The Field Day Theatre Company began as an artistic collaboration between playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 1980, the duo set out to launch a production of Friel's recently completed play, Translations . They decided to rehearse and premiere the play in Derry with the hope of establishing a major theatre company for Northern Ireland. The production and performance of Translations generated a level of excitement and anticipation that unified, if only for a short time, the various factions of a divided community.
Although Field Day has never put forth a formal mission statement, their intention was to create a space, a 'fifth province,' that transcended the crippling oppositions of Irish politics. The term 'fifth province' — Ireland now consists of four provinces, but the Irish term cúige signifies 'a fifth portion' and there were five historic provinces – was coined by the editors of an Irish Journal, The Crane Bag, to name an imaginary cultural space from which a new discourse of unity might emerge. In addition to being an enormous popular and critical success, Field Day's first production created just such a space. After the production of Translations, Seamus Heaney, Ireland's most prominent poet, recognised the importance of what they had accomplished and urged Brian Friel to continue with the project: "this was what theatre was supposed to do" (cited in Richtarik, 65).
That the company was established in Derry, Northern Ireland's "second city," is significant. Although Friel knew the city well (he had lived there until 1967), Derry, being close to the border, was a hot-spot in the north-south tensions during "The Troubles". Furthermore, its western location and its relationship to Belfast, Northern Ireland's east coast capital, underline a second historically older division in Ireland – the division between the cosmopolitan east and the rural, romantic west.
What began with a desire to develop a local Northern Irish theatre and make it available to a popular audience, quickly grew into a much larger cultural and political project. Even before the company's opening performance, four prominent Northern Irish writers were invited to join the project — Seamus Deane, David Hammond, Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin; they would eventually become Field Day's board of directors. (Thomas Kilroy, the only member born in the Republic, joined the board in 1988). All of the members of Field Day agreed that art and culture had a crucial role to play in the resolution of what had come to be known as "the Troubles":
The directors believed that Field Day could and should contribute to the solution of the present crisis by producing analyses of the established opinions, myths and stereotypes which had become both a symptom and a cause of the current situation. (Ireland's Field Day vii)
Field Day became an artistic response to the violence, history and politics which divided Northern Ireland into a series of seemingly irresolvable dichotomies; Orange/Green, Unionist/Nationalist and Protestant/Catholic are only the most prominent.
Every year saw a new production open in Derry and begin a tour of venues large and small throughout both Northern Ireland and the Republic. While Field Day's artistic venture continued to fulfil its original mandate of bringing "professional theatre to people who might otherwise never see it" (Richtarik 11), in September 1983 they launched a project whose target audience was primarily the academic community. The Field Day Theatre Company began publishing a series of pamphlets "in which the nature of the Irish problem could be explored and, as a result, more successfully confronted than it had been hitherto" (Ireland's Field Day viii).
The first set of three pamphlets were written by directors of the Field Day Company – Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. The pamphlets were largely responsible for entering Field Day into the political debate whose calcified terms the project had originally wanted to explode. With Tom Paulin's Riot Act (1984) the division between critic and artist began to crumble, the politics of the pamphlets were finding their way into the plays (Richtarik 242).
In the 1990 introduction to Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature — a collection of three Field Day Pamphlets by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said — Deane writes: "Field Day's analysis of the (Northern Irish) situation derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial crisis" (Eagleton 6). In this essay Deane calls for a re-engagement with the concept of nationalism, and positions Field Day in a squarely antithetical position to those he refers to as revisionist historians and critics, whose chief aim is "to demolish the nationalist mythology" (6). The categories of revisionist and anti-revisionist were all too easily superimposed onto the categories of unionist and nationalist, and the space between them, created by the production of Translations, was closing fast. For some, Seamus Deane had become the de facto spokesman, and Field Day became increasingly associated with republican politics and post-colonial theory.
By this time Field Day was no longer a novel experiment; it was part of the establishment: "That Field Day was attacked for being nationalist and for being anti-nationalist was a positive sign insofar as it proved that the company was raising questions generally, but the fact that the debate had narrowed so quickly to the old terms indicated that Field Day was losing the moral and artistic high ground" (Richtarik 249).
In 2005, Field Day Publications was launched in association with the Dublin school of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. With Seamus Deane as General Editor, the company's first publication was Field Day Review 1, an annual journal primarily concerned with Irish literary and political culture, but in an international context. To critical acclaim, Field Day Review has published essays and interviews by numerous eminent academics, including Benedict Anderson, Giovanni Arrighi, Maud Ellmann, Tariq Ali, Terry Eagleton, Pascale Casanova, Alan Ahearne, Kevin Whelan, David Lloyd, Brendan O'Leary, Luke Gibbons, Joe Cleary, Claire Connnolly and Catherine Gallagher. Field Day Review 10 was published in October 2014.
To date, Field Day Publications has published 24 titles in the fields of literary criticism, history, Irish art music, cultural studies, art history and 18th-century Irish poetry. [1]
From the beginning Field Day struggled to establish a cultural identity, not just for the North, but for the Irish. Much like the stated intentions of the Irish National Theatre established by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory almost one hundred years earlier (Harrington vii), the goal was not just to reach or represent an audience, but to create an audience. History, and Field Day's post-colonial sensibilities, determined that the construction of Irishness would often be worked out against notions of Britishness. In a pointed and humorous verse epistle, "An Open Letter," Heaney responds to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry:
The Field Day directors recognised that in order for Ireland to claim "Its proper name" Irish literature would need its own comprehensive anthology .
In 1991 Field Day Published the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , edited by Seamus Deane. The project, according to Deane, was nothing less than an "act of definition", one which he hoped would be inclusive and representative of the plurality of Irish identity: "There is a story here, a meta-narrative, which is, we believe, hospitable to all the micro-narratives that, from time to time, have achieved prominence as the official version of the true history, political and literary, of the island's past and present". The Anthology was immediately attacked by Field Day's critics as politically biased. The anthology's most conspicuous flaw, however, was the paucity of women writers. In response to the accusations that Field Day had elided the female voice, a new all-female board of editors issued two additional volumes (2002), which exceeded the first three in length.
Starting in early 2017, Field Day started to commission articles for every issue of Village Magazine , [2] a leftist current affairs publication issued in Dublin. The Field Day Podcast appeared in January 2018. [3] The annual Seamus Deane Lecture was inaugurated in 2015 with a lecture by Deane himself. The 2016 lecture was delivered by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, and in 2017-18 a set of three lectures were delivered by Dr Bryan McMahon, Dr. Conor Kenny of Médecins sans Frontières, and by Seamus Deane himself. In 2022, lectures were delivered by Angus Mitchell and by Brendan O'Leary.
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
Brian Patrick Friel was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov" and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.
Stephen Rea is an Irish film and stage actor.
Thomas Neilson Paulin is a Northern Irish poet and critic of film, music and literature. He lives in England, where he was the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.
Irish literature is literature written in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from back in the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish, including religious texts, poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as The Táin and Mad King Sweeny.
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel, written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag (Ballybeg), a County Donegal village in 19th century Ireland. Friel has said that Translations is "a play about language and only about language", but it deals with a wide range of issues, stretching from language and communication to Irish history and cultural imperialism. Friel said that his play "should have been written in Irish" but, despite this fact, he carefully crafted the verbal action in English, bringing the political questions of the play into focus. Baile Beag is a fictional village, created by Friel as a setting for several of his plays, although there are many real places called Ballybeg throughout Ireland.
Events from the year 1980 in Ireland.
The culture of Northern Ireland relates to the traditions of Northern Ireland. Elements of the Culture of Ulster and the Culture of the United Kingdom are to be found.
Kathleen Ni Houlihan is a mythical symbol and emblem of Irish nationalism found in literature and art, sometimes representing Ireland as a personified woman. The figure of Kathleen Ni Houlihan has also been invoked in nationalist Irish politics. Kathleen Ni Houlihan is sometimes spelled as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, and the figure is also sometimes referred to as the Sean-Bhean Bhocht, the Poor Old Woman, and similar appellations. Kathleen Ni Houlihan is generally depicted as an old woman who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die to free Ireland from colonial rule, usually resulting in the young men becoming martyrs for this cause, the colonial power being the United Kingdom. After the Anglo-Irish War, Kathleen Ni Houlihan became associated with the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, especially during the Troubles.
St Columb's College is a Roman Catholic boys' grammar school in Derry, Northern Ireland. Since 2008, it has been a specialist school in mathematics. It is named after Saint Columba, the missionary monk from County Donegal who founded a monastery in the area. The college was originally built to educate young men into the priesthood, but now educates boys in a variety of disciplines.
Seamus Francis Deane was an Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian. He was noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which won several literary awards and was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.
Sinn Féin and Sinn Féin Amháin are Irish-language phrases used as a political slogan by Irish nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While advocating Irish national self-reliance, its precise political meaning was undefined, variously interpreted as the aim of a separate Irish republic or that of a dual monarchy. Its earliest use was to describe individual political radicals unconnected with any party and espousing a more "advanced nationalism" than the Irish Home Rule movement represented by the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). In the 1890s "Sinn Féin, Sinn Féin amháin" was the slogan of the Gaelic League, which advocated the revival of the Irish language.
Reading in the Dark is a novel written by Seamus Deane in 1996. The novel is set in Derry, Northern Ireland and extends from February 1945 through July 1971. The book won the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature, is a New York Times Notable Book, won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, besides being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. It has been translated into 20 languages.
Desmond Carolan Fennell was an Irish writer, essayist, cultural philosopher, and linguist. Throughout his career, Fennell repeatedly departed from prevailing norms. In the 1950s and early 1960s, with his extensive foreign travel and reporting and his travel book, Mainly in Wonder, he departed from the norm of Irish Catholic writing at the time. From the late 1960s into the 1970s, in developing new approaches to the partition of Ireland and the Irish language revival, he deviated from political and linguistic Irish nationalism, and with the philosophical scope of his Beyond Nationalism: The Struggle against Provinciality in the Modern World, from contemporary Irish culture generally.
The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes is a verse adaptation by Seamus Heaney of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It was first published in 1991. The story comes from one of the myths relating to the Trojan War. It is dedicated in memory of poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald.
Edna Longley is an Irish literary critic and cultural commentator specialising in modern Irish and British poetry.
That part of the United Kingdom called Northern Ireland was created in 1922, with the partition of the island of Ireland. The majority of the population of Northern Ireland wanted to remain within the United Kingdom. Most of these were the Protestant descendants of settlers from Great Britain.
Kevin Kiely is a poet, critic, author and playwright whose writings and public statements have met with controversy and also with support.
John Wilson Foster is an Irish literary critic and cultural historian.
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation is a verse translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf into modern English by the Irish poet and playwright Seamus Heaney. It was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and Faber and Faber, and won that year's Whitbread Book of the Year Award.