reviews

The Freedom of the City
John Lewis
 * The Age, Wednesday June 12, 2002**

Evil cloaked in the rituals of judgment
In //The Freedom of the City//, Brian Friel explores the nature of oppression. It is 1970 and the place is Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The drama in Brian Friel's The Freedom of the City centres on the killing of three Bogside citizens who, fleeing tanks and tear gas, find themselves in the mayoral parlour of the guildhall.

The killing, merciless and shameful, is never seen, but from the very first the horrendous nature of the act is revealed. The cold blue light that illuminates the stage and its three grotesque corpses suggests a numbed stasis, shocking moments outside ordinary time. There is no dialogue. The only sound is the wail of an ambulance siren. The shadowy action goes on in dumb show as photographer and priest, nervous and fearful, attend to their affairs.

While the priest continues his ministrations, a spotlight picks out the judge and policeman on the battlements above the guildhall. An inquiry is beginning into the events, which are still proceeding below. The scene visually emphasises power and status. These are figures of the controlling Establishment. The corpses are not even cold (the scene suggests) before the system moves to assert its power.

The judge is peremptory and brusque, the policeman capclutching and subservient - a more lowly tool of the ruling hegemony. Beneath the judge's veneer of rhetoric (``objective view/factfinding) the audience is made aware that the ``facts to be discovered by the tribunal are already fixed and decided in the judge's mind. There is such contempt conveyed here. While the judge stagily subdues his mirth at the idea that a Bogsider should have a name such as ``Adrian Casimir Fitzgerald'', the corpses are dragged off the apron of the stage beneath him like mere carcasses or so much rubbish. So begins Friel's exploration of the allpervasive oppression that faces the ordinary Bogsiders who have no freedom in their city.

As the inquiry proceeds, the manufactured stories and assertions of the British and the Northern Irish forces are shown as merely to be expected. The claims they make about events do not even make a gesture towards the truth. These men are mere functionaries. The real evil behind their actions, Friel shows, lies in the continuing connivance of the privileged Establishment, which maintains its status and power not only by using armed force but by parading the forms and shows of civilisation, morality and justice.

Ritual and ceremony are used to cloak the harsh reality. It is this aspect that is put so forcefully in the mock granting of the freedom of the city organised by Skinner. Here the longestablished ceremony, intended to reward particularly worthy individuals, takes on myriad ironies.

In Londonderry, this parody insists, the very idea of someone nonEstablishment being so singled out is wildly fantastic. The visual effect of the three Bogsiders togged out in mayoral and alderman's robes makes it all the more ludicrous. Skinner's speech slyly undercuts all the selfsatisfied preening and forelocktugging of the proBritish Establishment. Lily's spontaneous music hall song and dance is a bit of vaudeville, revealing the staginess and absurd otherness of the rituals and props of those in power. Her parody of the Queen's ``My husband and I'' is especially funny and poignant given Lily's idle husband and the drudgery of her life.

Michael, careful and constrained, is a sort of bystander here. Through him Friel makes a special point. Michael can see the injustice of the society but he has been so duped and regulated by the rhetoric and forms of the Establishment that he cannot throw off its restraints. In Act 2, anally retentive until death, he is shown protesting as he is shot that it has all been a ``terrible mistake''.

The church and its role in the hell of Londonderry does not escape Friel's attention either. It's not for nothing that Lily, in the flush of her excitement at being dressed in the finery of the alderman's robes, thinks not just of a covering for her couch but is reminded of church: ``You feel you could - could give benediction.'' The church is part of the whole setup. The priests dress up and demand power and respect as much as the judge and the ruling powers do.

Indeed some of the most savage satire of the play is in the two homilies announcing the requiem for Lily, Michael and Skinner. The stage setting is again not incidental. The priest delivers his homilies from the battlements. His first sermon is as clothed in rhetoric as the judge's words. The references to scripture - ``Blessed are they that mourn'' - are just so much patter. There's a sense of an inattentiveness, a lack of any felt concern as he launches into his sermonising cadences: ``They died for/They died for/They sacrificed their lives. And there's a comic, unintended irony in the imprecision of his language (given the imbibing that went on in the mayor's parlour) as he explains how his administration of absolution meant that they didn't go ``unfortified before their maker.

His second homily opens like the first but then changes direction. The three dead are no longer noble dreamers but victims of communistic fomenters of revolution. His final admonition, taken from The Sermon on the Mount, ``Blessed are the meek for they shall possess the earth'' comes as a glib perversion of the Christian message.

Towards the end of the play, the whole church is seen as part of the Establishment show, part of the impressiveness of the turnout of dignitaries for the funeral.

While the play condemns the Establishment, the strongest indictment of the evil that holds sway in Londonderry lies in Friel's suggestion that oppression begets oppression. Lily's husband, the ironically nicknamed Chairman, unemployed like so many in the Bogside, is an oppressor in his own right. Arguably the most moving moment of the play is Lily's exclamation, ``O merciful God'' as she recalls her husband's bitter abuse of her and their mongoloid child: ``Bonestupid bitch. No wonder the kid's bone stupid.''


 * The Freedom of the City

Valerie Sutherland The Age Monday February 23, 2004**

When truth is a casualty

Varying accounts of one event form the basis of a play about the Irish conflict. At the core of Brian Friel's play The Freedom of the City is one event - the shooting by British troops of three civil rights marchers in Londonderry in 1970.

The play discusses how and why conflicting versions of the deaths of Lily, Michael and Skinner vary according to who is telling the story.

The period between 1968 and 1972 was one of intense conflict in Northern Ireland between the poverty-stricken and disempowered Catholic majority and the British authorities. Having become part of the United Kingdom in 1922, this area of Ireland was the focus of a struggle that saw large numbers of citizens march in the streets against what they saw as a foreign power keeping them in poverty.

A large number of the residents of the area known as the Bogside in Derry were unemployed and unable to attain political power due to a corrupt electoral system. When they challenged this state of affairs through marches for civil rights, the response of the Government was to send in heavily armed British paratroops with the Royal Ulster Constabulary as their assistants.

The economic power at the base of the struggle is referred to in the play when Michael points out that the ``Hon. The Irish Society is one of ``big London businessmen and big bankers and they own most of the ground in the city.

The social effect of this situation is explained objectively through the commentary of the sociologist, Dodds. He points out that ``the economic environment conditions the psychological and social man and as a consequence ``if you are born into the subculture of poverty (you) constantly feel(s) inferior, marginal, helpless, dependent.

This play dramatises how those groups in society who hold economic power and social status manipulate the truth in order to maintain control.

The opening scene portrays how power was distributed in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s. Overseeing the scene of the lifeless bodies of three Irish citizens is the English judge. Given the brief to establish what has happened, he is explicit in pointing out that his ``tribunal of inquiry, appointed by her majesty's Government, is in no sense a court of justice''.

Given that the civil rights marchers were seeking justice for the Irish people, this ironical statement supports the belief that they could not hope to find it through the British legal system.

Involved but keeping safe are the representatives of the church and the media (the priest and the photographer). The active aggressors are the British troops who remove the bodies of those they have killed from the stage.

Knowing the truth but failing to defend it is the police constable, representative of local Irish authorities.

The tribunal is set the task of forming ``an objective view of the events that have occurred, however, the judge has already decided on what he wants to believe - that Lily, Skinner and Michael ``seized possession of a civic building and openly defied the security forces. Because we (the audience) have been privy to what the three were actually doing and saying during their time in the Guildhall, we know that this account of their actions is a cynical fiction.

Dodds does not have a role in the action of the play but his objective description of the ``subculture of poverty'' and the analysis of the powerlessness of the poor is given a validity missing from the narratives expressed through other characters. Through his independent commentary the play is able to make links between the situations that oppressed sections of society find themselves in ``all over the Western world''. The forces of established power in Ireland (the British Government, legal system and armed forces, the church and the media) are shown to be administering and perpetuating an unjust system within which certain groups will always be powerless.

The appearance of Michael, Skinner and Lily directly after Dodds' first exit is like a charade demonstrating what he has just stated. The three appear disoriented and vulnerable, far from the ``callous terrorists'' the judge has suggested they are.

The unquestioning ease with which Liam O'Kelly, the television newsman, constructs his fictitious report accentuates the culpability of the media in manipulating the facts. The contrast between three fairly bewildered civilians and O'Kelly's ``group of about 50 armed gunmen terrorists'' is ludicrous.

The alternative view of the three in the Guildhall as expressed by the Balladeer is even more inflated. In his narrative they have become ``a hundred Irish heroes''. By closely juxtaposing the Balladeer's myth-making with the newsman's sensationalist demonising of Lily, Skinner and Michael, the play suggests that their fictions are equally distant from the truth.

Opposing versions are pitted against each other in a contest of ideologies.

Capturing the public imagination and convincing the broad population of the veracity of their claims is an important element for any group seeking to capture and maintain social control.

The Guildhall displays the comforts enjoyed by the powerful class that are impossible luxuries for the three ``Bogsiders''. The quality of the furnishings, the cocktail cabinet, record player and well-appointed bathroom are a world away from Lily's living conditions where ``one tap and one toilet below in the yard'' serves eight families. Just how to respond to the social injustice they are subject to is a matter for contention between Michael and Skinner.

Michael believes he can expect ``justice and fair play through ``dignified, peaceful protest. His belief that he will be safe because he has ``done nothing wrong'' is shown to be tragically misguided. Skinner, on the other hand, knows that ``the only certainty they have is death and therefore responds with the ``defensive flippancy that leads him to trash the Guildhall chamber.

Lily becomes a spokeswoman for her class. Through her we see the poverty and oppression that fostered the civil rights movement and through differing accounts of her death, how truth and justice were also casualties of the suppression of that movement.

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING · Sunday, 2002, docudrama written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Charles McDougal, broadcast on ABC television Monday, January 5, 2004.

· Brian Friel: A Casebook, edited by William Kerwin. Garland, 1997.

· Brian Friel and Ireland's Drama, by Richard Pine. Routledge, 1990.

WEB LINKS:

[|www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Friel.html]

[|www.toorakcollege.vic.edu.au/warrickw/english/ireland_question.htm]

[|www.eng.umu.se/lughnasa/brian.htm]