Field Day Theatre Company
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.
Read more about Field Day Theatre Company: More Than Theatre, Bibliography
Famous quotes containing the words field, day, theatre and/or company:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I do not want to be covetous, but I think I speak the minds of many a wife and mother when I say I would willingly work as hard as possible all day and all night, if I might be sure of a small profit, but have worked hard for twenty-five years and have never known what it was to receive a financial compensation and to have what was really my own.”
—Emma Watrous, U.S. inventor. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, ch. 8, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)
“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air: the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.”
—Eleonora Duse (1858–1924)
“We’re too unseparate. And going home
From company means coming to our senses.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)