Marilynn Richtarik, "Forging a Usable Past: Brian Friel’s 'Making History'"

Academic critics of Making History (1988), Brian Friel’s play about the Elizabethan-era Irish leader Hugh O’Neill, have correctly pointed out that, far from replacing heroic myth with less-heroic truth (as a naïve reading of it might suggest), Friel deliberately replaced one historical myth with another. Friel’s factual distortions in the play are neither incidental nor accidental, but there has been less attention paid to the nature of the story he used the play to tell and to his reasons for telling it. A fuller understanding of Making History will result from the recognition that Friel wanted not only to talk about the writing of history, or to re-write it himself, but to help make it through storytelling. Friel’s dramaturgical decisions during the four years he spent writing Making History also advanced his political aim of demonstrating that division along sectarian lines need not be a defining feature of political life in Ireland. As Stewart Parker remarked about his own play Northern Star, “this is not an historical play,” although set centuries in the past, but “very much a play about today.”

In this talk, Marilynn Richtarik will explore the immediate political context of Making History, in the belief that greater comprehension of its contemporary political resonance will lead to an enhanced appreciation of Friel’s last play for the Derry-based Field Day Theatre Company. This talk is based on the first chapter of her recent book, Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland (2023).

Marilynn Richtarik is a Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of three books published by Oxford University Press: Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980-1984 (1994), Stewart Parker: A Life (2012), and Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland (2023). Both Stewart Parker and Getting to Good Friday were shortlisted for the biennial Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, instituted in memory of the British Ambassador to Ireland assassinated in 1976 and awarded to works that “promote and encourage peace and reconciliation in Ireland.” During the first half of 2017, she taught at Queen’s University Belfast as a US Fulbright Scholar.

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