Brian Friel
Encyclopedia
Brian Friel is an Irish
dramatist, author
and director of the Field Day Theatre Company
. He is considered to be the greatest living English-language dramatist, hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov
" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland". Friel is best known for plays such as Philadelphia Here I Come!
and Dancing at Lughnasa
but has written more than thirty plays in a six-decade spanning career that has seen him elected Saoi
of Aosdána
. His plays have been a regular feature on Broadway
throughout this time.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! was turned into a film in 1975, starring Donal McCann
, directed by John Quested, screenplay by Brian Friel. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company
and his play Translations
was the company's first production. Neil Jordan
completed a screenplay for a film version of Translations that was never produced. With Field Day Friel has collaborated with Seamus Heaney
, 1995 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature
. Heaney and Friel have been friends from a young age.
Dancing at Lughnasa
brought Friel great acclaim internationally, winning him several Tony Award
s, including Best Play, the Laurence Olivier award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play. It was also turned into a film in 1998, starring Meryl Streep
, directed by Pat O'Connor
, script by County Donegal
playwright Frank McGuinness
. His play Lovers
was adapted into an opera by Richard Wargo entitled Ballymore (1999), which was premiered by the Skylight Opera Theatre, Milwaukee, in February 1999.
Friel is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the British Royal Society of Literature
and the Irish Academy of Letters. The Brian Friel Theatre
, a studio theatre
in Belfast
, is named after him. He was appointed to Seanad Éireann
in 1987 and served until 1989. Richard Pine has written and edited his definitive history.
, County Tyrone
, the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel. His father was a primary school teacher and later a councillor (or "corporater") on Londonderry Corporation (as it was, up until 1970, officially called), the local city council in Derry
. Friel's mother, Mary McLoone, was postmistress of Glenties
, County Donegal
. He attended St Columb's College in Derry, alongside Seamus Heaney
, John Hume
, Seamus Deane
, Phil Coulter
, Eamonn McCann
and Paul Brady
. Friel received his B. A.
from St. Pat's College, Maynooth (1945–48), and qualified as a teacher at St. Joseph's Training College in Belfast
, 1949-50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has four daughters and one son; they remain married. Between 1950 and 1960, he worked as a Maths teacher in the Derry primary and intermediate school system, taking leave in 1960 to pursue a career as writer, living off his savings. In 1966, the Friels moved from 13 Malborough Street, Derry to Muff, County Donegal, eventually settling outside Greencastle
, County Donegal.
He was appointed to Seanad Éireann
at the behest of the Taoiseach
in 1987 and served until 1989. In 1989, BBC Radio
launched a "Brian Friel Season," a series devoted a six-play season to his work, He was the first living playwright to receive such an honour. In 1999 (April–August), Friel's 70th birthday was celebrated in Dublin with the Friel Festival, during which ten of his plays were staged or presented as dramatic readings throughout Dublin. A conference, National Library exhibition, film screenings, pre-show talks, and the launching of a special issue of The Irish University Review devoted to the playwright ran in conjunction with the festival. In 1999, he also received a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Times.
On 22 February 2006 Friel was presented with a gold Torc
by President Mary McAleese
in recognition of his election as a Saoi
by the members of Aosdána
. Only seven members of Aosdána can hold this honour at any one time, and Friel joined fellow Saoithe Louis le Brocquy
, Patrick Scott
, Camille Souter
, Seamus Heaney
, Seóirse Bodley
, and Anthony Cronin
. On acceptance of the gold Torc, Friel quipped, "I knew that being made a Saoi, really getting this award, is extreme unction; it is a final anointment--Aosdana's last rites."
In August 2006, on the occasion of the 75th birthday of Friel's wife, Seamus Heaney had his stroke in County Donegal.
In November 2008, The Queen's University of Belfast
announced its intention to build a new theatre complex and research centre, to be named The Brian Friel Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research
.
His 80th birthday was commemorated in 2009. The Gate Theatre staged three plays (Faith Healer, The Yalta Game, and Afterplay) during several weeks in September. In the midst of the Gate's productions, the Abbey Theatre presented "A Birthday Celebration for Brian Friel," on 13 September 2009 - an evening of staged readings (excerpts from Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa), the performance of Friel-specific songs and nocturnes, and readings by Thomas Kilroy and Seamus Heaney. Although somewhat of a recluse, Friel attended the performance amid regular seating, received a cake while the audience sang "Happy Birthday," and mingled with well wishers afterwards. Also in 2009, the journal Irish Theatre International published a Special Issue to commemorate the occasion with seven articles devoted to the playwright.
in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966).
His first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and To This Hard House (24 April 1958). These were followed by A Doubtful Paradise, his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. While the play was politely received, such review titles as "Difficulties for cast in Group play" in the Belfast Telegraph and "New Ulster play at Group just avoids bathos" in The News Letter convey the play's reception.
While struggling as a working writer, Friel wrote 59 articles for The Irish Press
, a Dublin-based newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this diverse series included short stories, political editorials on life in Northern Ireland and Donegal, his travels to Dublin and New York City, and his childhood memories of Derry, Omagh, Belfast, and Donegal.
He struggled with little initial success to gain recognition as a playwright from 1958 through 1964; at one point the Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects" (1962). Friel later admitted in a 1965 interview that he feared that his play A Doubtful Paradise (1960) contributed to the collapse of the Belfast-based Ulster Group Theatre. While only on the Abbey stage for 9 performances, The Enemy Within (1962) enjoyed some success; it was revived by Belfast's Lyric Theatre in September 1963 and was aired on both the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann in 1963. Although The Blind Mice (1963) was later withdrawn by the author, it was by far his most successful play of this very early period, playing for 6 weeks at Dublin's Eblana Theatre, revived by the Lyric, and broadcast by radio Éireann and the BBC Home Service almost ten times by 1967.
Shortly after his return from a short stint as "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie's theater in Minneapolis, during May and June 1963, Friel wrote Philadelphia Here I Come!
(1964), the play that immediately made him famous in Dublin, London, and New York. This play retains its status as a turning point in Irish drama (away from the genre of peasant plays) and one of the most important plays of the 1960s. The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), and Lovers
(1967) were both successful in Ireland, with Lovers also popular in America.
The Freedom of the City
(1973) is an explicitly political work about the Troubles
in Northern Ireland, while The Mundy Scheme (1969) and Volunteers (1975) are pointed, and in the first case bitter, satires of the Irish government. On 30 January 1972, Friel marched with the crowds in a Civil Rights Association protest against internment, in defiance of a government ban. In circumstances that remain under intense debate, the soldiers of the British 1st Battalion Parachute Brigade
opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen and injuring thirteen others in what was to become known as "Bloody Sunday.
" Although in a 1973 interview with Eavan Boland Friel pointed out that he had been working on the play for about ten months prior to the event, he later added in a 1982 interview with Fintan O'Toole that Bloody Sunday transformed and sharpened the earlier play that became Freedom of the City. Along with such plays as John Boyd's The Flats (1971), Stewart Love's Me Oul Segocia (1979), and Martin Lynch's The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (1982), Friel's play has become one of the essential plays about the Troubles that remain popular in Ireland.
Volunteers (1975) stages an archeological excavation on the day before the site is turned over to a hotel developer, and uses Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. In this play, the Volunteers are IRA prisoners who have been indefinitely interned by the Dublin government, and the term Volunteer is both ironic, in that as prisoners they have no free will, and political, in that the IRA used the term to refer to its members. Using the site as a physical metaphor for the nation's history, the play's action examines how Irish history has been commodified, sanitized, and oversimplified to fit the political needs of society.
By the mid 1970s, Friel had moved away from overtly political plays to examine family dynamics in a manner that has attracted many comparisons to the work of Chekhov. Living Quarters
(1977), a play that examines the suicide of a domineering father, is a retelling of the Theseus/Hippolytus myth in a contemporary Irish setting. This play, with its focus on several sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother, serves as a type of preparation for Friel's more successful Aristocrats (1979), a Chekhovian study of a once-influential family's financial collapse and, perhaps, social liberation from the aristocratic myths that have constrained the children.
Many plays of this period incorporate assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in Philadelphia, Here I Come!; portraying dead characters in "Winners" of Lovers, Freedom, and Living Quarters; a Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in Freedom of the City; and metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in Living Quarters. These experiments came to fruition in Faith Healer
(1979), a series of four conflicting monologues delivered by dead and living characters who struggle to understand the life and death of Frank Hardy, the play's itinerant healer who can neither understand nor command his unreliable powers, and the lives sacrificed to his destructive charismatic life. Later in Friel's career, such experimental aspects became buried beneath the surface of more seemingly realist plays like Translations
(1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa
(1990); however, avant-garde techniques remain a fundamental aspect of Friel's work into his late career.
was premiered in 1980 at Guildhall, Derry
by the Field Day Theatre Company, with Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, and Ray MacAnally. Set in 1833, it is a play about language, the meeting of British and Irish cultures, the looming potato famine, the coming of a free national school system that will eliminate the traditional hedge schools, the English expedition to convert all Irish place names into English, and the crossed love between an Irish woman who speaks no English and an English soldier who speaks no Irish. Yet it was an instant success because of the play's deft ability to reference the Troubles and English-Irish relations without condemning or idealizing any side. The innovative conceit of the play is to stage two language communities (the Gaelic and the English), which have few and very limited ways to speak to each other, for the English know no Irish, while only a few of the Irish know English. Translations has gone on to be one of the most translated and staged of all post-World War II plays, having been performed in Estonia, Iceland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, along with most of the world's English-speaking countries (including South Africa, Canada, the U.S. and Australia).
Despite his growing fame and success, the 1980s are often referred to as Friel's artistic "Gap" because he published so few original works for the stage: Translations in 1980, The Communication Cord in 1982, and Making History
in 1988. Privately, Friel complained both of the work required managing Field Day (granting written and live interviews, casting, arranging tours, etc.) and of his fear that he was "trying to impose a 'Field Day' political atmosphere" on his work. However, this is also a period during which he worked on several minor projects that fill out the decade: translations of Chekhov's Three Sisters
(1981) and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
(1987), an edition of Charles McGlinchey's memoirs entitled The Last of the Name for Blackstaff Press (1986), and Charles Macklin's play The London Vertigo in 1990. Friel's decision to premiere Dancing at Lughnasa
at the Abbey Theatre rather than as a Field Day production initiated his evolution away from involvement with Field Day, and he formally resigned as a director in 1994.
During the 1990s Friel was seen to return to a position of dominance of Irish theatre with the premiers of Dancing at Lughnasa
(1990), a version of Turgenev
's A Month in the Country
for the Abbey Theatre (1992; revived by the RSC 1998), Molly Sweeney
(1994), and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), along with the less critically successful Wonderful Tennessee (1993). Friel's reputation as a playwright who creates compelling plays for women rests largely on the works of this period. With 2 plays before 1975 with all-male casts (The Enemy Within and Volunteers [1975]), and an overall male to female ratio of 4 male to every female character in his plays from 1963 to 1975, Friel was first considered a writer of the Irish male experience. However, he begins writing sororal plays--plays with numerous strong female parts—as early plays as Living Quarters (1977) and Aristocrats (1979), a development that culminates in the plays of the 1990s.
Dancing at Lughnasa
(1990) is probably his most successful play; it premiered at the Abbey Theatre
, transferred to London's West End
, and went on to Broadway
, where it won three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play. This play is loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in the Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal, and it is rumored to have caused some tension within his own family as many felt that he was staging too much of his family's history. Set in 1936, during the summer before de Valera's new constitution was approved by referendum, the play depicts the late summer days when love briefly seems possible for three of the Mundy sisters (Chris, Rose, and Kate) and the family welcomes home the frail elder brother, who has returned from a life as missionary in Africa. However, as the summer ends, the family foresees the sadness and economic privations under which the family will suffer as all hopes fade. Dancing at Lughnasa was turned into a film starring Meryl Streep
.
Friel had been thinking about writing a "Lough Derg" play for several years, and his Wonderful Tennessee (1993) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate one of their member's birthday with culinary delicacies and alcohol. As they await their ferryman who never comes, the couples are forced to spend a night on an abandoned pier, singing (both inspirational songs and show tunes), recounting local history, expounding on religious myth, and reminiscing on their lives, friendships, secrets, and mishaps. As the night fades into morning, they are seized with the passionate determination to sacrifice one of their group—unintentionally re-enacting a local murder in the 1930s that was inspired by religious ecstasies. Their friend survives, though all pledge to return next year to re-enact their ritual.
Molly Sweeney
(1993) enjoyed considerable success on the stage, but it attracted little critical interest, perhaps because of its superficial similarities to Faith Healer
(1979), another play composed of a series of monologues delivered on an empty stage by characters who have no interaction. This play is about a blind woman in Ballybeg who constructed for herself an independent life rich in friendships and sensual fulfillment, and her ill-fated encounter with two men who destroy it and cause her madness: Frank, the man she marries who becomes convinced that she can only be complete when her vision is restored, and Dr. Rice, a once-renowned eye surgeon who uses Molly to restore his career. In a note in the programme of the 1996 Broadway production, Friel says that the story was inspired in part by Oliver Sacks
's To See and Not See.
Give Me Your Answer Do! recounts the lives and careers of two novelists and friends who pursued different paths, one writing shallow, popular works and the other writing works that refuse to conform to popular tastes. After an American university pays a small fortune for the popular writer's papers, their careers are cast into stark contrast when the same collector comes to review the manuscripts of the impoverished artist. They all gather for a dinner party as the collector prepares to announce whether he will recommend the papers to his university, but at the last moment the existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based on the writer's daughter forces everyone to reassess his career.
and Sonya Serebriakova of his Uncle Vanya
; "Afterplay" has been revived several times since its premier and was part of the Friel/Gate Festival in September 2009. However, the most innovative work of this period is Performances (2003), a meditation on an artist's fears of aging and the intersection of life and art in a long one-act play (70 minutes in performance), combining drama with a staged performance of Leoš Janáček's Intimate Letters for string quartet. In this play Anezka Ungrova is a graduate researching the impact of Janáček's platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work. She playfully and passionately argues with the composer who appears to host her at his artistic retreat, more than 70 years after his death, about his life and her life, while players of the Alba String Quartet
interrupt their dialogue, warm up, chat, and finally play the first two movements of his Second String Quartet in a tableau that ends the play. In some transparent ways, Performances suggests Friel's personal concerns, since the composer Janáček is portrayed as Friel's age at the time of the play's composition (74 years), and expresses his anxiety over not being up to the challenges of scaling for a final time "the mountain" of creating a full-scale work.
The final, full-scale work that Friel had in mind while writing Performances was The Home Place
(2005), the last of his plays set in Ballybeg. Although Friel had written plays about the Catholic gentry, this is his first play that directly considers the Protestant experience. In this work, he considers the first hints of the waning of Ascendancy authority during the summer of 1878, the year before Charles Stuart Parnell became president of the Land League and initiated the Land Wars. The play focuses on the aging Christopher Gore, who struggles to maintain his authority over both maturing son David and restive peasants, the latter under the growing influence of local Fenians. Gore's ability to claim legitimacy as one of the region's model landlords is threatened by the arrival of his cousin Richard, who demeans the tenants by subjecting the local peasants to cranial measurements intended to advance his anthropometric research. The resulting crisis places Christopher's son in an unresolved position as one who both usurps and submits to the paternal authority upon which the Gore family authority rests. After a sold-out season at the Gate Theatre
in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End
on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at the Guthrie Theater
(Minneapolis, MN) in September 2007.
), he only speaks briefly at the film's end. Similarly, when Radio Telefís Éireann
presented a series, entitled Reading the Future (1999), of hour-long interviews with Ireland's greatest living authors (including Seamus Heaney
, Michael Longley
, Edna O'Brien
, and William Trevor
), Friel was the sole designee not to participate. The Friel interview featured theater critic Fintan O'Toole
, Irish scholar Declan Kiberd
, and director Patrick Mason
in a discussion of his work. Despite his famed public reticence, Friel is noted for his conversation and wit in private settings.
houses the 160 boxes of The Brian Friel papers (Manuscript Collection List #73 [MSS 37,041-37,806], given as a gift to the state in December 2000), containing notebooks, manuscripts, playbills, correspondence, contracts, unpublished manuscripts, programmes, production photos, articles, uncollected essays, and a vast collection of ephemera relating to Friel's career and creative process from 1959 through 2000. It does not contain his Irish Press articles, which can be found in the Dublin and Belfast newspaper libraries.
His papers were valued at n1.2 million.
" (from the Irish for "Small Town"--Baile Beag)) or in its environs: Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Crystal and Fox, The Gentle Island, Living Quarters
, Faith Healer
, Aristocrats, Translations
, The Communication Cord, Dancing at Lughnasa
, Wonderful Tennessee, Give Me Your Answer Do! and The Home Place
, while the seminal event of Faith Healer
takes place in the town. These plays present an extended history of this imagined community, with Translations and The Home Place set in the nineteenth century, and Dancing at Lughnasa
in the 1930s. With the other plays set in "the present" but written throughout the playwright's career from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, the audience is presented with the evolution of rural Irish society, from the isolated and backward town that Gar flees in the 1964 Philadelphia, Here I Come! to the propserous and multicultural small city of Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), where the characters have health clubs, ethnic restaurants, and regular flights to the world's major cities.
Irish people
The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...
dramatist, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
and director of the Field Day Theatre Company
Field Day Theatre Company
The Field Day Theatre Company began as an artistic collaboration between playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 1980, the duo set out to launch a production of Friel's recently completed play, Translations. They decided to rehearse and premiere the play in Derry with the hope of...
. He is considered to be the greatest living English-language dramatist, hailed by the English-speaking world as an "Irish Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...
" and "the universally accented voice of Ireland". Friel is best known for plays such as Philadelphia Here I Come!
Philadelphia Here I Come!
Philadelphia, Here I Come! is a 1964 play by Irish dramatist Brian Friel. Set in the fictional town of Ballybeg, Co.Donegal, the play launched Friel onto the international stage.-Plot:...
and Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
but has written more than thirty plays in a six-decade spanning career that has seen him elected Saoi
Saoi
Saoi , is the highest honour that members of Aosdána, an association of people in Ireland who have achieved distinction in the arts, can bestow upon a fellow member...
of Aosdána
Aosdána
Aosdána is an Irish association of Artists. It was created in 1981 on the initiative of a group of writers and with support from the Arts Council of Ireland. Membership, which is by invitation from current members, is limited to 250 individuals; before 2005 it was limited to 200...
. His plays have been a regular feature on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
throughout this time.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! was turned into a film in 1975, starring Donal McCann
Donal McCann
Donal McCann was an Irish stage, film, and television actor best known for his roles in the works of Brian Friel and for his lead role in John Huston's last film, The Dead.-Early life:...
, directed by John Quested, screenplay by Brian Friel. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company
Field Day Theatre Company
The Field Day Theatre Company began as an artistic collaboration between playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea. In 1980, the duo set out to launch a production of Friel's recently completed play, Translations. They decided to rehearse and premiere the play in Derry with the hope of...
and his play Translations
Translations
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag , a small village at the heart of 19th century agricultural Ireland...
was the company's first production. Neil Jordan
Neil Jordan
Neil Patrick Jordan is an Irish filmmaker and novelist. He won an Academy Award for The Crying Game.- Early life :...
completed a screenplay for a film version of Translations that was never produced. With Field Day Friel has collaborated with Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, 1995 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Nobel Prize in Literature
Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...
. Heaney and Friel have been friends from a young age.
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
brought Friel great acclaim internationally, winning him several Tony Award
Tony Award
The Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theatre, more commonly known as a Tony Award, recognizes achievement in live Broadway theatre. The awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing and The Broadway League at an annual ceremony in New York City. The awards are given for Broadway...
s, including Best Play, the Laurence Olivier award for Best Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play. It was also turned into a film in 1998, starring Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...
, directed by Pat O'Connor
Pat O'Connor (director)
Pat O'Connor, born in Ardmore, County Waterford, is an Irish film director.In 1982, O'Connor won a Jacob's Award for his direction of the RTÉ TV adaptation of William Trevor's short story, Ballroom of Romance starring Cyril Cusack and Brenda Fricker. It was shot near the village of Ballycroy,...
, script by County Donegal
County Donegal
County Donegal is a county in Ireland. It is part of the Border Region and is also located in the province of Ulster. It is named after the town of Donegal. Donegal County Council is the local authority for the county...
playwright Frank McGuinness
Frank McGuinness
Professor Frank McGuinness is an award-winning Irish playwright and poet. As well as his own works, which include Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, he is recognised for a "strong record of adapting literary classics, having translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen and...
. His play Lovers
Lovers (play)
Lovers is a 1967 play written by Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel.Lovers is a play broken in to two parts, Winners and Losers.-Winners:...
was adapted into an opera by Richard Wargo entitled Ballymore (1999), which was premiered by the Skylight Opera Theatre, Milwaukee, in February 1999.
Friel is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the British Royal Society of Literature
Royal Society of Literature
The Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
and the Irish Academy of Letters. The Brian Friel Theatre
Brian Friel Theatre
The Brian Friel Theatre is a studio theatre located at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was opened in February 2009 and is named after the Irish dramatist, theatre director and author, Brian Friel....
, a studio theatre
Studio Theatre
A studio theatre is a 20th-century term that describes a small theatre space. Studio theatres often have a flexible auditorium whose stage and seating may be re-arranged to suit the specific requirements of a production...
in Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
, is named after him. He was appointed to Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann is the upper house of the Oireachtas , which also comprises the President of Ireland and Dáil Éireann . It is commonly called the Seanad or Senate and its members Senators or Seanadóirí . Unlike Dáil Éireann, it is not directly elected but consists of a mixture of members chosen by...
in 1987 and served until 1989. Richard Pine has written and edited his definitive history.
Biography
Friel was born in OmaghOmagh
Omagh is the county town of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It is situated where the rivers Drumragh and Camowen meet to form the Strule. The town, which is the largest in the county, had a population of 19,910 at the 2001 Census. Omagh also contains the headquarters of Omagh District Council and...
, County Tyrone
County Tyrone
Historically Tyrone stretched as far north as Lough Foyle, and comprised part of modern day County Londonderry east of the River Foyle. The majority of County Londonderry was carved out of Tyrone between 1610-1620 when that land went to the Guilds of London to set up profit making schemes based on...
, the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel. His father was a primary school teacher and later a councillor (or "corporater") on Londonderry Corporation (as it was, up until 1970, officially called), the local city council in Derry
Derry
Derry or Londonderry is the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland and the fourth-biggest city on the island of Ireland. The name Derry is an anglicisation of the Irish name Doire or Doire Cholmcille meaning "oak-wood of Colmcille"...
. Friel's mother, Mary McLoone, was postmistress of Glenties
Glenties
Glenties is a village in the northwest of Ireland in central County Donegal. It is situated where two glens meet, northwest of the Blue Stack Mountains, near the confluence of two rivers. Glenties is the largest centre of population in the parish of Iniskeel...
, County Donegal
County Donegal
County Donegal is a county in Ireland. It is part of the Border Region and is also located in the province of Ulster. It is named after the town of Donegal. Donegal County Council is the local authority for the county...
. He attended St Columb's College in Derry, alongside Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, John Hume
John Hume
John Hume is a former Irish politician from Derry, Northern Ireland. He was a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, and was co-recipient of the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize, with David Trimble....
, Seamus Deane
Seamus Deane
Seamus Deane is an Irish poet, novelist, and critic.Born in Derry, Northern Ireland, Deane was born into a Catholic nationalist family. He attended St. Columb's College in Derry, Queen's University Belfast and Pembroke College, Cambridge University . At St...
, Phil Coulter
Phil Coulter
Phil Coulter is an artist with an international reputation as a successful songwriter, pianist, music producer, arranger and director. His success has spanned four decades and he is one of the biggest record sellers in Ireland...
, Eamonn McCann
Eamonn McCann
Eamonn McCann is an Irish journalist, author and political activist.-Life:McCann was born and has lived most of his life in Derry. He was educated at St. Columb's College in the city. He is prominently featured in the documentary film The Boys of St...
and Paul Brady
Paul Brady
Paul Joseph Brady is an Irish singer-songwriter, whose work straddles folk and pop. He was interested in a wide variety of music from an early age...
. Friel received his B. A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
from St. Pat's College, Maynooth (1945–48), and qualified as a teacher at St. Joseph's Training College in Belfast
Belfast
Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
, 1949-50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has four daughters and one son; they remain married. Between 1950 and 1960, he worked as a Maths teacher in the Derry primary and intermediate school system, taking leave in 1960 to pursue a career as writer, living off his savings. In 1966, the Friels moved from 13 Malborough Street, Derry to Muff, County Donegal, eventually settling outside Greencastle
Greencastle, County Donegal
Greencastle, County Donegal , is a commercial fishing port located in the north of the scenic Inishowen Peninsula on the north coast of County Donegal, part of the Province of Ulster, in the northwest of Ireland. Nowadays, given the decline in the fishing industry, it resembles more closely a...
, County Donegal.
He was appointed to Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann
Seanad Éireann is the upper house of the Oireachtas , which also comprises the President of Ireland and Dáil Éireann . It is commonly called the Seanad or Senate and its members Senators or Seanadóirí . Unlike Dáil Éireann, it is not directly elected but consists of a mixture of members chosen by...
at the behest of the Taoiseach
Taoiseach
The Taoiseach is the head of government or prime minister of Ireland. The Taoiseach is appointed by the President upon the nomination of Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas , and must, in order to remain in office, retain the support of a majority in the Dáil.The current Taoiseach is...
in 1987 and served until 1989. In 1989, BBC Radio
BBC Radio
BBC Radio is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation which has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927. For a history of BBC radio prior to 1927 see British Broadcasting Company...
launched a "Brian Friel Season," a series devoted a six-play season to his work, He was the first living playwright to receive such an honour. In 1999 (April–August), Friel's 70th birthday was celebrated in Dublin with the Friel Festival, during which ten of his plays were staged or presented as dramatic readings throughout Dublin. A conference, National Library exhibition, film screenings, pre-show talks, and the launching of a special issue of The Irish University Review devoted to the playwright ran in conjunction with the festival. In 1999, he also received a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Times.
On 22 February 2006 Friel was presented with a gold Torc
Torc
A torc, also spelled torq or torque, is a large, usually rigid, neck ring typically made from strands of metal twisted together. The great majority are open-ended at the front, although many seem designed for near-permanent wear and would have been difficult to remove. Smaller torcs worn around...
by President Mary McAleese
Mary McAleese
Mary Patricia McAleese served as the eighth President of Ireland from 1997 to 2011. She was the second female president and was first elected in 1997 succeeding Mary Robinson, making McAleese the world's first woman to succeed another as president. She was re-elected unopposed for a second term in...
in recognition of his election as a Saoi
Saoi
Saoi , is the highest honour that members of Aosdána, an association of people in Ireland who have achieved distinction in the arts, can bestow upon a fellow member...
by the members of Aosdána
Aosdána
Aosdána is an Irish association of Artists. It was created in 1981 on the initiative of a group of writers and with support from the Arts Council of Ireland. Membership, which is by invitation from current members, is limited to 250 individuals; before 2005 it was limited to 200...
. Only seven members of Aosdána can hold this honour at any one time, and Friel joined fellow Saoithe Louis le Brocquy
Louis le Brocquy
Louis le Brocquy is an Irish painter born in Dublin. His work has received many accolades in a career that spans seventy years of creative practice...
, Patrick Scott
Patrick Scott
Patrick Scott is an Irish artist.Patrick Scott had his first exhibition in 1944, but trained as an architect and did not become a full time artist until 1960. He worked for fifteen years for the Irish architect Michael Scott, assisting, for example, in the design of Busáras, the central bus...
, Camille Souter
Camille Souter
Camille Souter, born Betty Pamela Holmes, is a painter. Though born in Northampton, England, in 1929, she was raised in Ireland. She was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 2008....
, Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, Seóirse Bodley
Seóirse Bodley
Seóirse Bodley is an Irish composer and former associate professor of music at University College Dublin . He has been Saoi of Aosdána since 2008.-Biography:...
, and Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin
Anthony Cronin is an Irish poet. He received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature....
. On acceptance of the gold Torc, Friel quipped, "I knew that being made a Saoi, really getting this award, is extreme unction; it is a final anointment--Aosdana's last rites."
In August 2006, on the occasion of the 75th birthday of Friel's wife, Seamus Heaney had his stroke in County Donegal.
In November 2008, The Queen's University of Belfast
Queen's University of Belfast
Queen's University Belfast is a public research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The university's official title, per its charter, is the Queen's University of Belfast. It is often referred to simply as Queen's, or by the abbreviation QUB...
announced its intention to build a new theatre complex and research centre, to be named The Brian Friel Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research
Brian Friel Theatre
The Brian Friel Theatre is a studio theatre located at Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was opened in February 2009 and is named after the Irish dramatist, theatre director and author, Brian Friel....
.
His 80th birthday was commemorated in 2009. The Gate Theatre staged three plays (Faith Healer, The Yalta Game, and Afterplay) during several weeks in September. In the midst of the Gate's productions, the Abbey Theatre presented "A Birthday Celebration for Brian Friel," on 13 September 2009 - an evening of staged readings (excerpts from Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa), the performance of Friel-specific songs and nocturnes, and readings by Thomas Kilroy and Seamus Heaney. Although somewhat of a recluse, Friel attended the performance amid regular seating, received a cake while the audience sang "Happy Birthday," and mingled with well wishers afterwards. Also in 2009, the journal Irish Theatre International published a Special Issue to commemorate the occasion with seven articles devoted to the playwright.
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
Friel began writing short stories for The New YorkerThe New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966).
His first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and To This Hard House (24 April 1958). These were followed by A Doubtful Paradise, his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. While the play was politely received, such review titles as "Difficulties for cast in Group play" in the Belfast Telegraph and "New Ulster play at Group just avoids bathos" in The News Letter convey the play's reception.
While struggling as a working writer, Friel wrote 59 articles for The Irish Press
The Irish Press
The Irish Press was an Irish national daily newspaper published by Irish Press plc between 5 September 1931 and 25 May 1995.-Foundation:...
, a Dublin-based newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this diverse series included short stories, political editorials on life in Northern Ireland and Donegal, his travels to Dublin and New York City, and his childhood memories of Derry, Omagh, Belfast, and Donegal.
He struggled with little initial success to gain recognition as a playwright from 1958 through 1964; at one point the Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects" (1962). Friel later admitted in a 1965 interview that he feared that his play A Doubtful Paradise (1960) contributed to the collapse of the Belfast-based Ulster Group Theatre. While only on the Abbey stage for 9 performances, The Enemy Within (1962) enjoyed some success; it was revived by Belfast's Lyric Theatre in September 1963 and was aired on both the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann in 1963. Although The Blind Mice (1963) was later withdrawn by the author, it was by far his most successful play of this very early period, playing for 6 weeks at Dublin's Eblana Theatre, revived by the Lyric, and broadcast by radio Éireann and the BBC Home Service almost ten times by 1967.
Shortly after his return from a short stint as "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie's theater in Minneapolis, during May and June 1963, Friel wrote Philadelphia Here I Come!
Philadelphia Here I Come!
Philadelphia, Here I Come! is a 1964 play by Irish dramatist Brian Friel. Set in the fictional town of Ballybeg, Co.Donegal, the play launched Friel onto the international stage.-Plot:...
(1964), the play that immediately made him famous in Dublin, London, and New York. This play retains its status as a turning point in Irish drama (away from the genre of peasant plays) and one of the most important plays of the 1960s. The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), and Lovers
Lovers (play)
Lovers is a 1967 play written by Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel.Lovers is a play broken in to two parts, Winners and Losers.-Winners:...
(1967) were both successful in Ireland, with Lovers also popular in America.
The Freedom of the City
The Freedom of the City
The Freedom of the City is a play by Irish playwright Brian Friel first produced in 1973. It is set in Derry, Northern Ireland in 1970, in the aftermath of a Roman Catholic Civil Rights meeting, and follows three protesters who mistakenly find themselves in the mayor's parlour in the Guildhall...
(1973) is an explicitly political work about the Troubles
The Troubles
The Troubles was a period of ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland which spilled over at various times into England, the Republic of Ireland, and mainland Europe. The duration of the Troubles is conventionally dated from the late 1960s and considered by many to have ended with the Belfast...
in Northern Ireland, while The Mundy Scheme (1969) and Volunteers (1975) are pointed, and in the first case bitter, satires of the Irish government. On 30 January 1972, Friel marched with the crowds in a Civil Rights Association protest against internment, in defiance of a government ban. In circumstances that remain under intense debate, the soldiers of the British 1st Battalion Parachute Brigade
1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment
The First Battalion, The Parachute Regiment is a battalion sized formation of the British Army's Parachute Regiment and subordinate unit within 16th Air Assault Brigade, but is permanently attached to the Special Forces Support Group....
opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen and injuring thirteen others in what was to become known as "Bloody Sunday.
Bloody Sunday (1972)
Bloody Sunday —sometimes called the Bogside Massacre—was an incident on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot by soldiers of the British Army...
" Although in a 1973 interview with Eavan Boland Friel pointed out that he had been working on the play for about ten months prior to the event, he later added in a 1982 interview with Fintan O'Toole that Bloody Sunday transformed and sharpened the earlier play that became Freedom of the City. Along with such plays as John Boyd's The Flats (1971), Stewart Love's Me Oul Segocia (1979), and Martin Lynch's The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (1982), Friel's play has become one of the essential plays about the Troubles that remain popular in Ireland.
Volunteers (1975) stages an archeological excavation on the day before the site is turned over to a hotel developer, and uses Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. In this play, the Volunteers are IRA prisoners who have been indefinitely interned by the Dublin government, and the term Volunteer is both ironic, in that as prisoners they have no free will, and political, in that the IRA used the term to refer to its members. Using the site as a physical metaphor for the nation's history, the play's action examines how Irish history has been commodified, sanitized, and oversimplified to fit the political needs of society.
By the mid 1970s, Friel had moved away from overtly political plays to examine family dynamics in a manner that has attracted many comparisons to the work of Chekhov. Living Quarters
Living Quarters
Living Quarters is a play written by Brian Friel and first performed in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, in 1977.-Summary:Living Quarters is a memory play set in a soldier's home in Donegal, near Friel's favourite fictional town of Ballybeg. It tells the story of the fateful day that...
(1977), a play that examines the suicide of a domineering father, is a retelling of the Theseus/Hippolytus myth in a contemporary Irish setting. This play, with its focus on several sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother, serves as a type of preparation for Friel's more successful Aristocrats (1979), a Chekhovian study of a once-influential family's financial collapse and, perhaps, social liberation from the aristocratic myths that have constrained the children.
Many plays of this period incorporate assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in Philadelphia, Here I Come!; portraying dead characters in "Winners" of Lovers, Freedom, and Living Quarters; a Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in Freedom of the City; and metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in Living Quarters. These experiments came to fruition in Faith Healer
Faith Healer
Faith Healer is a play by Brian Friel about the life of faith healer Francis Hardy as monologued through the shifting memories of Hardy, his wife, Grace, and stage manager, Teddy.-Synopsis:...
(1979), a series of four conflicting monologues delivered by dead and living characters who struggle to understand the life and death of Frank Hardy, the play's itinerant healer who can neither understand nor command his unreliable powers, and the lives sacrificed to his destructive charismatic life. Later in Friel's career, such experimental aspects became buried beneath the surface of more seemingly realist plays like Translations
Translations
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag , a small village at the heart of 19th century agricultural Ireland...
(1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
(1990); however, avant-garde techniques remain a fundamental aspect of Friel's work into his late career.
1980s and 1990s
TranslationsTranslations
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag , a small village at the heart of 19th century agricultural Ireland...
was premiered in 1980 at Guildhall, Derry
Guildhall, Derry
The Guildhall in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is a building in which the elected members of Derry City Council meet. It was built in 1890....
by the Field Day Theatre Company, with Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, and Ray MacAnally. Set in 1833, it is a play about language, the meeting of British and Irish cultures, the looming potato famine, the coming of a free national school system that will eliminate the traditional hedge schools, the English expedition to convert all Irish place names into English, and the crossed love between an Irish woman who speaks no English and an English soldier who speaks no Irish. Yet it was an instant success because of the play's deft ability to reference the Troubles and English-Irish relations without condemning or idealizing any side. The innovative conceit of the play is to stage two language communities (the Gaelic and the English), which have few and very limited ways to speak to each other, for the English know no Irish, while only a few of the Irish know English. Translations has gone on to be one of the most translated and staged of all post-World War II plays, having been performed in Estonia, Iceland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, along with most of the world's English-speaking countries (including South Africa, Canada, the U.S. and Australia).
Despite his growing fame and success, the 1980s are often referred to as Friel's artistic "Gap" because he published so few original works for the stage: Translations in 1980, The Communication Cord in 1982, and Making History
Making History (play)
Making History is a play written by Irish playwright Brian Friel in 1989. It is set in Ireland in August 1591 and focuses on the real-life plight of Aodh Mór Ó Néill, Earl of Tyrone, who led an Irish and Spanish alliance against the English in an attempt to drive them out of Ireland. The play is...
in 1988. Privately, Friel complained both of the work required managing Field Day (granting written and live interviews, casting, arranging tours, etc.) and of his fear that he was "trying to impose a 'Field Day' political atmosphere" on his work. However, this is also a period during which he worked on several minor projects that fill out the decade: translations of Chekhov's Three Sisters
Three Sisters (play)
Three Sisters is a play by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov, perhaps partially inspired by the situation of the three Brontë sisters, but most probably by the three Zimmermann sisters in Perm...
(1981) and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
Fathers and Sons
Fathers and Sons is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, his best known work. The title of this work in Russian is Отцы и дети , which literally means "Fathers and Children"; the work is often translated to Fathers and Sons in English for reasons of euphony.- Historical context and notes :The fathers...
(1987), an edition of Charles McGlinchey's memoirs entitled The Last of the Name for Blackstaff Press (1986), and Charles Macklin's play The London Vertigo in 1990. Friel's decision to premiere Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
at the Abbey Theatre rather than as a Field Day production initiated his evolution away from involvement with Field Day, and he formally resigned as a director in 1994.
During the 1990s Friel was seen to return to a position of dominance of Irish theatre with the premiers of Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
(1990), a version of Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...
's A Month in the Country
A Month in the Country (play)
A Month in the Country is a comedy in five acts by Ivan Turgenev. It was written in France between 1848 and 1850 and was first published in 1855...
for the Abbey Theatre (1992; revived by the RSC 1998), Molly Sweeney
Molly Sweeney
Molly Sweeney is a two-act play by Brian Friel. It tells the story of its title character, Molly, a woman blind since infancy, who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight. Like Friel's Faith Healer, the play tells Molly's story through monologues by three characters, in this case Molly,...
(1994), and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), along with the less critically successful Wonderful Tennessee (1993). Friel's reputation as a playwright who creates compelling plays for women rests largely on the works of this period. With 2 plays before 1975 with all-male casts (The Enemy Within and Volunteers [1975]), and an overall male to female ratio of 4 male to every female character in his plays from 1963 to 1975, Friel was first considered a writer of the Irish male experience. However, he begins writing sororal plays--plays with numerous strong female parts—as early plays as Living Quarters (1977) and Aristocrats (1979), a development that culminates in the plays of the 1990s.
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
(1990) is probably his most successful play; it premiered at the Abbey Theatre
Abbey Theatre
The Abbey Theatre , also known as the National Theatre of Ireland , is a theatre located in Dublin, Ireland. The Abbey first opened its doors to the public on 27 December 1904. Despite losing its original building to a fire in 1951, it has remained active to the present day...
, transferred to London's West End
West End of London
The West End of London is an area of central London, containing many of the city's major tourist attractions, shops, businesses, government buildings, and entertainment . Use of the term began in the early 19th century to describe fashionable areas to the west of Charing Cross...
, and went on to Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
, where it won three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play. This play is loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in the Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal, and it is rumored to have caused some tension within his own family as many felt that he was staging too much of his family's history. Set in 1936, during the summer before de Valera's new constitution was approved by referendum, the play depicts the late summer days when love briefly seems possible for three of the Mundy sisters (Chris, Rose, and Kate) and the family welcomes home the frail elder brother, who has returned from a life as missionary in Africa. However, as the summer ends, the family foresees the sadness and economic privations under which the family will suffer as all hopes fade. Dancing at Lughnasa was turned into a film starring Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep
Mary Louise "Meryl" Streep is an American actress who has worked in theatre, television and film.Streep made her professional stage debut in 1971's The Playboy of Seville, before her screen debut in the television movie The Deadliest Season in 1977. In that same year, she made her film debut with...
.
Friel had been thinking about writing a "Lough Derg" play for several years, and his Wonderful Tennessee (1993) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate one of their member's birthday with culinary delicacies and alcohol. As they await their ferryman who never comes, the couples are forced to spend a night on an abandoned pier, singing (both inspirational songs and show tunes), recounting local history, expounding on religious myth, and reminiscing on their lives, friendships, secrets, and mishaps. As the night fades into morning, they are seized with the passionate determination to sacrifice one of their group—unintentionally re-enacting a local murder in the 1930s that was inspired by religious ecstasies. Their friend survives, though all pledge to return next year to re-enact their ritual.
Molly Sweeney
Molly Sweeney
Molly Sweeney is a two-act play by Brian Friel. It tells the story of its title character, Molly, a woman blind since infancy, who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight. Like Friel's Faith Healer, the play tells Molly's story through monologues by three characters, in this case Molly,...
(1993) enjoyed considerable success on the stage, but it attracted little critical interest, perhaps because of its superficial similarities to Faith Healer
Faith Healer
Faith Healer is a play by Brian Friel about the life of faith healer Francis Hardy as monologued through the shifting memories of Hardy, his wife, Grace, and stage manager, Teddy.-Synopsis:...
(1979), another play composed of a series of monologues delivered on an empty stage by characters who have no interaction. This play is about a blind woman in Ballybeg who constructed for herself an independent life rich in friendships and sensual fulfillment, and her ill-fated encounter with two men who destroy it and cause her madness: Frank, the man she marries who becomes convinced that she can only be complete when her vision is restored, and Dr. Rice, a once-renowned eye surgeon who uses Molly to restore his career. In a note in the programme of the 1996 Broadway production, Friel says that the story was inspired in part by Oliver Sacks
Oliver Sacks
Oliver Wolf Sacks, CBE , is a British neurologist and psychologist residing in New York City. He is a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, where he also holds the position of Columbia Artist...
's To See and Not See.
Give Me Your Answer Do! recounts the lives and careers of two novelists and friends who pursued different paths, one writing shallow, popular works and the other writing works that refuse to conform to popular tastes. After an American university pays a small fortune for the popular writer's papers, their careers are cast into stark contrast when the same collector comes to review the manuscripts of the impoverished artist. They all gather for a dinner party as the collector prepares to announce whether he will recommend the papers to his university, but at the last moment the existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based on the writer's daughter forces everyone to reassess his career.
2000s and 2010s
Entering his eighth decade, Friel found it difficult to maintain the writing pace that he returned to in the 1990s; indeed, between 1997 and 2003 he produced only the very short one-act plays "The Bear" (2002), "The Yalta Game" (2001), and "Afterplay" (2002), all published under the title Three Plays After (2002). The latter two plays stage Friel's continued fascination with Chekhov's work. "The Yalta Game" is concerned with Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Lapdog," "Afterplay" had its world premiere at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. It is an imagining of a near-romantic meeting between Andrey Prozorov of Chekhov's Three SistersThree Sisters (play)
Three Sisters is a play by Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov, perhaps partially inspired by the situation of the three Brontë sisters, but most probably by the three Zimmermann sisters in Perm...
and Sonya Serebriakova of his Uncle Vanya
Uncle Vanya
Uncle Vanya is a play by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. It was first published in 1897 and received its Moscow première in 1899 in a production by the Moscow Art Theatre, under the direction of Konstantin Stanislavski....
; "Afterplay" has been revived several times since its premier and was part of the Friel/Gate Festival in September 2009. However, the most innovative work of this period is Performances (2003), a meditation on an artist's fears of aging and the intersection of life and art in a long one-act play (70 minutes in performance), combining drama with a staged performance of Leoš Janáček's Intimate Letters for string quartet. In this play Anezka Ungrova is a graduate researching the impact of Janáček's platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work. She playfully and passionately argues with the composer who appears to host her at his artistic retreat, more than 70 years after his death, about his life and her life, while players of the Alba String Quartet
Alba String Quartet
The Alba String Quartet was formed by students of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama in 2003. It comprises four young musicians: Liam Lynch and Stewart Webster , Hannah Craib and Emily Walker...
interrupt their dialogue, warm up, chat, and finally play the first two movements of his Second String Quartet in a tableau that ends the play. In some transparent ways, Performances suggests Friel's personal concerns, since the composer Janáček is portrayed as Friel's age at the time of the play's composition (74 years), and expresses his anxiety over not being up to the challenges of scaling for a final time "the mountain" of creating a full-scale work.
The final, full-scale work that Friel had in mind while writing Performances was The Home Place
The Home Place
The Home Place is a play written by Brian Friel that first premiered at the Gate Theatre, Dublin on 1 February 2005. After a sold-out season at the Gate it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, where it won the 2005 Evening Standard Award for Best Play, and made its American premiere at...
(2005), the last of his plays set in Ballybeg. Although Friel had written plays about the Catholic gentry, this is his first play that directly considers the Protestant experience. In this work, he considers the first hints of the waning of Ascendancy authority during the summer of 1878, the year before Charles Stuart Parnell became president of the Land League and initiated the Land Wars. The play focuses on the aging Christopher Gore, who struggles to maintain his authority over both maturing son David and restive peasants, the latter under the growing influence of local Fenians. Gore's ability to claim legitimacy as one of the region's model landlords is threatened by the arrival of his cousin Richard, who demeans the tenants by subjecting the local peasants to cranial measurements intended to advance his anthropometric research. The resulting crisis places Christopher's son in an unresolved position as one who both usurps and submits to the paternal authority upon which the Gore family authority rests. After a sold-out season at the Gate Theatre
Gate Theatre
The Gate Theatre, in Dublin, was founded in 1928 by Hilton Edwards and Micheál Mac Liammóir, initially using the Abbey Theatre's Peacock studio theatre space to stage important works by European and American dramatists...
in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End
West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English speaking...
on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at the Guthrie Theater
Guthrie Theater
The Guthrie Theater is a center for theater performance, production, education, and professional training in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is the result of the desire of Sir Tyrone Guthrie, Oliver Rea, and Peter Zeisler to create a resident acting company that would produce and perform the classics in...
(Minneapolis, MN) in September 2007.
Private life
Over the course of his career Brian Friel has guarded his private life to such a great extent that many of his basic biographical details remain under debate. For example, uncertainty remains as to whether his father was named "Patrick," which is the general consensus, or "Sean," as listed in "The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel." Similarly, Dantanus, Pine, and Boltwood disagree regarding the length and itinerary of Friel's 1963 sojourn to the United States. While he was unusually responsive to interview requests from 1980 through 1985 because of his role as Field Day's premier artist, most of his career is marked by a public reluctance and reclusiveness. Thus, the two published versions of his "Self Portrait," both of 1972, have attained a place of primacy for those practicing biographical criticism; in his book, Boltwood argues for a greater prominence for The Irish Press series in understanding Friel's intellectual and ideological development. (Boltwood further argues that Friel has sought to expunge these essays from his body of work: they are not included in the otherwise comprehensive Friel Papers housed in the National Library of Ireland because, he argues, they are often too personal and revealing for the playwright.) Indeed, while Friel is occasionally filmed staring pensively into the distance in the authorized, year 2000 documentary produced by Ferndale Films (written by fellow playwright and Friel's personal friend Thomas KilroyThomas Kilroy
Thomas F. Kilroy is an Irish playwright and novelist.He was born in Green Street, Callan, County Kilkenny and studied at University College, Dublin. In his early career he was play editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin...
), he only speaks briefly at the film's end. Similarly, when Radio Telefís Éireann
Raidió Teilifís Éireann
Raidió Teilifís Éireann is a semi-state company and the public service broadcaster of Ireland. It both produces programmes and broadcasts them on television, radio and the Internet. The radio service began on January 1, 1926, while regular television broadcasts began on December 31, 1961, making...
presented a series, entitled Reading the Future (1999), of hour-long interviews with Ireland's greatest living authors (including Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer. He lives in Dublin. Heaney has received the Nobel Prize in Literature , the Golden Wreath of Poetry , T. S. Eliot Prize and two Whitbread prizes...
, Michael Longley
Michael Longley
Michael Longley, CBE is a Northern Irish poet from Belfast.-Life and career:Longley was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and subsequently read Classics at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus...
, Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brien
Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist and short story writer whose works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men and to society as a whole.-Life and career:...
, and William Trevor
William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE is an Irish author and playwright. He is considered one of the elder statesman of the Irish literary world and widely regarded as the greatest contemporary writer of short stories in the English language....
), Friel was the sole designee not to participate. The Friel interview featured theater critic Fintan O'Toole
Fintan O'Toole
Fintan O'Toole is a columnist, assistant editor and drama critic for The Irish Times. He has written for The Irish Times since 1988 and was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001. He is a literary critic, historical writer and political commentator, with generally left-wing views...
, Irish scholar Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar. He is known for his literary criticism of Irish literature in Irish and English, and his contributions to public cultural life....
, and director Patrick Mason
Patrick Mason
Patrick Mason is an award-winning theatre director.Mason was educated at Downside School and trained at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. He was appointed fellow in drama at the University of Manchester in 1974 and then lecturer in performance studies...
in a discussion of his work. Despite his famed public reticence, Friel is noted for his conversation and wit in private settings.
The Brian Friel Papers
The National Library of IrelandNational Library of Ireland
The National Library of Ireland is Ireland's national library located in Dublin, in a building designed by Thomas Newenham Deane. The Minister for Arts, Sport & Tourism is the member of the Irish Government responsible for the library....
houses the 160 boxes of The Brian Friel papers (Manuscript Collection List #73 [MSS 37,041-37,806], given as a gift to the state in December 2000), containing notebooks, manuscripts, playbills, correspondence, contracts, unpublished manuscripts, programmes, production photos, articles, uncollected essays, and a vast collection of ephemera relating to Friel's career and creative process from 1959 through 2000. It does not contain his Irish Press articles, which can be found in the Dublin and Belfast newspaper libraries.
His papers were valued at n1.2 million.
Significance of Ballybeg
Thirteen of Friel's plays have been set either in the fictional town of "BallybegBallybeg
Ballybeg is a generic name given to small Irish towns. The name comes from the Gaelic words Baile Beag which literally means Little Town...
" (from the Irish for "Small Town"--Baile Beag)) or in its environs: Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Crystal and Fox, The Gentle Island, Living Quarters
Living Quarters
Living Quarters is a play written by Brian Friel and first performed in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland, in 1977.-Summary:Living Quarters is a memory play set in a soldier's home in Donegal, near Friel's favourite fictional town of Ballybeg. It tells the story of the fateful day that...
, Faith Healer
Faith Healer
Faith Healer is a play by Brian Friel about the life of faith healer Francis Hardy as monologued through the shifting memories of Hardy, his wife, Grace, and stage manager, Teddy.-Synopsis:...
, Aristocrats, Translations
Translations
Translations is a three-act play by Irish playwright Brian Friel written in 1980. It is set in Baile Beag , a small village at the heart of 19th century agricultural Ireland...
, The Communication Cord, Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
, Wonderful Tennessee, Give Me Your Answer Do! and The Home Place
The Home Place
The Home Place is a play written by Brian Friel that first premiered at the Gate Theatre, Dublin on 1 February 2005. After a sold-out season at the Gate it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, where it won the 2005 Evening Standard Award for Best Play, and made its American premiere at...
, while the seminal event of Faith Healer
Faith Healer
Faith Healer is a play by Brian Friel about the life of faith healer Francis Hardy as monologued through the shifting memories of Hardy, his wife, Grace, and stage manager, Teddy.-Synopsis:...
takes place in the town. These plays present an extended history of this imagined community, with Translations and The Home Place set in the nineteenth century, and Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa
Dancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
in the 1930s. With the other plays set in "the present" but written throughout the playwright's career from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, the audience is presented with the evolution of rural Irish society, from the isolated and backward town that Gar flees in the 1964 Philadelphia, Here I Come! to the propserous and multicultural small city of Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), where the characters have health clubs, ethnic restaurants, and regular flights to the world's major cities.
Awards
- 1988 Evening Standard Award for Best Play – Aristocrats
- 1989 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play – Aristocrats
- 1991 Laurence Olivier award for Best Play – Dancing at LughnasaDancing at LughnasaDancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
- 1992 New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play– Dancing at LughnasaDancing at LughnasaDancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
- 1992 Tony awards, including Best Play – Dancing at LughnasaDancing at LughnasaDancing at Lughnasa is a 1990 play by dramatist Brian Friel set in Ireland's County Donegal in August 1936 in the fictional town of Ballybeg. It is a memory play told from the point of view of the adult Michael Evans, the narrator...
- 1996 New York Drama Critics Circle award for best foreign play – Molly SweeneyMolly SweeneyMolly Sweeney is a two-act play by Brian Friel. It tells the story of its title character, Molly, a woman blind since infancy, who undergoes an operation to try to restore her sight. Like Friel's Faith Healer, the play tells Molly's story through monologues by three characters, in this case Molly,...
- 2010 Donegal Person of the Year
- Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
- Member of the British Royal Society of LiteratureRoyal Society of LiteratureThe Royal Society of Literature is the "senior literary organisation in Britain". It was founded in 1820 by George IV, in order to "reward literary merit and excite literary talent". The Society's first president was Thomas Burgess, who later became the Bishop of Salisbury...
- Member of the Irish Academy of Letters
- Visiting Writer at Magee CollegeMagee CollegeMagee College is a campus of the University of Ulster located in Derry, Northern Ireland. It opened in 1865 as a Presbyterian Christian arts and theological college...
(1970-71 academic year) - Honorary doctorate from Rosary College, River Forest, IllinoisRiver Forest, IllinoisRiver Forest is a suburban village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. Two universities make their home in River Forest, Dominican University and Concordia University Chicago. The village is closely tied to the larger neighboring community of Oak Park, Illinois. There are significant...
(1974)
Further reading
- Boltwood, Scott, Brian Friel, Ireland, and The North. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
- Fitzpatrick, Noel, Le Sujet et Les Je(ux) de Discours dans L'oeuvre de Brian Friel, Doctoral Dissertation (Universite Paris 7), 2005.
- Corbett, Tony, Brian Friel: Decoding the Language of the Tribe. The Liffey Press, 2002.
- Pine, Richard, The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel. University College Dublin Press, 1999.
- McGrath, F.C., Brian Friel's (Post)Colonial Drama. Syracuse University Press, 1999.
- Pelletier, Martine, Le théâtre de Brian Friel: Histoire et histoires. Septentrion, 1997.
- Andrews, Elmer, The Art of Brian Friel. St. Martin's, 1995.
- Dantanus, Ulf, Brian Friel: A Study. Faber & Faber, 1989.
- O’Brien, George, Brian Friel. Gill & Macmillan, 1989.
- Maxwell, D.E.S., Brian Friel. Bucknell University Press, 1973.
- Brian Friel in Conversation (ed. Paul Delaney). University of Michigan Press, 2000.
- Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1999 (ed. Christopher Murray). Faber & Faber, 1999.
External links
- Aosdána biographical note
- Faber and Faber - UK publisher of Brian Friel's plays
- About Friel: The Playwright and the Work ed. by Tony Coult
- Brian Friel in Conversation ed. by Paul Delaney
- The Diviner: The Art of Brian Friel by Richard Pine
- Brian Friel, Ireland, and The North by Scott Boltwood
- Le Sujet et Les Je(ux) de Discours dans L'Oeuvre de Brian Friel by Noel Fitzpatrick