Blind since infancy, Molly Sweeney is persuaded by her impulsive husband Frank to seek medical treatment to restore her sight. But at what cost? A lyrical and compassionate play, suffused with the rich tradition of Irish story-telling, by the author of Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa.

Taken from Questors' Monthly Newsletter: Brian Friel's delicate, humorous and profoundly moving play about our ability (or inability) to see the world from our own and others' perspective.

Most of us who look at a blind person probably assume they are disadvantaged by not having sight. We don't ever think that a non-seeing person can have as rich an appreciation of the world, as full a life, as those born with functioning eyes. Over the last two hundred years there have been fewer than thirty operations to restore sight to the long-term blind, with varying degrees of "success". For those who can see again, or see for the first time, our recognisable world proves a frightening collage of baffling, hectic images. Sight has been restored, but learning to see is a more profound proposition and many of those operated on retreat to the world of darkness they recognize and understand.

Molly Sweeney is Brian Friel's dramatization of such a case, set in the imaginary Irish town of Ballybeg. It is essentially one story as perceived by the three central figures in Molly Sweeney's life. It is a play as much about emotional blindness as that of clinical blindness. Frank and Mr. Rice are as much blind to their own failings and lack of insight as they are to Molly's blind resourcefulness.

As usual in Friel's work, memory plays an important part in this play. Molly's operation happened in the past, and the characters have to delve back as much into their own pasts (and encounter the ghosts that live there) as recreate the meanings and feelings behind the important events leading up to Molly seeing again. Seamus Heaney, in an essay on Friel's use of memory, explains that memory need not necessarily be an escape mechanism; rather, it can be liberating, in the sense that it can help us understand past events and release us, cathartically, from the "confusion which comes from seeing a drama complete itself in accordance with its own inner necessities rather than in accordance with the spectator's wishes". Or, as T.S.Eliot wrote:

See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which,
as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

More on Molly Sweeney:

Questors' Monthly Newsletter:
Perspicacity
City Paper.Net
Now2Do

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