the protagonist declares that ‘to remember everything is a form of madness’, whereas in Making History, one of the main characters poses the question ‘isn’t that what history is, a kind of story-telling?’ – and suggests that truth and falsity may not be the proper criteria by which historiography can be assessed. Thus my interest will be to explore the subtlety with which Friel explores the difficulties and contradictions of colonial and post-colonial experience by raising a series of issues which mirror those of this conference: questions of identity, the dangers of crossing cultural borders, linguistic belonging, the relationship between economic survival and cultural practice, memory and its representation, the encoding of the ‘other’ (by the coloniser and the colonised), the connections between history and narrative, the imposition of a language and its effects. My intention will be to examine the suggestiveness of Friel’s drama in order to see how it might help us as we engage in the ongoing process of making our own languages and our own histories.

About Tony Crowley

Tony Crowley earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Oxford and has taught at the universities of Oxford, Southampton and Manchester (UK), Rutgers, San Diego State University and University of California Santa Cruz (US), Barcelona (Spain), and Hefei (China). From 1994-2005 he was the Chair of Language, Literature and Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester, and he is currently the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College, California. His books include The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates (1989), Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (1991), Language in History: Theories and Texts (1996), The Politics of Language in Ireland 1366-1922: A Sourcebook (2000), The Language and Cultural Theory Reader (with L.Burke and A.Girvin) (2000), and Wars of Words: The Politics of Language in Ireland 1537—2004 (Oxford University Press 2005 - Winner of the American Committee for Irish Studies Durkan Prize).

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