# Zosia Kuczyńska, *Brian Friel's Models of Influence*

Martine Pelletier

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OpenEdition
Journals

## Édition électronique

URL : https://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/19035

DOI : 10.4000/12nwz

ISSN : 2259-8863

## Éditeur

Presses universitaires de Caen

## Édition imprimée

Date de publication : 6 décembre 2024

Pagination : 159-161

ISBN : 978-2-38185-248-5

ISSN : 0183-973X

## Référence électronique

Martine Pelletier, « Zosia Kuczyńska, *Brian Friel's Models of Influence* », *Études irlandaises* [En ligne], 49-2 | 2024, mis en ligne le 08 novembre 2024, consulté le 14 avril 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/19035 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12nwz

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elucidates how this religion influenced him, while Clare highlights a paradox in his writings: the use of Catholic characters with English names, partly masking a desire for greater recognition of Irish identity. Territorially speaking, Montague conducts an investigation regarding the case of James Owen Hannay, who portrayed Ireland with an “acerbic eye” (p. 217) – a case of Moore’s appropriation.

While influences on Moore are acknowledged and are worth focusing on, his influence on others, which is rarely analysed, is innovatively depicted in this book. In essence, the latter offers a comprehensive understanding of Moore’s life and literary endeavours.

Sarah LEVY VALENSI

Université de Caen Normandie

**Zosia Kuczyńska, *Brian Friel’s Models of Influence*, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, 278 p.**

“A complete archive is good. You always hope to get a complete archive. But of course it’s not a question of bulk” says David Knight in Brian Friel’s *Give Me Your Answer, Do!* (1997),<fnref n="1" /> as he hopes to convince writer Tom Connolly to sell his archive to the American university he represents. We can easily understand that the question should have exercised the playwright since at the time he was also pondering what to do with his own considerable archive… The decision he made was to donate it to the National Library of Ireland (NLI) and, as a result, one hundred and thirty boxes were presented and conveyed from the playwright’s Donegal home to Dublin in 2000 and joined the collections of the NLI, becoming “The Brian Friel Papers”. Forty-eight more boxes came in 2011 becoming “The Brian Friel Papers Additional”. Given Brian Friel’s eminent role in Irish theatre and intellectual history in Ireland, North and South, as well as his international recognition, it is hard to overestimate the value and importance of this archive.

Zosia Kuczyńska's research into the archive has been extensive and fruitful. *Brian Friel’s Models of Influence* testifies to this research carried out lovingly and skilfully at doctoral and postdoctoral levels, providing food for thought for anyone interested in the works of Brian Friel, for those concerned with the “archival turn” in academe, the uses and abuses of archives generally but also for anyone keen to see how a creative mind functions. The volume is organised around seven chapters, including a fleshed-out introduction and a conclusion plus an appendix containing some of Friel's sources, a bibliography, and an index.

Kuczyńska displays a remarkable familiarity with the archive and with the playwright’s creative process as documented through these papers. She rightly claims

<footnote n="1">1. Brian Friel, *Give Me Your Answer, Do!* [1997], Dramatists Play Service Inc., 2000, p. 13.</footnote>
that the Friel Papers offer “a record of a life’s work in progress. They represent a way of working and of making art over a period spanning more than fifty years” (p. 1). Her focus in this volume is not so much on a genetic approach to the plays through their various stages of composition as on the “creative encounters” which influenced Friel’s writing as evidenced by the archive:

> For Brian Friel, inspiration came in many forms and was more likely in the first instance to have come less from his sense of his own place in a given literary canon than from the review pages of the *Times Literary Supplement* or the *New Yorker*. As the archive will attest, Friel’s plays are saturated with an eclectic array of contemporary thinking on subjects that range from linguistics to historiography, from dissident Russian writers to neglected muses, and from the praxis of living painters to the history of timekeeping. (p. 2)

A further, and more original ambition of this book is to enquire “not only how and *by whom* Friel was being influenced and inspired, but also how and *for whom* Friel’s artistic process might come to be an inspiration” (p. 1).

The opening chapter following the introduction is devoted mostly to one such creative encounter, as Friel’s notes show his explorations of the nature of artistic creation and the role of chance at the time he was tentatively moving towards what would become one of his masterpieces, *Faith Healer* (1979). The breakthrough came, Kuczyńska convincingly argues, with Friel’s chance reading of the interviews given by painter Francis Bacon to David Sylvester. Those interviews “served as a catalyst for a major development in Friel’s experiment with form” (p. 53), which subsequently informed several of his plays, “staging the juxtaposition of different truths, not in order to say which was the more valid, but rather to create a space within which an audience exposed to multiple truths might construct their own reality” (p. 53).

The next chapter delves into the “embodiments of the intertexts” (p. 66), focusing particularly on *Translations* (1980) and demonstrating that George Steiner had influenced Friel not just through *After Babel* (1975), as is widely known, but also with the earlier and lesser known *In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture* (1975). This is an influence this reviewer had happened to note many years ago and is delighted to see confirmed through Friel’s notes in the archive! Influential texts and ideas for a playwright cannot remain abstract but must find embodied forms for the play to function.

The chapter on “Form and Core” argues for the influence academic and critic Denis Donoghue’s *Ferocious Alphabets* has had on Friel’s thinking around what he referred to repeatedly as “the core” of a play (p. 107), allowing Kuczyńska to analyse the genesis of two of Friel’s less successful plays, *The Communication Cord* (1982) and *Wonderful Tennessee* (1993).

The chapter on “Friel’s Performing Muse” shows Kuczyńska delving into gender studies post #MeToo to seek to clarify her own somewhat mixed reaction to *Performances* (2003), a play which features a young female academic questioning composer Leoš Janáček about his relationship with his “muse” and conversely encourages a questioning of Friel’s own gender politics and portrayal of women
as muses or victims both in *Performances* and *Molly Sweeney* (1994). Kuczyńska uses Ann Cvetkovich's *Out of the Closet, Into the Archives* (2015) to claim that queer archival methodologies are characterised by “practice forms of the archival turn that put relentless curiosity and unapologetic passion to use as methods for intellectual invention” (p. 3); I wonder if this passion is strictly limited to queer research whilst sincerely hoping it is not.

Kuczyńska’s “abiding ambition is to extend Friel’s legacy of artistic practice to new ways of working that might emerge from a practical engagement with his archive” (p. 4) and this ambition is borne out in the fifth chapter entitled “‘Don’t anticipate the ending’: Towards a Legacy of Artistic Practice”, which focuses on the author’s own creative encounter with the Friel archive on *Dancing at Lughnasa* (1990) through her collaborative practice-based project with dancer/choreographer Jessie Keenan and performer/composer Robbie Blake. It is a pity that this artistic project based on the Friel archive should have been so disrupted by Covid but two short films now form part of a digital exhibition curated by Kuczyńska for the Museum of Literature Ireland. Whether it will lead other artists to engage with the archive is too early to tell but easier access to the material through digitisation may well be an important step in this direction and here we must applaud the project led by Queen’s University, the NLI and JSTOR, The Brian Friel Digital Archive.

*Brian Friel’s Models of Influence* is undoubtedly an original and very valuable study that readers interested in creative processes, and not only in the drama of Brian Friel, will find useful and inspiring. It certainly bears out the author’s contention that “the Brian Friel papers have the potential to transform the way we think about Friel’s legacy without seeking to impose a dominant critical narrative upon a body of work strong enough and flexible enough to withstand fresh interpretation and increasingly inventive staging” (p. 14).

Martine PELLETIER

Université de Tours

Elizabeth Brewer Redwine, *Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre*, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021, 240 p.

Whose work is remembered in theatre history; and whose forgotten? What type of work is celebrated or, conversely, invisibilised? These are some of the important questions that Elizabeth Brewer Redwine raises in *Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre*. By focusing especially on gender and performance, her book exposes important blind spots in the history of Irish Revival theatre. It problematises the issue of authorship, highlighting the inherently collective nature of any theatrical piece, from its conception to its various stage iterations, as well as challenging the widespread tendency amongst theatre historians and theatre critics