In particular, Dancing at Lugbnasa seems to express /perform the nuances of memory and migration in ways that both resonate with and stand out as distinctive within the body of Friel's plays.
دور الذاكرة في المسرحية كان موضعا للنقد خاصة من خلال علاقته بالتاريخ. فالتاريخ هو طريقة لفهم الماضي, أما الذاكرة طريقة سلسلة وفردية في استدعاء الماضي.
History is a mode of understanding the past in a structured and consensual way, whereas memory is a somewhat fluid and individual way of recalling the past.
To underpin that device, in his narrative monologues Michael makes an explicit theme of memory. He speaks of his memories as memories, seeming to reflect on memory itself at times.
Michael recalls: August 1936 in the imaginary village of Ballybeg in
the real County. The audience isn't informed what year or place the narrator Michael is speaking from; they know only that it must be after the mid-1950s. Little mention is made of political events or socio-historical observations related to the village, county or Ireland generally in the play. There isn't any direct reference to recognisable events of Irish history. On the contrary, the historical events mentioned are deliberately outside the local sphere and even outside the nation: Jack's involvement in the First World War
and location is created, details that hold in a general way with any
awareness of Ireland's social history that an audience may have. The importance of the radio; the persistence of pagan rituals like the Festival of Lughnasa; Maggie's Wild Woodbine cigarettes; Kate's allegiance to her Catholic heritage and neighbourhood. These small, everyday details accrue to convey a strong socio-historical sense of the context. It is evidently a context caught in transition; a rural society in which a passing way of life contends with the appearance of mechanisation and modernity.
A close consideration of the role of memory and history in the play suggests that the former dominates over the latter. Dancing at Lughnasa is structured around memory and attends to the workings of memory considerably more emphatically than it dwells on historical events and narratives.
The manner of distinguishing between 'memory' (fluid and more individual) and 'history' (organised, evidenced and relatively consensual) may appear artificial.
Dancing at Lughnasa seemed to provide a pointed counterpoint in emphasising memory over history.
Richard Pine: using memory to articulate the everydayness of 'home' in Ireland: It concentrates on forms of truth, on different kinds of memory'.
over history
Friel evokes the collective memory that persists in rural Ireland through pagan rituals, such as the Festival of Lughnasa.
Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) comes to mind as resonating with Dancing at Lughnasa in various ways: in its focus on a predominantly female household of sisters; as a 'lucid picture of profound transition' without explicit allusions to historical events; and in the manner in which characters articulate their desires and relationships and losses through a web of memories. The obvious parallel is in using the device of a narrator looking back from an indefinite present, a narrator who is also a character in the events recalled onstage.
اختيار التعامل مع الواقع في مسرحية الذاكرة هو تقدر لقوة الذاكرة ففي المسرحية استخدم الكاتب المسرحي شكل مسرحية الذاكرة (تجلت في صورة واقعية ومنطقية للحياة المنزلي في منزل مندي بينما تشوه الذاكرة او اخفاقها قد صقل من خلال حديث الراوي مايكل المتصل)
The manner of dealing with reality in a 'memory play' is a reckoning with the operations of memory itself. In Dancing at Lughnasa Friel uses the form of the 'memory play': It presents a coherent and realistic picture of the domestic setting of the Mundy household while simultaneously foregrounding the slippages and distortions of memory -smoothed over by narrator Michael's linking speeches.
· It is implausible that the boy Michael would have the kind of photographic memory that his adult self would be able to recall accurately. This is particularly so since the boy lives in his own child-world, making kites and given to childlike imagining. The power of the child's imagination is vividly conveyed when he feels that he has actually seen the imaginary bird Maggie had pretended to let fly (p. 14).
وايضا بعض الذكريات تبدو كفوتوغراف فقط في بداية وهاية المسرحية فالذكريات التي تحدثت عنها الشخصيات في المسرحية مثل الحنين للوطن مشبعة اكثر بالمتعة التي تثيرها اكثر من الجروح الواقعية.
The flow of memories that the play seems to be set off by and returns to still photographic moments at the beginning and end of the play. The memories that characters speak of within the play are nostalgic, imbued more with the pleasure they evoke than the abrasions and equivocations of reality:
- Maggie's memory of her escapade with Bernie when she was sixteen (p. 20) is a memory of a youthful and exciting past; in Jack's memory everything to do with Ryanga is painted in idyllic colours, untainted by cultural and colonial conflicts; nothing about Chris's memories of Gerry sullies her love for him.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Migration
****The play's
structuring through and thematic preoccupation with memory is inextricably
bound to the theme of migration.
بناء المسرحية من خلال استغراق الافكار مع الذاكرة
هو مرتبط دون انفصال مه موضوع الهجرة.
صاوميل دين لاحظ اهمية موضوع المنفى في
الاعمال المسرحية المبكرة. والموروثة من التقليد المسرحي الايرلندي.
تجربة الهجرة متجذرة بعمق في التاريخ الاستعماري
وما بعد الاستعمار الايرلندي و الذاكرة الفردية والجماعية. في المسرحية نجد ان
الهجرة غدت موضوعا في عدة طرق من الشخصيات.
·
Seamus Deane has
noted the importance of the 'theme of exile' in the
playwright's early work, inherited from 'Irish theatrical tradition.
-
The
experience of migration is deeply rooted in Irish colonial/postcolonial history
and collective/individual memory
-
In Dancing at Lughnasa migration is
thematised in a number of unmistakable ways.
_______________________________________
الشخصيات
التي هاجرت او اغتربت واسباب هجرتها وتاثير ذلك عليهم
The characters who are or
become migrants in the play\ the reasons for migration \\ effects it has on
them.
الراوي
مايكل واضح انه يتحدث عن ذكرياته ليس كانها بعيدة فقط لانها حدثت في طفولته ولكن
ايضا بعيدة في الوقت والمكان. لا يوجد سبب واضح لذلك ولكنها رغبة في الرحيل فقط
وهذا الاحساس جعله ما بين الولاء وما بين الواجب لسعي نفسه للحرية
·
The narrator Michael: It is clear from the
beginning that he is recalling 1936 from a significant distance in time and
place; his vivid memories are not merely of a distant childhood but of a
distant home that he has left behind. No clear explanation of his reasons for leaving or his career away from
the childhood home emerges, except the briefest note on the 'simple desire to
leave'. That feeling of being torn between loyalty to a backward area and
obligation to the self seeking freedom saturates the play as a whole - both in
the narrator's nostalgic reminiscing and in what's revealed of each character.
جاك
المهاجر العائد من غربته وضح ان هجرته لم تكن جسديا فقط وانما رحيل ثقافة واستبدالها. وهو واضح في امكاناته اللغوية
وتقاليده الدينية. هو لا يشعر بانه قادر على تقبل المنطقة كوطن بعد عدوته
او انه ينتمي للعائلة وكذلك في علاقاته
(يعمل في اوغندا مبشرا بالمسيحية والمبشر هو الشخص الذي يدعو للدين
المسيحي)
·
Jack: The returned emigre Jack's alienation in
Ballybeg demonstrates that migration is not merely about physical movement but,
more importantly, about cultural displacements and replacements. Every aspect
of Jack's sensibility had migrated: his linguistic ability, religious
convictions, cherished memories, relationships, adaptation to everyday life.
The return is a process of incomplete re-adaptation wherein he is unable to
accept Baliybeg as home again or regain his sense of belonging to the family.
In fact, for Jack the missionary purpose of migration - cultivating Christian
religious beliefs and practices in Kyanga - has been subverted by the
comprehensiveness of his migration.
·
Gerry: In Michael's 'memory play' Gerry is a
perpetual migrant, a drifter always looking for 'a named destination).
Gerry's constant movement within Ireland, to Spain, back to Wales, the land of
his birth, seems to be not so much due to restlessness and alienation as due to
an easy and detached ability to adapt quickly wherever he is. The itinerant
Gerry's home is, evidently, wherever he is: 'Wales isn't my home any more. My
home is here - well, Ireland' (p. 31).
جيري
هو
مهاجر دائم\ غير مستقر الوجهة \ يبحث عن جنة عن ديموقراطية..... فهو هاجر في ايرلندا الى اسبانيا ثم عاد الى
ويلز مكان ولادته وبسبب كثر الهجرة اصبح قادرا على التكيف في أي مكان ولم تعد ويلز
موطنه بل ايرلندا .
·
Rose and Agnes: Their emigration and sad
ending after the events covered in the play is speculatively explained by
narrator Michael:
روز
واغنس كانت ع\هجرتهم لاسباب اقتصادية
Only Kate, Chris and Maggie aren't or do not
become migrants. They experience at different points in the play feelings of
oppression with their circumstances in Ballybeg, but appear to be unable or
unwilling to try to escape them.
الاخوات
الثلاثة بقين في المنطقة ولم يهارجن رغم رغبتهن بذلك
_______________________________________
الهجرة
يمكن اعتبارها هي البعد عن الوطن او المنزل, لفظ HOME في تلك الفترة كان دايما يرمز ويشار به للوطن
·
Migration is usually understood as departure from
a 'home', where 'home' is a space of domicile or a space with regard to which
some rooted allegiance or notion of belonging is entertained.
·
The dominant critical convention at present is to think of such
a 'home' as territorially described, most often as a country (a nation or a state)
from which emigration happens or to which immigration takes place.
موضوع الهجرة في المسرحية مرتبط بالقومية الايرلندية
(وخاصة الانقاسامت في الدولة بين الشمال والجنوب لتحقيق الجمهورية الايرلندية )
-
The
theme of migrations in Dancing at 'Lughnasa has been critically engaged
primarily in terms of the Irish nation: in terms of movements related to the
complex split between North and South, or the Republic of Ireland (what was the
Free State in 1936), or a composite Irish nation and people.
تعقد الولاء تجاه ايرلندا كوطن والهجرة من ايرلندا كوطن
هو لجذب الانتباه تجاه التاريخ الاجتماعي الايرلندي
***The
conflict between allegiance to Ireland as 'home' and emigration from Ireland as
'home' has usually been accounted for by drawing attention to Irish social history.
Ex: the pressured environment of Ballybeg in
1936 depicted in the play, caught between the traditional rural lifestyle and
the appearance of modernity (heralded by the radio and the glove factory.
ما بين اسلوب الحياة الريفي التقليدي وما بين الحداثة
هيلين لوجيك ناقشت الحدود
التي تعاني منها اخوات مندي ضد الرؤية الرومانسية تجاه المراة الايرلندية
(رومانسية كما في الفترة الرومانسية أي ان المراة زوجة وام فقط حياتها من اجل
زوجها وهو ما قيد دور المراة خارج المنزل ولم يساويها بلمواطنة كالرجل)
-
Helen Lojek
has understood the variously expressed sense of limitations that the Mundy
sisters suffer against the following background: A romantic vision of Irish
woman meant 'wife and mother': her 'life' (not her work) within the home 'gives
to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.' Such
legislative paternalism restricted women's roles outside the home and granted
them less than equal citizenry.
وبالنسبة لجون دين فان هنالك بعض القضايا المتعلقة
بالجندر كانت تدعم تجربة الشخصيات في
المسرحية مثل ان الاخوات غير متزوجات فنسبة كبيرة جدا من النساء لم تكن
متزوجات
-
Joan
Fitzpatrik Dean cites socially indicative statistics of Ireland to understand
some of the gender issues that underpin the experience of characters in the
play, noting that: the sisters' unmarried state was more common than not at the
time; and Rose and Agnes's emigration was part of a larger trend of female
migration.
هذه الخلفية الثقافية
التاريخية مهمة لفهم المسرحية خاصة فيما يخص مفهوم الوطن والهجرة
Useful as such socio-historical backgrounds and details
are for understanding the play, thinking of the theme of migration vis-a-vis
Ireland as 'home' seems to go against the grain of the play.
HOME في
المسرحية هو منزل الاخوات مندي في القري. هذا الحس بالهوم كان من خلال ذاكرة وقتية
ومكانية كما وضحها الراوي مايكال والهجرة هنا يمكن ان نفهمها من خلال ما يسترجعه
المهاجر بذاكرته اكثر من كونه أض او دولة كايرلندا. هذا معناه هجرة بالذاكرة وليس
الهجرة عن الارض.
-
The 'home' of the play is certainly inside the Ireland of
1936, but the 'home' is not Ireland itself. The 'home' is something more
specific; it is no more than the Mundy household in Ballybeg in the few days of
August 1936 that are etched in the narrator Michael's memory.
-
This sense of 'home' is characterised by the specific memory of
a time and place, where the 'homeliness' for Michael is defined by the unusual
togetherness of all the characters then.
-
Migration is understood here in terms of what migrants recall as
'home' rather than of some objective territory — a region or nation - as 'home'.
Such an
understanding of 'home', as migrant memory rather than country, gels with other
aspects of the play.
_______________________________________
_______________________________________
****Amidst the interstices of individual and
collective memory and the migrations from the 'home' that are held by memory,
there are expressions that cannot be put into words and which destabilise the
space of 'home' and plough into deeper underpinnings of human society and consciousness. This is most cogently realised
in the performance of, rather than through the words of, Dancing at Lughnasa.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Language and performance in Dancing at Lughnasa
Anita Pacbeco
***The dramatic devices
Friel employs to give vivid theatrical shape to his theme of memory:
-
The tableaux that
start and finish the play;
-
the use of the
adult Michael as a narrator;
-
The convention of
having the boy Michael as an 'absent-presence' on the stage, visible only to
the characters.
-
Friel's use of
props, like the radio and the kites, that take on a symbolic charge.
_______________________________________
Activity 1 من الكتاب كامل
·
The sisters speak in a
colloquial, everyday register.
·
The similarities
between the sisters' speech patterns do not obscure the differences between
them.
·
Looking at language and
characterisation in the excerpt tells us a good deal about its mood and tone
and pace.
·
The actors would need to convey the complex emotions of this
episode through their delivery of the lines, their facial expressions and such
body language as is allowed by their seated positions and/or engagement with
their respective chores.
_______________________________________
Activity 2 FROM THE BOOK
·
The metaphorical use of
language here conveys the power of memory and contributes to the 'poetic'
quality that characterises the speech as a whole.
·
The repetitions and the
careful balance of phrasing here ('both / and') give the language a
distinctive, almost hypnotic rhythm, akin to that of the music Michael is
describing.
·
Alliteration ('sweet
sounds') and those two adverbs -'rhythmically, languorously' - that, with their
combined eight syllables, seem to mimic the floating motion that dominates his
memory.
·
Through the language of
Michael's closing monologue, then, Friel foregrounds the non-verbal activity
that lies at the heart of his play as the sentences build to a climactic
statement of the transcendence of language: 'Dancing as if language no longer
existed because words were no longer necessary ...'
The language is crucial, any actor playing Michael would need
to keep the audience focused on him through a delivery of the speech attentive
to its lyrical qualities and pronounced rhythms.
