Analysis: The great gift in Friel's writing is its ability to resonate with audiences across generations and borders
Brian Friel is widely remembered as one of Ireland's greatest playwrights. He was part of a new generation of Irish writers in the 1960s who revolutionised Irish theatre and explored a sense of Irishness, identity, language, and place, from the local to the global through his plays and other writings. Out of his fictional heartland of Ballybeg, Friel’s plays remain beloved by audiences worldwide for revealing the inner worlds and outer existences that we all share.
Friel was born near Omagh, Co. Tyrone in 1929 and the family moved to Derry where he attended St Columb's College, before attending St Patrick's College in Maynooth, as a young seminarian. However, he did not complete that vocation, instead graduating with a BA in 1948.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Sunday Miscellany, theatre director Joe Dowling pays tribute to Brian Friel
He could have followed various paths, from the classroom to the priesthood, but writing dominated his early working years, and alongside his growing family and wife, Anne. Friel published books of short-stories as well as in the New Yorker magazine, and had plays broadcast on BBC Radio as part of his literary apprenticeship.
Friel’s major breakthrough for the stage came with Philadelphia, Here I Come! which premiered at the Olympia Theatre in October 1964 during the Dublin Theatre Festival. In the play, we meet the Public and Private worlds of Gar O’Donnell, (both sides played by different actors) a young man from Ballybeg who must make a major decision by the play’s end. He can either stay within his pre-determined pathway in his local village and life with his father, or seek out a new life elsewhere, one not yet knowable, and emigrate to Philadelphia in the United States.
He confided in a letter to Mary O'Malley, director at the Lyric Theatre Belfast, that the play could have been a failure and he couldn’t be assured that the split-character device would work. But the play was a hit at the Dublin Theatre Festival and transferred to the Helen Hayes Theatre on Broadway, New York, in 1966 where it ran for nine months. The play made celebrities of Friel and its cast as they navigated media calls, television interviews, and heightened Irish-American sentiment in J.F.K.’s America. Bobby Kennedy and family attended the play and met the cast on stage after the show.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor Show in 2021, discussion on the Brian Friel: Shyman and Showman documentary with Friel family friend Gary McKeone and Druid Theatre's Garry Hynes
Friel had arrived, but New York would prove fickle in later years. In 1979, Friel’s monologue play, Faith Healer, considered by many to be his masterpiece, failed to prove successful with critics and closed after just 20 performances. The 'Fantastic Francis Hardy’, the eponymous faith healer and seventh son of a seventh son, was an itinerant showman, a healer of sorts, but one so fraught with a self-destructive nature that the tragedy is that Frank couldn’t heal himself.
Faith Healer would return to Dublin and the Abbey Theatre in 1980 directed by Joe Dowling, where Donal McCann would enter Irish theatre folklore for his moving and enigmatic performance as Frank Hardy. McCann later recounted how the role in Faith Healer took a huge toll on him, as the play and its text consumed him, saying that "It became part of me".
In 2006, Faith Healer was revived at the Gate Theatre in Dublin with Hollywood star Ralph Fiennes in the role of Frank Hardy. It was the first time in the Gate’s history that the entire run of the play sold out before the show opened. On one night during the play’s final climactic monologue, a mobile phone rang in the front row causing Fiennes to break character and shout "turn that f***ing thing off!" Fiennes later met the offending party post-show and quipped that he would heal them later. Most recently, Aidan Gillen starred in the lead role in Faith Healer at the Abbey in 2021, again directed by Joe Dowling, marking 40 years since the play’s Irish premiere at the Abbey.
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From RTÉ Archives, Chris Kelly reports for RTÉ News on the Field Day Theatre Company's production of Brian Friel's Translations in Derry.
Translations is another Friel masterpiece. First staged in the Guild Hall in Derry in 1980 by Field Day Theatre Company, which Friel co-founded alongside Stephen Rea, the production starred Liam Neeson, Nuala Hayes, Ray McAnally, Mick Lally and Rea.
The play explored the effects of colonialism on the Irish landscape and Irish language in the 1830s while officers of the first Royal Ordnance Survey seek to anglicise the placenames of Ireland. From a rural hedge school in Ballybeg, audiences see how love and relationships develop across many borders – physical borders as well as political and linguistic borders. Friel stated the play being premiered in Derry had "a spiritual quality" being so close to the fictional world of Ballybeg in close-by Donegal, across the actual border to the Republic of Ireland.
In a 1980 interview, Friel spoke about how Translations resonated with historic issues of Anglo-Irish relations, conquest, and conflict, apart from the then contemporary political issues. He described how the play mattered most about words, and on communication through and confined by "an acquired language". He further described how language can have different meanings for different people. Words like "loyalty, treason, patriotism, republicanism, homeland" - all loaded terms in the heightened political world of Northern Ireland of the early 1980s.
In 2022, Translations received a co-production by the Lyric Theatre Belfast and Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. In the wake of Brexit, the problems and vocabularies of borders again dominated Anglo-Irish relations and our news feeds. Reports were filled on talks debating things like hard borders, soft borders, land or sea borders and even the risk of reinstating check-points for goods and trade along the Irish border. A line from the play, "you can learn to decode us", was used to promote the 2022 cross-border production, reminding us again of Friel’s sense of universal humanity and the power of words.
To understand Friel’s plays is to understand the world his characters inhabit. Invariably this world is the fictional ‘every village’ of Ballybeg. The universality of theme of Friel’s plays make them appealing to audiences globally.
Joe Vanek designed many of Friel’s plays, envisioning the sets and costumes for many of his best loved plays, including Dancing at Lughnasa on Broadway in 1991. In all, Lughnasa was nominated for eight Tony Awards, winning three, including Best Play. The corn field that Vanek created on stage radiated the warmth of long August sunshine, a pastoral scene in the background of the brewing conflict within the play – the meeting points of past Pagan traditions with current Catholicism, foreshadowing an increasing presence of technology, all which erupts through a wild release in a dance by the sisters, where they lose control to the power of music broadcast by ‘Marconi’, the sister’s radio set.
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From RTÉ Archives, Eoin Ronayne reports for RTÉ Radio 1's Morning Ireland on Dancing at Lughnasa winning the Laurence Olivier Award for play of the year in 1991
The play tells the story of the Mundy sisters (all loosely based on Friel’s own mother and aunts) and their lives and work within the family home in August 1936, as the local harvest dance and its pagan festivities approach. It's narrated by Michael Evans, a man recalling his childhood summer and the fates of his aunt and mother, and uncle Jack, returned from African missions. Friel's work was transferred onto the big screen in an 1998 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep.
As we remember Friel and his work, perhaps one phrase often used by the sisters in Lughnasa comes to mind – that it is simply ‘supreme’. The great gift in Friel’s writing is its ability to resonate with audiences across generations and borders, bringing all who see it on a journey through Friel’s plays, his world, to Ballybeg and elsewhere.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
