THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

talent for documentary pièces d’occasion achieved considerable commercial success with the apocalyptic and, at the
time highly topical, study of the effects of stock market deregulation in the City of London, Serious Money (1987).
More remarkable was Mad Forest: A Play from Romania (1990), the outcome of her work with a group of British
drama students in Bucharest in the immediate aftermath of the Romanian revolution. It is a powerful and demanding
study of competing truths and half truths, perspectives and distortions, aspirations and disillusionments.
Probably the most intelligent, challenging, and humane of the political playwrights who established a reputation in
the 1970s and 1980s is the most senior, Brian Friel (b. 1929), an Irishman who has written almost exclusively about
and for Ireland. Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), written after he had abandoned his chosen career as a
schoolmaster, deals with a young man’s decision to escape from the frustrations of village life in County Donegal by
emigrating to America, but it does so by presenting a would-be emigrant’s dilemma through two actors who
separately represent his public and private consciousnesses. The Freedom of the City (produced in 1973) is set in a
dangerous Londonderry in 1970 as British troops attempt to disperse Catholic civil-rights marchers, three of whom
take temporary refuge in the assertively Unionist mayor’s parlour in the Guildhall. This same Guildhall has figured
prominently in Friel’s subsequent career as the prime venue for the productions of Field Day, a small touring theatre
company which has had the distinction not only of transferring productions to London theatres but, far more
importantly, of winning financial and popular support from both sides of the Irish border. The Field Day company has
premiered two of Friel’s most remarkably revisionist plays, Translations (its première production in 1980) and
Making History in 1988. Translations opens in a hedge-school in an Irish-speaking community in the 1830s.
Although the play’s medium is English, it is built around an implied clash of languages (English, Irish, Latin, Greek),
around attempts to find a common means of communication, and around juxtapositions of cultures. On one level, the
British Army surveyors, working on the Ordnance Survey map of Ireland, are intruders who impose their fudged and
alien nomenclature on pre-existent ways of seeing and naming; on another, they are the representatives of
disinterested scientific advance, jumping the West of Ireland into European conformity. The play’s ramifications are
relevant to virtually every territory over which tribes, aspirant colonizers, and recalcitrant natives have disputed and
claimed as their unique possession. Making History, by contrast, explores how the writing of history imposes ordered
arguments, narrative patterns, and convenient interpretation on essentially disordered and inconclusive material.
Friel’s questioning of assumptions, manners, and inherited prejudices is also
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evident in his subtlest and densest play, Dancing at Lughnasa (premièred at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990, and
presented at the National Theatre in London later in the same year). The play’s narrator, an adult looking back on and
re-enacting his boyhood in a Donegal cottage, is faced with a series of confusions and half truths, but Dancing at
Lughnasa as a whole deals with far more than the altered perceptions of maturity. Its supposed date, 1936, removes it
from simply nationalist preoccupations, but places it squarely on the margins of other conflicts: a Spanish civil war
which causes Irish Catholics to lean instinctively towards Franco, and Irish involvement in Catholic missionary work
in Africa. The play does not simply question the inward-looking, self protecting values of a tightly knit family, it also
exposes the ostensibly Catholicized culture of rural Ireland to direct parallels with despised ‘pagan’ Africa. Its
delicacy, sympathy, and lexical richness render it comparable to the plays of Synge. Its multiple layers of reference, its
political tensions, and its open-endedness render recent English attempts to write either about Ireland or about the
rural working class patronizingly crude by comparison.
Broad as has been the theatrical appeal of most of the dramatists discussed so far, none has been able to match the
popular success and the prolific output of Alan Ayckbourn (b. 1939), who in 1976 managed to have five plays running
simultaneously in London. Ayckbourn’s success has been based not simply on his sure ear for ordinary conversation
or on his sharp observation of the whims, vices, irrationalities, and snobberies of precisely the kind of people who
come to see his plays, but on his ability to amuse and provoke without giving offence. He has few ideological axes to
grind. Some of his rapport with the public at large can also be put down to the fact that his plays have become central
to the repertoires of the numerous middle-brow, amateur theatrical companies which operate in a long and honourable
(if generally non-innovative) English tradition.
Despite Ayckbourn’s prominence on both professional and amateur stages, his work, like that of many other living
and dead dramatists, has reached a mass audience only through the medium of television. Though it has often been
despised as a vulgar and largely commonplace form of entertainment and though it has sometimes been disparaged as
a mere popularizer, British television has consistently attracted creative talent. Whereas the London stage was
remarkable in the 1980s for adaptations of classic novels-notably Edgar’s dramatization of Nicholas Nickleby,
produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1980, and the extraordinarily effective version of Laclos’s Les
Liaisons dangereuses, adapted for the same company by Christopher Hampton (b. 1946) in 1987 — the tradition of
high quality adaptation had been kept vigorously alive in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s both by the BBC and by
commercial television companies. Though some critics have always deplored the idea of translating prose fiction into