Field Day Theatre Company
Encyclopedia
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 consists of four 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, recognized 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, is a hot-spot in the north-south tensions known as "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.
, David Hammond, Seamus Heaney
, and Tom Paulin
; they would eventually become Field Day's Board of Directors. (Thomas Kilroy
, the only member from 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.
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 nationalist 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, Tariq Ali, Terry Eagleton, Seamus Deane, Pascale Casanova, Alan Ahearne, Kevin Whelan, David Lloyd, Brendan O'Leary, Luke Gibbons, and Joe Cleary. Field Day Review 7 will appear in 2011.
To date, Field Day Publications has published 21 titles in the fields of literary criticism, history, Irish art music, cultural studies, art history and 18th-century Irish poetry.
In my own place and dwell within
(Ireland's Field Day 26)
The Field Day directors recognized that in order for Ireland to claim "Its proper name" Irish literature would need its own comprehensive anthology .
In 1990 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, the directors, all men, commissioned a fourth volume to be edited by women and dedicated to women's writing. But for the critics of Field Day, and even to some of their supporters, a separate volume, issued as an afterthought, became emblematic of the marginalization of women within nationalist and cultural discourse .
Brian Friel
Brian Friel is an Irish dramatist, author and director of the Field Day Theatre Company. He is considered to be the greatest living English-language dramatist, hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland"...
and actor Stephen Rea
Stephen Rea
Stephen Rea is an Irish film and stage actor. Rea has appeared in high profile films such as V for Vendetta, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire and Breakfast on Pluto...
. 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
Derry
Derry or Londonderry is the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland and the fourth-biggest city on the island of Ireland. The name Derry is an anglicisation of the Irish name Doire or Doire Cholmcille meaning "oak-wood of Colmcille"...
with the hope of establishing a major theatre company for Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
. The production and performance of Translations
Translations
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag , a small village at the heart of 19th century agricultural Ireland...
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 consists of four 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
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, Ireland's most prominent poet, recognized 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
Derry
Derry or Londonderry is the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland and the fourth-biggest city on the island of Ireland. The name Derry is an anglicisation of the Irish name Doire or Doire Cholmcille meaning "oak-wood of Colmcille"...
, 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, is a hot-spot in the north-south tensions known as "The Troubles
The Troubles
The Troubles was a period of ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland which spilled over at various times into England, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. The duration of the Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by many to have ended with the Belfast...
". Furthermore, its western location and its relationship to Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
, 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.
More than theatre
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 DeaneSeamus Deane
Seamus Deane is an Irish poet, novelist, and critic.Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Deane was born into a Catholic nationalist family. He attended St. Columb's College in Derry, Queen's University Belfast and Pembroke College, Cambridge University . At St...
, David Hammond, Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, and Tom Paulin
Tom Paulin
Thomas Neilson Paulin is a Northern Irish poet and critic of film, music and literature. He lives in England, where he is the GM Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford.- Life and work :...
; they would eventually become Field Day's Board of Directors. (Thomas Kilroy
Thomas Kilroy
Thomas F. Kilroy is an Irish playwright and novelist.He was born in Green Street, Callan, County Kilkenny and studied at University College, Dublin. In his early career he was play editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin...
, the only member from the Republic
Republic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
, 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.
Field Day Publishing
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 of 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
Terry Eagleton
Terence Francis Eagleton FBA is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics...
, Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
and Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
— 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 nationalist 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, Tariq Ali, Terry Eagleton, Seamus Deane, Pascale Casanova, Alan Ahearne, Kevin Whelan, David Lloyd, Brendan O'Leary, Luke Gibbons, and Joe Cleary. Field Day Review 7 will appear in 2011.
To date, Field Day Publications has published 21 titles in the fields of literary criticism, history, Irish art music, cultural studies, art history and 18th-century Irish poetry.
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
From the beginning Field Day's 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:- You'll understand I draw the line
- At being robbed of what is mine,
- My patris, my deep design
The Field Day directors recognized that in order for Ireland to claim "Its proper name" Irish literature would need its own comprehensive anthology .
In 1990 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, the directors, all men, commissioned a fourth volume to be edited by women and dedicated to women's writing. But for the critics of Field Day, and even to some of their supporters, a separate volume, issued as an afterthought, became emblematic of the marginalization of women within nationalist and cultural discourse .