One crude division that can be applied to Friel’s work is between the plays which are predominantly private monologues and those which are public ensemble pieces. With its rural house-party setting and air of shabby-gentility, echoing Chekhov whom Friel has translated in the past and who is quoted from here early on, Give Me Your Answer, Do! falls into the latter category. Tom Connolly (Tom Hickey) is a serious but materially unsuccessful novelist, counterpointed with his friend and fellow-novelist Garret Fitzmaurice (Des McAleer), whose work is popular but bland. They are criticised and judged, supported and loved, by their respective wives, Daisy (Catherine Byrne) and Grainne (Frances Tomelty). Jack and Maggie (David Kelly and Aideen O’Kelly), Daisy’s parents, are another couple fraught with foibles. The cast is completed by David Knight (Darragh Kelly), a literary agent deciding whether his Texas university will buy Tom’s manuscripts for its Irish archive (he has already secured a handsome sum for Garret’s papers), and Bridget (Pauline Hutton), the Connellys’ silent and mentally disturbed daughter, whom Tom regales loquaciously, at the beginning and the end, with fantastic stories. Tom is waiting for an answer from these last two, just as he is waiting for an answer from Daisy, and ultimately from himself.
Criticisms of an otherwise brave play are that the choice between taking the money and selling out or refusing it and keeping one’s integrity is a little black and white: why not accept the offer but not let it impinge on one’s notion of self-worth? It is hinted that Tom may have sexually abused Bridget and that this is responsible for her nervous collapse (otherwise why does Tom call two unpublished novels he wrote immediately after she got sick ‘pornographic’?), but this angle is never developed. There are also a few too many heavily sign-posted speeches, particularly from Daisy, where subtle implication would have been preferable. These segments are undramatic, and while they may make great text, they are poor theatre. Perhaps this would have been ameliorated if Friel had left the direction of his script to someone else.
But these comments should not cloud what is an impressive work. The radical scepticism Friel has brought to bear on language (Translations, The Communication Cord), memory (Faith Healer) and history (Making History), is here employed on art. This is writing questioning itself. ‘Audiences impose limits on us,’ says Grainne to Garret at one point, referring to how they behave towards each other in public, but maybe in his play’s title Friel is addressing we who are watching his work, or even himself, just as his central character is. Wittgenstein’s famous formulation, ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’, is another quotation invoked here, and towards the end Daisy says: ‘Uncertainty is necessary...Because there can be no verdicts, no answers. Indeed there must be no verdicts. Because being alive is the postponement of verdicts, isn’t it?’ Hopefully the evening made the audience question their own lives. But rather than the title of a traditional Irish song, it was the title of a reggae number by Johnny Nash which I was left with running through my mind: ‘There Are More Questions Than Answers’.

First published in The Big Issues