Cultural Events- Putting the 'mick' into Mi [Mick]ry: Brian Friel's Postcolonial Drama

Alison O'Malley- Younger and Putting the 'mick' into Mi [Mick]ry: Brian Friel's Postcolonial Drama

Following in the foot step of the Irish poet Eavan Boland, the Indian critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, to name but a few, as part of the Critical and Cultural Theory season at the University of Glasgow, Alison O’Malley- Younger of the University of Sunderland returns to the work of Brian Friel and the field of postcolonial studies.

In her paper entitled Putting the ‘Mick’ into Mi[Mick]ry: Brian Friel’s Postcolonial Drama. Alison O’Malley- Younger offers an insightful and detailed exploration, analysis and commentary of mimicry and liminality, hybridity and conceptual third spaces within Brian Friel’s drama, in this instant The London Vertigo. The London Vertigo is based upon The True Born Irishman, by Charles Macklin Brian Friel comments that ‘My reason for renaming the play The London Vertigo is that this title both signposts the play’s theme and hints as the fate the author himself eagerly embraced.’

Alison argues that The London Vertigo is a mediation of non- realist dramatic genre which is highly artificial in its contrived plots, characterisation and settings, and which capitalises on wit, satire, and verbal brilliance to explore the ludicrous discrepancy between the surface veneer of decorum in modish, middle class London society and the unabashed debauchery beneath it. Friel translates this canonical genre into an Irish context, and through the discourses of mimicry highlights identity as a complex, theatricalised, citational process something that is peripatetic and prosthetic; a mobile, transferable, enacted, theatrical event based on role-play, costume and ritual. In effect mirroring Friel’s own comment regarding The London Vertigo.

One of the most significant strengths and joys of Alison’s paper will be the reconceptualisation of the applicability of a postcolonial paradigm to Ireland, and particularly Friel’s. Exploring Friel’s position at the fulcrum of various exclusivist and essentialist foundational myths of identity based on static binarisms such as ‘us’ and ‘them.’