By Bobby Kennedy, Dramaturg
Called “the finest Irish dramatist of his generation” by The Guardian, Brian Friel wrote many beloved plays over a five-decade-long career. Rural Ireland was the playwright’s favorite setting, and a “search for moral and psychic wholeness,” as Irish poet Seamus Heaney put it, was a common thread in his work. But in form and in focus, he would constantly explore new narrative and emotional territory in each new play. “To look at the litany of Friel plays is to witness a rigorous and restless imagination in full flight,” wrote his friend Gary McKone in a 2015 tribute. “[He] revealed Ireland, past and present, to itself.”
Friel was born in January 1929 near Omagh, a town in County Tyrone. Eight years earlier, County Tyrone and five other northern counties had been partitioned from the rest of the island to become Northern Ireland, which remained in the United Kingdom while the rest of the counties became the self-governing Irish Free State—and later the Republic of Ireland. When Friel was ten years old, his family moved to the city of Londonderry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland, more commonly called by its original name Derry. After graduating from university, he trained as a teacher and taught math in the Derry school system beginning in 1950.
While working as a teacher, Friel began writing short stories and eventually plays. The New Yorker began paying him so much for his stories that he was able to stop teaching in 1960 and focus on his writing career. With his burgeoning interest in the theatre, Friel spent six months observing the Irish-born director Tyrone Guthrie work on plays in Minneapolis where he was founding one of the first regional theatres. Returning to Ireland, Friel wrote his breakout play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which tells the story of a young Irishman on the evening before he emigrates to America. First staged in Dublin in 1964, the play moved to Broadway two years later where it was a hit, earning a Tony Award nomination for Best Play.
Philadelphia, Here I Come! also introduced the world to the town of Baile Beag, a fictional town in County Donegal where Friel would continue to set many of his plays over the course of his career. Although only a couple miles west of Friel’s home in Derry, Donegal became part of the Republic of Ireland, cutting it off from the rest of Northern Ireland and Derry, the nearest large city. Friel’s mother was from the small village of Glenties in Donegal, and Friel would visit his family there during holidays. His fond memories of summers in Glenties later inspired him to set his plays in a place just like it.
In a dedication to Friel published in 2015, Gary McKone spoke of the legacy of Baile Beag, which means “small town” in Irish and is spelled Ballybeg in English.
“You will search maps of Donegal in vain for Ballybeg [but it] is every bit as real, in its own way, as the many villages and small towns that make up the actual landscape of the north-west corner of Ireland. Such is the force of Friel’s creation that the imagined Ballybeg has become part of the Irish psyche. Through it, the playwright reveals Ireland, past and present, to itself. More than that, Ballybeg becomes a kind of everyplace, where the whole business of being human is laid bare in a body of work that is as compassionate as it is skillful, as moving as it is entertaining, and as universal as it is local.”
Friel’s work became increasingly political in the 1970s. Since the late 1960s, increased opposition by the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland to the discriminatory policies of the Protestant government had led to sectarian conflict and a subsequent deployment of British troops. On January 13, 1972, Friel took part in a protest march in Derry, organized by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, decrying the use of internment without trial by the British army. The unarmed civilian protesters were fired on by British soldiers. Fourteen people were killed and the soldiers were cleared of any blame. “Bloody Sunday,” as the incident came to be called, contributed to further violence and unrest that would continue into the 1990s, a period referred to as “The Troubles.”
In an 18-month period from 1979 to 1980, three of Friel’s greatest plays debuted and showed the range of his dramatic talents. Aristocrats is a Chekhovian play showing the fracturing of an influential Baile Beag family, whereas Faith Healer uses only monologues to tell the story of a spiritual healer and his unreliable gift. To produce Translations, Friel and his friend, the actor Stephen Rea, founded their own company, Field Day Theatre Company, and staged the play in Derry. Set in 1833, the period piece dramatizes a pivotal moment in Irish history when the British began to assert more control over Donegal and use of the Irish language began to wane.
While writing Translations, Friel sporadically made entries in a diary about his progress. He at one point described the impact of this moment in Irish history on the characters he was depicting in the play:
“In Ballybeg, at the point when the play begins, the cultural climate is a dying climate – no longer quickened by its past, about to be plunged almost overnight into an alien future. The victims in this situation are the transitional generation. The old can retreat into and find immunity in the past. The young acquire some facility with the new cultural implements. The in-between ages become lost, wandering around in a strange land. Strays.”
Translations would win Friel another round of international acclaim, but he found a certain irony in this. In interviews at the time, the playwright would continually comment on the discomfort he felt the Irish (including himself) had in using the English language. In a 1982 interview, Friel said,
“The whole issue of language is a very problematic one for us all on this island. I had grandparents who were native Irish speakers and also two of the four grandparents were illiterate. [...] And to be so close to illiteracy and to a different language is a curious experience. And in some ways I don’t think we’ve resolved it. [...] We flirt with the English language, but we haven’t absorbed it and we haven’t regurgitated it in some kind of way. It’s accepted outside the island, you see, as ‘our great facility with the English language’ – that’s all old rubbish. [...] Because we are in fact talking about accommodation or marrying of two cultures here, which are ostensibly speaking the same language but which in fact aren’t.”
In another interview about Translations, Friel admitted, “the sad irony, of course, is that the whole play is written in English. It ought to be written in Irish.”
Throughout the 1980s, Friel premiered fewer plays as he spent more of his time running Field Day. But in 1990, perhaps his most famous play debuted at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Dancing at Lughnasa tells the story of five sisters living in Baile Beag in the 1930s, inspired by the lives of Friel’s mother and aunts. The play was rapturously received and West End and Broadway productions soon followed, with Friel winning Tony and Olivier Awards for his writing. A film version premiered in 1998, adapted by fellow Irish writer Frank McGuinness and starring Meryl Streep.
In his later years, Friel was awarded an assortment of honorary degrees and saw his work revived and produced all over the world. He and his wife, Anne, who he married in 1954, lived most of their lives in the village of Greencastle, County Donegal, up the coast from Derry. When Friel died in 2015 at the age of 86, he elected to be buried in Glenties, the town in Donegal that had meant so much to him and that through his writing he made mean so much to all of us.
