Volunteers by Brian Friel

First published: 1979

First produced: 1975, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, Ireland

Type of plot: Political

Time of work: The 1970’s

Locale: Ireland

Principal Characters:

• George, the site supervisor
• Mr. Wilson, the guard
• Des, an archaeology student
• Knox,
• Butt,
• Smiler,
• Keeney, and
• Pyne, the prisoners who volunteer to work on the archaeological excavation

The Play

Volunteers is set on an archaeological site in the middle of an Irish city, presumably Dublin, in the mid-1970’s. A parking garage and some houses have been razed to allow construction of a luxury hotel, complete with underground swimming pool. Workers have removed layers of Georgian cellars and Norman debris to reveal the foundations of a tenth century Viking house. These foundations and a Viking skeleton the workers have named Leif are the dominant features of the set, which remains unchanged throughout the play.

Because of the archaeological value of the discoveries, hotel construction has been temporarily halted to allow fuller study. Funding for the project, however, has been exhausted, and the task is being completed by the volunteers of the title—five prisoners on daily parole. These prisoners’ offenses, though revealed only in broad outlines, have resulted from a frustrating Irish mix of political and economic disfranchisement, so that they are neither clearly criminals nor clearly political prisoners. Shortly after the play begins, they are delivered to the site by Wilson, an obtuse guard (a former officer in the British army) who leaves immediately to spend the rest of the day observing his daughter’s music examination.

On the site, the prisoners are supervised by Des, an archaeology student fond of Marxist clichés, and by George, an indifferent bureaucrat who proudly displays a thirteenth century jug he has pieced together out of 593 fragments. The fragments were discovered by Smiler, a volunteer whose only crime was civil disobedience but who has been beaten by the police into a state of childlike dependence on his friends. Keeney, the closest thing to a leader of the volunteers, is a cynical joker with a fondness for limericks and a sardonic dislike of pretense.

As the play begins, it is to be the last day of the dig, and it is revealed that the prisoners, by volunteering, have completely isolated themselves. The other prisoners resent cooperation in any form with the government which has interned so many and have refused to speak to the volunteers since the project began five months ago. Old friends outside the prison have similarly ostracized the volunteers, who now have only one another to talk to. It is that companionship, the guard Wilson correctly realizes, which they will miss the most when the dig is over.

The volunteers settle in for another typical day on the site—playing practical jokes on one another, speculating about why Leif’s skeleton has a hole in the skull and a noose around the neck, and mercilessly parodying the school tours and American tourists who regularly visit the site. When Des arrives, he learns that the dig is at an end but that the prisoners have not yet been told. Insisting that the site director has been bought off by speculators and is ending the dig only because he has already “looted enough for another coffee-table book,” Des calls the volunteers together to announce the site’s closure and to vow support for them in “whatever protest you think fit.” He then rushes off to protest the end of the dig to museum authorities.

Meanwhile, Smiler has wandered off the site. Convinced that he cannot take care of himself in the “outside” world, George is encouraged by the prisoners to call and report Smiler’s disappearance; they hope he will be captured and returned to safety. Keeney, however, stops them. The night before, he announces, he learned that the other internees plan to execute the volunteers for their cooperation with authorities. Keeney argues persuasively that Smiler would stand even less chance of survival inside the prison than he will outside. As the curtain falls, Keeney is polling the others on their feelings, which are now clearly against allowing George to report Smiler’s escape.

When act 2 opens, the volunteers are cleaning up the site, but the lines of authority are plainly reversed. Keeney is in charge, and George is reduced to spluttered threats that he will tell Wilson about their interference with the escape report. As the volunteers recognize their entrapment between enemies inside the prison and enemies outside, their joking becomes almost frantic. Sensing that they have nothing left to lose, they emphasize their new resistance to authority by playing keep-away with George’s precious reconstituted jug, quitting only when they decide that the jug rightfully belongs to Leif, at whose feet they deposit it. The mixture of humor and serious debate continues as each volunteer creates a story explaining why Leif has a hole in his skull—each story an ironic echo of the teller’s own history.

Des returns, having readily agreed to end the dig since he himself is assured of continuing work assessing the artifacts. Keeney mocks Des’s abandonment of Marxist principles, telling him that the volunteers have written a letter of protest to the paper, quoting Des freely. Into the middle of this increasingly tense atmosphere walks Smiler, whose desire to get away has not been able to dominate his need for the care and direction provided by the other prisoners. Butt, Smiler’s closest friend, deliberately drops George’s jug, fragmenting it beyond repair. As a gesture of respect, the volunteers cover Leif with a tarp and conduct a burial service of sorts, before leaving him to final burial by the cement mixer. Wilson returns (pathetically uncertain how the English examiner had reacted to his daughter’s playing) to take the volunteers back to prison and almost certain death. Keeney delivers a closing limerick which bitterly summarizes the world’s view of the volunteers as worthless. The volunteers exit with Wilson. Left alone on the stage, George removes the tarpaulin from Leif’s skeleton and folds it as the lights go down.

Dramatic Devices

The set of Volunteers emphasizes the play’s themes of entrapment and isolation. Simultaneously a construction and an excavation site, the area of the dig is fifteen feet below ground and shielded from the life of the surrounding city by sheets of corrugated iron that make it impossible to look in or out. The prisoners, literally and symbolically beneath the surface, dig into their own and the city’s pasts. The supervisor’s office perched halfway up the wall of the excavation reflects the hierarchical nature of this society. The tips of television antennas and the fact that it will soon be the location of a high-rise hotel emphasize the commercial nature of contemporary Ireland, set to destroy its varied past in favor of a graceless commercial present. The set reflects the enclosed nature of Irish society, the enclosed nature of the volunteers’ experiences, and the enclosed nature of the Irish minds (including the prisoners’ minds) which produced this situation.

The relative bareness of the set adds importance to a number of symbolic props, most notably the skeleton of Leif and the jug which has been glued together out of fragments. At the end of the play, when the jug has been smashed, and when George folds the tarp with which the prisoners have sought to provide a minimum of protection and dignity for the skeleton, the audience is given powerful visual reinforcement for two of the play’s major themes: the difficulty of reconstituting or understanding the past and the indifferent contemporary commercialism which unthinkingly prefers saving an item of minimal value to providing a measure of dignity to people and to the past.

The names of characters also function symbolically in this play. George and Mr. Wilson, the two supervisors, have appropriately British names. Des, the theoretical Marxist, has a traditional Irish name. The prisoners’ names, however, are colorful, unlikely, and often ironic reflections of their reality. Keeney, for example, reminds the audience that this mocking character is using his keen wit as a means of mourning (keening) the lives and the world he sees around him. Smiler, Knox, Pyne, Butt—the names eloquently reflect Brian Friel’s assessment of the prisoners’ characters and situation.

The play’s mixture of comic high jinks and serious social commentary is a dramatic technique of which Friel has made skillful use in a number of plays. The audience is rocked with laughter at the prisoners’ mocking, playful attitude. Keeney’s limericks, barbed and bawdy, suggest an almost music-hall atmosphere, similar to the atmosphere which Friel creates with songs in other plays. However, the humor has a sharp edge and cuts close to painful social issues, so that ultimately Volunteers is not only a serious play but a bitter play as well. It is the essence of Friel’s realism to refuse to separate artificially the comic and tragic aspects of his world.

Critical Context

Volunteers is one of a number of Brian Friel plays which address the contemporary Irish situation. Like other Irish writers, he is caught in what Irish poet Seamus Heaney has called “the quarrel between free, creative imagination, and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation.” Friel has most often dealt with social, political, and economic problems as they affect the lives of ordinary people. His first widely popular play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (pr. 1964), examines why one young Irishman becomes part of the vast wave of emigration. The Freedom of the City (pr. 1973) uses actual events in the northern city of Derry to assess the impact of denial of civil rights on three ordinary residents. With Volunteers, Friel moves south, where he again uses historical events as the loose basis for an imaginative assessment of the impact of public events on private lives. In part, Volunteers is Friel’s insistence that the Irish “troubles” are not simply a northern phenomenon. The Viking references also link this play to similar material in the poetry of Heaney, to whom Volunteers is dedicated.

In Translations (pr. 1980), nineteenth century lovers are destroyed by the conflicting demands of their tribes. Making History (pr. 1988) continues what Declan Kiberd has called Friel’s “search for a usable past,” a search which often focuses on “the cries of those caught up in the fury of lived histories.” Friel often modifies historical facts to fit dramatic necessity, but his works demonstrate a commitment to drama which opens dialogue on important issues.

Friel’s commitment to social dialogue is also evident in his involvement, since 1980, in Field Day, an Irish company which he co-founded and which has taken as its mission the participation in anything that might further discussion and lessen tension and violence. Field Day produces plays, publishes pamphlets, and has compiled a comprehensive anthology of Irish writing designed to “show how the various groups, sects and races which have intermingled in Ireland have produced a literature which is unique to them and an achievement which makes manifest what they have in common.” In his effort to create drama which will further social dialogue, Friel frequently uses innovative dramatic techniques, but his restless experimentation is less obvious in Volunteers than elsewhere.

The thematic concern with the past, the mixture of mythmaking and verbal play with a straight realistic plot line, and the concern with the interplay of public and personal events mark Friel as working in the mainstream of contemporary Irish drama, along with playwrights such as Frank McGuinness and Stewart Parker, with whom he has worked closely on several projects.

Sources for Further Study

Andrews, Elmer. The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality nor Dreams. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.

Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1985.

Delaney, Paul, ed. Brian Friel in Conversation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

Kearney, Richard. “Friel and the Politics of Language Play.” Massachusetts Review 28 (Autumn, 1987): 510-515.

Kerwin, William, ed. Brian Friel: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997.

Maxwell, D. E. S. “The Honour of Naming: Samuel Beckett and Brian Friel.” In A Critical History of Modern Irish Drama, 1891-1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Peacock, Alan J. The Achievement of Brian Friel. Hyattsville, Md.: University Press, 1997.