CULTURE SHOCK:ONE OF THE most beautiful and unsettling things you could ever see is Foucault's pendulum in the Pantheon in Paris. The physicist Leon Foucault used the high dome of the building for his famous experiment in 1851, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
It looks very simple: a shiny metal ball hangs from a long wire attached to the top of the dome. It swings over and back across a table marked with mathematical calibrations. A low wall that surrounds the pendulum is marked like a giant measuring tape. The ball swings back and forth in a peaceful mesmeric rhythm. And then, very gradually, you begin to notice that the ball is swinging across a different number to the one that marked its progress a short while ago. The pendulum is remaining steady, but the earth, as Foucault set out to demonstrate, is rotating beneath it.
I saw Foucault’s pendulum earlier this year, shortly before I went across the road to the Irish cultural centre to see extracts from Brian Friel’s plays being performed. I was struck by how similar are the physicist’s demonstration and the master dramatist’s enactments of human yearning.
Like the steadily swinging pendulum, Friel’s language moves with a perfectly ordered to-and-fro swing. It has a miraculous rhythm, as metrical and formal in its own way as Shakespeare’s iambics. There are no false notes, no jerky striving for effect, no missed beats. Molière’s “Bourgeois Gentleman” Monsieur Jourdain is amazed and delighted to discover that “I have been speaking prose all my life and didn’t even know it.”
Friel’s variation on this is that his characters speak a poetry unknown to themselves. There are no poeticisms, no self-conscious purple passages. But there is that hardest of things to achieve – a speech that is at once unconscious and rigorous. Friel’s theatrical language has the immediacy and clarity of real speech but the concentration and control of poetry.
We are lulled by its beauty. We enter a world of form and mastery. We bathe in the bliss of the language. And then slowly, gradually, terrifyingly, we begin to realise that the earth is rotating on its axis. The fundamental motions of time, of which we are happily unconscious in normal life, make themselves felt beneath our feet. We feel the dizziness of existence.
Aristotle identified the emotions purged by tragedy as pity and terror.
Friel is, in this light, a classical dramatist, but also a profoundly modern one. In his plays, pity manifests itself as a kind of beauty. It is not fed by raging anguish or extravagant horror. It is chaste and careful, strained through dark Irish humour and a late 20th century sense of the absurd. It lies, as with Chekhov, more in the small moments of defeat or vain pretence than in the large epics of history and power. It is not that, for both playwrights, those great, crushing forces of politics and violence and historical entrapment are not thundering around and beneath the lives of their characters. It is rather that, for Friel, as for Chekhov, there is the sense that we hear them best when they are played, not as crashing symphonies but as intimate pieces of chamber music in which a single note can hint at the cacophony beyond.
This sense of pity is all about being attuned to Wordsworth’s “still, sad music of humanity”. And it is worth recalling what Wordsworth says of that music: “Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power/ To chasten and subdue.” Friel’s music is never grating, and it is powerful, chastening and subdued.
Its power lies in those mesmerising rhythms that demand our heightened attention. It is chastening in the sense that it has a toughness and stringency, an icy disdain for cliché and pretension, that make us feel afresh. But it is subdued, self-possessed and held ferociously in check. As with the words of all the best writers, Friel’s language feels like a powerful horse held tightly by the reins. There is a constant tension between the rage and sorrow beneath and the restraint that gives them artistic force.
If there were only the pity, however, Friel’s plays would be as well read as acted. What makes them plays at all is the terror of time. Time is the playwright’s medium, just as much as canvas is the painter’s. It is what we in the audience experience most. If the play is bad, time becomes unbearably slow. If it is good, time is concentrated and speeded up. Either way, it moves differently, more consciously, than in real life. We are made to feel it, not as something that surrounds reality but as a reality in itself.
This is what Friel does so supremely well. While the steady beat of his language is ticking away like a clock, the things that tie time together into a narrative, a story that seems to make sense of its passage, are slipping away. In the big world out there, the forces that shape us are history and politics. Within the drama, history is transmuted into its personal equivalent, memory. Politics are transmuted into their equivalent in the private world, family narratives. And neither of them will hold together. Things, in Friel, fall apart, and the breaking is felt in the fracturing of memory and the unwinding of carefully woven family stories.
In Friel, too, there is never quite a present tense. This seems paradoxical, for of course theatre itself is all present tense. It is all happening here and now before us. But there is an artistry that makes us half-forget this even as we are experiencing it. Friel’s plays unfold in either a before or an after. Either the big, shocking events (the “drama”) has already taken place and we are now in its aftermath, or it will take place in a tangible future, and we are moving through its prelude and overture. Instead of the blandness of the present, we have either the aftershocks of what has happened or the intimations of what will. This creates a kind of suspended time, an enriched, hovering moment in which we feel the unsteadiness of the earth beneath our feet.
The terror deepens the pity into compassion, not just for the characters, but for a much larger human predicament. The beautifully attuned pity makes the terror bearable, and, as with the best art, we emerge, for a while at least, with the courage to face it.