WHEN writers write about writers, it is often a sign that they to get out more, that their world has shrunk to the dimensions of their desks. Brian Friel has tended to be the exception. A seam of reflection on the business of writing runs through much of his best work. The makers of records, the compilers of histories, the manufacturers of maps, are, to his audiences, familiar figures. The closeness of art to lies, the fragility of the imaginative constructs by which we place ourselves in the world, the untrustworthiness of language itself, are his constant themes.
And his most astonishing play, Faith Healer, is, in some ways, his most self reflective. It is, at one level, a play about what it feels like to be a writer, hovering between the self contempt that comes from knowing all the tricks and the magical, evanescent wonder of those moments when you seem to have the power to bless and heal.
Yet what Faith Healer does, and his new play Give Me Your Answer, Do! at the Abbey, does not, is to embed those concerns in wider, less claustrophobic contexts. In Faith Healer the self analysis is woven into both a mythic pattern and a vividly evoked social reality. Give Me Your Answer, on the other hand reaches for both myth and reality but gets a grip on neither.
The play opens brilliantly with a theatrical device whose boldness and daring reminds you that you are confronting the work of a playwright who still has both the restlessness and the mastery to create surprising variations on theatrical form. In the centre of a darkened stage, there is a young woman (Pauline Hutton) obviously suffering from a mental disability, sitting in a bed. Tom Hickey, playing the middle aged novelist Tom Connolly, enters, gives himself a jerk as if switching himself on for a performance and launches himself into a monologue whose excessive exuberance does not hide his pain.
His talk is nonsense, wild lies that seem to be invented on the spot, and we understand that she does not hear, that the stream of talk is its own point, a way, not of communicating with his daughter but of being with her. What we are hearing is a monologue that ought to be a dialogue, so that the girl's silence becomes not a mere absence of words, but itself a powerful presence on stage.
This prelude is everything the play as a whole should be. There is a gripping, immediate human situation out of which all the themes that Friel is concerned with the uses of lies, the relationship between memory and invention, the fear of silence that forces us to, keep talking arise. And there is a ferocious, unsettling theatricality.
The rest, alas, has neither of these qualities. The bulk of the play is a return to territory that has always attracted Friel Chekhov's decaying country houses, filled with dilapidated lives. In the old manse that is the umpteenth wife occupied by Tom and his wife Daisy, the characters gather. There is David, an agent for a Texan university who is considering whether Tom's papers are worth buying. There are Daisy's parents, he a cocktail pianist, she a doctor. And there is another literary couple Garret Fitzmaurice, a novelist who has bartered integrity for popularity, and his wife Grainne.
A wispy aura of myth surrounds the bickerings, tears, drinking, self contempt and recrimination that are played out by these characters. David, referred to repeatedly as "Mister God", just in case we don't get it, is, in judging the worth of Tom's papers, also judging the worth of his life. And by extension, the characters are to become souls at the rusty gates of a rather downbeat Heaven, hoping that their sins - selfishness, kleptomania, the prostitution of talent - will be forgiven.
But while these mythic elements surround the action, they remain precisely a surrounding, too external to the action to provide the depth it needs to save it from becoming a mere compendium of human disappointments.
And the same is true of the pattern of contrasts around which the play is built. There are numerous counterpoints sewn into the text memory and amnesia, lies and inventions dancing and immobility, sale and theft. But rather than arising from the action, the action - seems to follow them. Daisy's father steals because David is trying to buy. Her mother is crippled with arthritis because her father is an elegant dancer. David is forgetful because his being so provides a nice contrast with his professional career of collecting archives.
Too much of what happens seems arbitrary. And as a result, the words that people speak often come to resemble the more abstract outgrowths of language - books, papers, scrabble games, quotations, rather desultory references to Wittgenstein that lie all around them.
Besides, the drama hinges on an issue that is hard to get excited about. Since we have no idea what his writing is like, we have too few reasons to care one way or the other whether David is going to buy Tom's papers. And since we are given no hint of the significance of the two unpublished pornographic novels that are crucial to David's decision, it is hard to find the revelation of their existence compelling.
Most seriously, the emotional - core of the play - the relationship between Tom and his mentally disabled daughter, so movingly enacted at the start, disappears from view until the very end.
It has to be said that Brian Friel's own direction does little to make up in performance what the play lacks as a text. Most of the energy of the actors seems to go into a reverential concern for the nuances of the words, leaving little behind for the kind of interaction that can convince an audience that these people are reacting, on the spot, to each other. Only Aideen O'Kelly as Daisy's mother and David Kelly as her lather quite manage to lose the edgy air of actors performing a text and to become, for us, people acting out their lives.
