Memory and Identity: Brian Friel’s Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Résumé

Among the fundamental preoccupations that inform the plays of Brian Friel, memory and identity occupy a central position, recurring through the Irish playwright’s entire theatrical canon. Both of them tend to elude capture and comprehension, for the plays delve especially on the role
that forged or imprecise memories play in creating no less volatile perceptions of the self, hence any attempt to pin down identity, be that of the individual or the community, is similarly doomed to fail. The paper starts from these premises in order to highlight their interplay in one of Friel’s
early plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), which is chosen as a case study for the purpose of our subsequent analysis.