Brian Friel frames the play through monologues by one character, Michael, who reveals his childhood memories from 1930s small-town Ireland. Music and dancing provide the organizing principle for many of the other characters’s actions. While many of the characters do actually dance together, they also speak about local festivals—which are collective events—at which dancing is a prominent feature. Music and memory are symbolized together by the radio or “wireless”; individual radios in people’s homes were becoming more common at that time, so the idea that everyone could access the same music simultaneously also contributes to collective memory.
Because the whole play is filtered through Michael, however, individual memory is primary; the play is his story. He emphasizes that each “memory” he access is not pegged to a specific “fact.” Rather, he advocates for an “atmosphere” that combines reality with illusion. Looking back at 1936, he says,
what fascinates me about that memory is that it owes nothing to fact. In that memory atmosphere is more real than incident and everything is simultaneously actual and illusory.
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