SOURCE: "Friel and the Politics of Language Play," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 28, No. 3, Autumn 1987, pp. 510-15.

In the following essay, Kearney speculates on the political and social dimensions of language as text and subject matter in Friel's Translations and The Communication Cord.

Brian Friel's drama has sometimes been accused of engaging too directly in Irish nationalist politics. In a recent issue of the Belfast magazine, Fortnight, Brian McEvera offers a typical example of this accusation; "Friel's work is directly political in its implications," he charges, "and its 'awareness' is one-sided. The 'shape' observed is a nationalist one—and a limited partial view of nationalism at that." McEvera concludes with the hope that the "more overt political element will disappear from (Friel's) work."

Such charges of political propaganda are, I believe, quite mistaken. Several of Friel's later plays do indeed have a political content—in the sense that...