‘Repeat Play’: Repetition and Truth-telling in <i>Play</i>, <i>Faith Healer</i>, and Irish Monologic Theatre

This essay argues that the critical consensus concerning Brian Friel’s Faith Healer (1979) as the origin play for an Irish tradition of monologue theatre overlooks the indebtedness of Friel’s first monologue drama to Samuel Beckett’s Play (1963) and, in so doing, obfuscates Beckett’s influence in the evolution of Irish monologic theatre. Tracing the reliance of Play and Faith Healer on musical structures of variation and recurrence, the essay discerns the reach of their interrogation of dramatic storytelling and argues that the subversion of truth-telling in these key plays has exercised a profound influence on the approach to the monologue form in contemporary Irish theatre. The essay examines how Play operates a comprehensive critique of the aesthetic and epistemological traditions upon which western theatre has developed and how through its compulsion to repeat itself reduces theatre to a visceral demand for judgment. The complex forms of duplication in Faith Healer are similarly read in relation to an audience’s desire for narrative coherence and, reading the play against its Beckettian precursor, the essay demonstrates how these dramas not only problematise dramatic narrative but, more fundamentally, disrupt an audience’s relationship with theatrical presence. The essay concludes with a consideration of Play and Faith Healer as predecessors to the monologic turn in Irish theatre, arguing that the Irish monologue not only speaks back to socio-political narratives but contests theatre’s claim to truth-tell.