Field Day

Field Day, a theatrical company founded in Derry in 1980 by the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Rea with the intention of establishing the city as a theatrical centre; and an associated literary movement which set out to redefine Irish cultural identity in the last quarter of the 20th cent. They were soon joined on the board of Field Day by Seamus Deane, David Hammond (the film-maker), Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin. Field Day offered to writers and readers a ‘fifth province of the mind’ in which potential identities for Ireland could be explored outside the constraints of existing traditions. It first produced Friel's Translations in 1980 in Derry. In 1982 Friel's The Communication Cord farcically re-interrogated many of the issues of Translations. In 1986 Tom Kilroy's Double Cross dealt with Irish identity as refracted through the characters of Brendan Bracken (the Irish-born secretary to Winston Churchill) and William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ (the pro-German wartime broadcaster). Kilroy soon afterwards became a director of Field Day. Friel's Making History (1988) explored how historians can be prisoners of their own narratives. In 1990 Seamus Heaney provided a version of Sophocles' Philoctetes as The Cure at Troy. Tom Kilroy's The Madam MacAdam Travelling Show (1992) was a comic study of the nature of playing. A Field Day pamphlet series was inaugurated in 1983. Tom Paulin's A New Look at the Language Question proposed the recognition of Hiberno-English as an authentic language system. Heaney's Open Letter was a verse protest against his recent inclusion in a collection of ‘British’ poetry; and Deane's Civilians and Barbarians explored the destructive simplifications implicit in those terms. Thereafter, pamphlets continued to be published in groups of three. The largest of its critical undertakings was the publication of the three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), edited by Deane, presenting Irish writing in Irish, Latin, and English from earliest times. Field Day publications continued into the new century in collaboration with Cork University Press.

A day set aside for the thorough cleaning of barracks or offices.