Nr. 3 (32) anul IX / iulie-septembrie 2011 - ROMDIDAC

Ex Ponto nr. 3, 2011
In 1936 the sisters acquired a radio, which may be regarded as a modern
intrusion into quite a traditional way of life in the countryside. Coincidentally,
in Michael’s memory Marconi’s arrival is connected with Father Jack’s
homecoming after twenty-five years in the African leper colony as a British
Army chaplain, serving the very colonial force that stifled Ireland. The change
in the family brought about the ex-priest’s arrival is paralleled by modernity
caused by the introduction of the radio in Ireland. “Lugh versus Marconi – the
pagan Celtic god versus the European inventor of the wireless” (Lojek 82).
Guglielmo Marconi, whose mother and wife were Irish, established the first
broadcast test points along Ireland’s western coast in 1898. The significance
of the wireless is worth mentioning in the first decades of the twentieth century
in Ireland. The “Marconi operators” radioed from the sinking Titanic and in
1916, rebels seized the Dublin broadcast facilities. Government broadcasting
played an important role after 1926 in achieving a unified country after the
Partition.
The Mundys’ Marconi intermittently signals “The Isle of Capri” by Cole
Porter, for which Maggie suggests a parodic tango and a foxtrot and “The
British Grenadiers”, a slow march. Maggie ironically compares herself to Ginger
Rogers and stage directions compare Gerry, who is a good dancer, to Fred
Astaire. Gerry arrives by motorcar and sells gramophones. Rose loves motion
pictures. It is only Kate that rejects music and dancing as pagan and foreign
and dangerous to Irish nationalism and religion. In 1935 – the play being set
in 1936 - the Public Dance Halls Act was passed, in response to complaints
by the clergy, to unregulate dancing as immoral. Legislation continued to be
oppressive through the 1937 constitution. Jazz, described as the music of Jews
and Negroes, was considered dangerous and the Public Dance Halls Act was
a method of protecting the Irish youth from bad foreign influences. “In 1943
Radio Éireann actually proscribed broadcasts of jazz” (Lojek 83). The same
act required licensing of dance venues and dances moved indoors, under the
supervision of the clergy who wanted to eliminate foreign dancing in favour of
traditional dancing. Later, dance halls were replaced with gramophones and
the radio and Celtic music yielded to imported tunes.
Ironically, the effect was a diminishing of the interest of the new generation
in the participation in various forms of Irish traditional music and dancing.
Therefore, De Valera’s vision of Ireland as a rural idyll with beautiful maiden
dancing at the crossroads becomes ironical. Maggie will act a parody “Will
you vote for De Valera, will you vote/ If you don’t, we’ll be like Gandhi with
his goat” (Friel 4), which links Ireland and India in postcolonial terms and
which also draws attention to De Valera’s Constitution, which constrained
women and seemed an abandonment of revolutionary views. However, the
Mundy family dance establishes a means of communication between the
sisters. This music seems to have a liberating effect on them. The sisters’
dance at the end of Act I is also symbolical of the breakdown of an order and
the inevitability of change.
Friel’s plays in general deal with identity, truth, and communication.
Language, for Friel, is closely implicated with identity. Like with Yeats or
Heaney, the names of places, for example, contain within them the history and
memories, both public and private, associated with them. However, because
of this difference in association, there is always a gap in communication.
Friel’s plays expose the inadequacy of language in any real communication
and move towards an exchange beyond language, such as the dancing of
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