When fathers and sons' dreams collide, the conflicts between them naturally escalate and are generally adapted as a dramatic device. These conflicts become a universal motif for any literary and artistic genre through which a constant state of flux and cultural milieus of a society as well as its culture could be reflected. The Irish father and son's conflicts particularly in Brian Friel's <Philadelphia, Here I Come!> and Hugh Leonard's <Da> are no exception.
This paper is an attempt to explore the internal relations of the Irish family by focusing on father and son through the prism of the two modern Irish plays. The primary focus of this study is to be on the interconnections of the father-son relationship within its social contexts. In other words, the relationships between the Irish fathers and their sons in the two plays acknowledge and employ Irish social patterns as a device and the literary imagination as a guide.
Brian Friel and Hugh Leonard provide initially different responses to Irish father-son relationships throughout their plays. The first of a three episode drama, <Philadelphia, Here I Come!>, portrays the internal struggles and fantasies triggered by a son's imminent departure on remembrances of another son's return to Ireland. Friel's play features a living father who gives virtually no words to his son, while the father in Leonard's <Da>, though deceased, nevertheless makes repeated attempts to converse with his surviving son.
At the same time, both plays share common responses in terms of exploiting the technical device of a running conflict between two individuals. Friel and Leonard utilize their protagonists as split into two halves constantly shifting their psychological landscape from present to past or vice versa. More specifically speaking, there are two split major characters, Public Gar as self and Private Gar as self-ego in <Philadelphia, Here I Come!>. Another character, Charlie Now in <Da> appears as self of time present and Young Charlie as time past.
Unlike the Irish tradition, the fathers portrayed in the two plays have nothing to grant to their son but affectionate fatherhood which is delivered silently and invisibly. In the plays, the Irish father and son relationship contributes the reflection on their intuitive sense of the substance of Irish identity, social transformations and contemporary struggle in the society. On one hand, Friel and Leonard challenge through their plays the relationship between fathers and sons in Ireland. On the other hand, through the 'undertow of the stream of consciousness', each has centered on critical problems of Irish identity.
From the earliest success, <Philadelphia, Here I Come!>, about a man's divided feelings concerning his emigration to America, Brian Friel has centered on the problems of Irish identity in his plays. His concern is not the problem of Irish emigration. Its concern, in Friel's term, is a 'kind of love: the love between a father and a son and between a son and his birthplace,' to which one should add that for Friel, love is a complex and often acrid emotion.
Irish scholars and writers, from the late 60s onwards, have struggled to define the related issues of culture, tradition and identity. Leonard also once said that "Irish theatre... concerned itself with Irishmen first and men later". Moreover, Leonard, borrowing the dialogue from Hogan, called a revolt "the four great 'F's of Ireland: faith, fatherland, family, and friendship" with which all subjects deal in the play.
The theme of the father-son relationship in <Da> could cause readers or viewers who are living in a society in which fathers and sons have less to share with each other in the day-to-day living process, a nostalgic reminiscence. The externalization of memory and subconscious desire is also the major concern of Hugh Leonard in <Da>. Nevertheless, it is not a memory play, but a mirror through which the images of Irish culture and identity are reflected.
Using and improving upon the basic techniques of the conventional domestic drama, these two plays successfully record the protagonists' abrupt movement from reality to reverie and memory, thereby giving form and motion and substance to the powerful urges that ripple through the subterranean habitations of consciousness of two Irish sons involved in the process of discovering new meanings for the words 'father' and 'home'.
Likewise, Friel and Leonard resolutely continue to explore the private worlds of their own obsessions, regarding their work which suggest the complex, varied, and transitional nature of contemporary Irish experiences. This exploration on Irish father-son relationships in bifocal landscapes give an awareness of historical and cultural time regarding the changing in consciousness of Ireland in 1960s.
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