Music, Songs, and Dances in Friel’s Plays: A Cultural Perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1210.16Keywords:
Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa, Irish Dances and songs, The Faith Healer, music and art, Northern Irish TheatreAbstract
The study aims to highlight Brian Friel's employment of non-verbal communication methods to present the major themes in his plays. Friel applied music, song, and dances as nonverbal language. Unlike other dramatists who applied these elements as a way for entertainment, or as marginal theatrical aids. However, this study attempted to reveal how these nonverbal elements played a very important function in expressing the inexpressible. They function at moments when language breaks, and are unable to express the characters’ motives, inner feelings, or even repressed wishes and desires. The plays that are selected for this study are Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), and The Faith Healer (1979). The study will use cultural materialism as a critical approach that helps in shedding light on the historic events that shaped Friel's vision. The study concluded that music, song, and dance were employed as a language that revealed repressed desires, and hidden secrets.
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