The Yalta Game by Brian FrielReview by: Richard PineIrish University Review, Vol. 32, No. 1, Special Issue: Thomas Kilroy (Spring - Summer, 2002),pp. 191-195Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25517199 .

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Richard Pine

Review Article

Brian Friel, The Yalta Game (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 2001), 36pp., IR?5.95

Brian Friel has for long -

perhaps for ever - been preoccupied by the

notion of transfiguration, of transforming or re-inventing oneself,

ostensibly through language but fundamentally through the magic of art. Since 1978, with the Chekhovian Aristocrats, and 1981 with his

version of Three Sisters, he has also demonstrated an affinity with the

work of Russian writers - more recently, versions of Turgenev's novel

Fathers and Sons (1987) and his play A Month in the Country (1992) and

Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1998). In The Yalta Game, a version of

Chekhov's short story 'Lady with Lapdog', staged by Karel Reisz at the

Gate Theatre during the eircom Dublin International Theatre Festival

in October 2001, this preoccupation and this affinity are brought

together in one of his most transparent and theatrical pieces of writing to date.

Friel is not the only Irish playwright to address the Russians - Tom

Kilroy's Seagull remains memorable - while others, including Kilroy and Frank McGuinness, have been drawn to the Scandinavians. In the

'other' matter - that of transformation - Tom Murphy, who was

simultaneously celebrated in the same Festival by productions of five

of his plays at the Abbey and Peacock, has demonstrated the

extraordinary lengths to which playwright, actors and audiences can

be pushed in order to experience transcendence, in plays such as The

Gigli Concert and Bailegangaire. As I have said in The Diviner: the Art of Brian Friel,1 there is a natural

affinity between the Irish and the Russians, or at least between the Irish

writer and the Russian writer. Friel himself has testified to a particular fascination with the Russian writers of the nineteenth century: T don't

feel at all distant from that world';2 'Over the years I have circled

around Gorky and Gogol and Ostrovsky but for some reason haven't

attempted them'.3

1. Richard Pine, The Diviner: the Art of Brian Friel (Dublin: UCD Press, 1999) Chapter 8, 'Magic7, passim.

2. Irish Times, 1 August 1992.

3. Brian Friel, 'Seven Notes for a Festival Programme' in Christopher Murray (ed.), Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews 1964-1999 (London: Faber and Faber 1999) p. 179.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

The classic Russian dramatic situation is one of inactive longing for

some kind of liveable life, while acknowledging the constant hunger, the lack of meaning, the fragmented experience of everyday existence.

Friel has given this situation a significant twist by using his

appreciation of the work of George Steiner and Martin Heidegger, both

of whom explicitly influenced Friel's Translations (1980) and,

subliminally, all his work which has been concerned with the transfer

of meaning 'between privacies' and the way that we are 'lived by

language'. That twist is especially evident in The Yalta Game.

The basic narrative of 'Lady with Lapdog' is simple: a holiday seduction of a young innocent woman (Anna Sergeyevna) by an older

roue, followed by hopeless, doomed infatuation. The play's title is

derived from the seducer's patter - the invention of spurious and

outrageous reflections on passers-by in order to attract his victim, who

then falls prey to the 'game' of make-believe itself so that the seduction, when it happens, doesn't 'happen' in reality, and each can go home to

'reality' undefiled. Friel has suppressed much of the detail of the story, and added greatly to the character of the seducer, Dmitry Dmitrich

Gurov. The 'theme', which is the home truth of the play, is that there is

no home, no truth to go back to, and that the various types of delusion

through which we live our melancholy lives are all we have to go on.

Unlike the trivia of most lives in Friel's other Russian adaptations, in

The Yalta Game the 'trivia' of Gurov and Anna are the passions in which

they are imprisoned. Nowhere previously has Friel provided such a telling illustration of

the idea that we live lives based on selected fictions. In a sense, Gurov

and Anna have no existence, since both deny the domestic contexts from

which they have come to Yalta, and to which they return merely to

endure long-distance-loving of a largely disembodied kind. The

togetherness for which they yearn is, of course, impossible of realization.

The play is utterly transparent: each is the mirror in which they learn

themselves and at the same time the looking-glass through which they pass to find the other. As they pass through each other and back again, each encounter allows them to invent, and simultaneously to be re

invented by, the other. Each gesture or speech or occasion of meeting moves our perception of them, and their perception of themselves,

towards a moment that will never arrive. It exemplifies Steiner's

assertion that 'every act of communication between human beings takes on the shape of an act of translation [...] All dialogue is a

proffering of mutual cognizance and a strategic redefinition of self'.4

4. George Steiner, Extraterritorial: Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), pp. 26-7, 72.

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REVIEW ARTICLE

The Yalta Game is a completely liminal play because the lovers are

forever at each other's thresholds (both physically and metaphysically) yet never consummate their need to be in and with one another. Yet in

this classically ritualistic situation the ritual is denied, so much so that

the arrested moment is the play. In his preface to The London Vertigo (1990), Friel wrote that 'the desire

to metamorphose oneself [...] secretly excites most people at some

stage of their lives [...] And of course the desire is a delusion'/ In The

Yalta Game he has provided us with several instances of

metamorphosis, not least the transformation of a tragic short story into a powerful and dangerous one-act play More seriously, he has made a

dialectical reversal of this notion of wished metamorphosis: Gurov and

Anna are caught up by their passions so that the roue unwittingly becomes a lover and the virtuous young wife becomes a 'fallen

woman'. And although their desire for each other may rest on a series

of delusions or fabrications through which first the seduction and then

the infatuation can happen, that desire is not a delusion itself but the

sole reality on which their future depends. The core of the play

- the point at which the lovers actually start to

live an imaginary domestic life - only slightly modifies Chekhov's

original: the idea that 'the real life' is irrelevant and the 'imagined life'

is the reality is almost a commonplace among frustrated lovers, but

both writers endow the sentiment with a metaphysical edge which cuts

into the reader's/audience's own emotional and intellectual

hinterland.

Chekhov (in David Margashack's translation):

By a strange concatenation of circumstances, possibly quite by

accident, everything that was important, interesting, essential,

everything about which he was sincere and did not deceive

himself, everything that made up the quintessence of his life, went

on in secret, while everything that was a lie, everything that was

merely the husk in which he hid himself to conceal the truth, like his work at the bank, for instance, his discussions at the club[...]

-

all that happened in the sight of all."

Friel:

Remember my sly game [i.e. the 'Yalta game']? Well, it... inverted

itself. Or else my world did a somersault. Or else all reality turned

itself on its head. Because suddenly, for no reason that I was aware

of, things that once seemed real now became imagined things. And

what was imagined, what I could imagine, what I could recall, that

5. Brian Friel, The London Vertigo (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1990), p. 9.

6. Anton Chekhov, Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories trans David Margashack (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964) p. 279,

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

was actual, the only actuality. The bank, colleagues, home, card

games, they all subsided into make-believe -

they were fictions,

weren't they? And the only reality was the reality in my mind.

(pp.29-30)

For students of Friel, this is of course familiar territory. The insistence on the reality of an imagined event began in Friel's own childhood with a fishing expedition with his father which did not happen, could not

have happened, but which was none the less real for all that, and was

written into Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). Here, however, with his

dramatic advantage over the writer of the short story, Friel can appeal

rhetorically to his audience: 'They were fictions, weren't they?' But the

tragedy consists in the fact that where, previously, Friel has used this

insistence on the writer's right to invert the relation between fiction

and reality here the lovers are caught up in a fiction of their own

imagining which crystallizes and confirms the Russian experience: that

life is a postponement, an absence.

In saying that this is one of Friel's most theatrical works, I have in

mind Peter Brook's set of simultaneous equations:

In everyday life 'if7 is a fiction, in the theatre 'if is an

experiment. In everyday life 'if' is an evasion, in the theatre 'if' is the truth.

When we are persuaded to believe in the truth, then the theatre

and life are one.7

By persuading us of both the 'truth' and the 'fiction' of these two

characters, Friel does achieve that fusion of theatre and life.

As will be evident from the passage quoted from The Yalta Game, one

of the particularly eloquent elements in Friel's drama is the fact that

although his characters are often inarticulate, stumbling through their

emotions, they express their difficulty in perfectly crafted, cadenced

sentences. Rarely do we encounter the stuttering, choking, slipsliding which we associate more readily with the work of Tom Murphy, Conor

McPherson and Martin McDonagh or the gestural drama of Tom

Maclntyre. As Friel said a couple of years ago:

In the theatre that has engaged me words are at the very core of it

all. The same words that are available to the novelist, to the poet; and used with the same

precision and with the same scrupulous attention not only to the exact kernel meaning but to all those

elusive meanings that every word hoards[...] Even though the

audience hears what it calls speeches, it hears too the author's

private voice, that intimate language, that personal utterance. And

7. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 157.

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REVIEW ARTICLE

that composite, that duet - the private and intimate set free into

public canticle where both voices are distinctly audible - that is what makes the experience of theatre unique.8

In The Yalta Game he has uricannily achieved this, but in so doing he

has created a quadraphonic sound in which we hear not only the

author's public and private voices but also the public and private voices of Anna and Dmitry (distinguished in the text by light and bold

type), amplified and made tantalisingly complex by their author.

It is as if Friel needs such a crafted speech in order to have his

characters ready for translation into a different order of experience. As

a strategy, it shadows Steiner's statement that 'language is the main

instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is',9 but it also

carries the field of drama into intensely philosophical debate about the uses of language. In The Diviner I said that the 'Russian' plays

supremely display the varieties of love, one of which, in Uncle Vanya, is

the syntactical frankness of 'almost love'.10 In The Yalta Game Friel has

made a cruel playing field of 'almost love', and has inverted the most

powerful statement of freedom which Uncle Vanya communicated:

'Anyone who betrays a wife or a husband is equally capable of

betraying his country as well'.11 While such a sentiment might seem out

of place in The Yalta Game, deep down its implications are at work: we

should recall the section of Fathers and Sons (deleted from the published and staged version) which mentioned Leonard McNally, playwright,

song-writer and double agent who betrayed his comrades in the

United Irishmen, for whom Friel provided this apologia:

Perhaps [...] creativity and betrayal are of a piece. Pehaps [...]

loyalty and betrayal are of a

piece... freedom, real freedom cannot

co-exist with loyalty or with love.12

The transparency of that intuition is behind the bleakness of The Yalta

Game which, however, is redeemed by the 'scrupulous attention' to

language with which Friel always blesses his creations.

8. 'Seven Notes', op. cit. pp. 173-4.

9. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1975), pp. 217-8.

10. Brian Friel, Uncle Vanya (Loughcrew: Gallery Press, 1998), p. 29.

11. ibid. p. 16.

12. Quoted in Richard Pine, The Diviner, op. cit. p. 326.

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