Liam Browne, Literary Director at Arts Over Borders, introduces Frieldays, a major new event cellebrating one of Ireland's most iconic playwrights, Brian Friel, at a series of site-specific venues across Donegal and Derry this August.
Certain writers are indelibly connected to place. We think of Thomas Hardy's Wessex (inspired by south and southwest England, particularly Dorset) or William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County (Lafayette County, Mississippi), places known through experience and memory and then shaped by the writer’s imagination.
To this list you could add Brian Friel’s Donegal, a county in which many of his plays are set and whose essence is contained in the fictional village of Ballybeg, built in Friel’s imagination out of the real-life Glenties where he spent summers as a boy.
If ever a playwright’s work offered an invitation to be performed in the landscapes of its setting rather than in the traditional theatre space, it’s Friel’s. And that’s what we’re doing with Frieldays - A Homecoming 2025 - 29 (which also incorporates Tyrone, where Friel was born, and Derry, where he lived for a number of years). Friel stated that 'a play is a living organism. It evolves with each performance, shaped by the actors, the audience, and the moment.’
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Listen: Brian Friel's widow Anne talks to Miriam O'Callaghan
And it’s that ‘moment’ that we’re seeking to illuminate by our placing and staging of Friel’s plays. Performed readings of five plays across August in 2025 - Dancing at Lughnasa (1st - 17th), Faith Healer (8th - 10th and 15th - 17th), Translations (22nd - 25th), Volunteers (29th - 31st) and The Home Place (23rd - 25th), culminating in all 29 plays being performed on the anniversary of his birth, 2029.
A performed reading of Dancing at Lughnasa will take place in the canteen hall of St Columba’s Comprehensive School in Glenties. The school is just 50 yards from The Laurels, the house in which the five sisters (including Friel’s mother) who inspired the play, lived. Should they want to, the audience can talk a walk up to it during the interval. The canteen will in effect be transformed into an installation, a physical engagement with the senses to convey 1930’s Donegal.
A core element in Dancing at Lughnasa is the Marconi radio, which transmits the music the sisters dance to in the play's iconic scene. But radio is also the conduit to the news and voices of the world they inhabit, a world that is changing rapidly. So important is the Marconi radio that we have commissioned a new electro-acoustic sound score by the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) composer John D’Arcy (AKA DJ Marconi).
Translations is set in a hedge school in Donegal in 1833. For Friel, it was a time that signified the beginning of the end of the traditional Gaelic culture in Ireland, not least the fact that British soldiers were soon to begin work in Donegal as part of an Ordnance Survey of the United Kingdom. For this performed reading, it felt essential therefore to try and convey that impression of a dying fall and to present the play in the heart of the Gaeltacht, in this case the Dunlewey Centre next to Mount Errigal. Across the adjacent lake lies the ghost village of Glentornan and next to the centre is the Weaver’s Cottage, and these spaces will be visited by audiences attending the play, allowing them to experience a mood and atmosphere that also permeates Translations. Even though the play is in English, all the Irish actors are Gaelic speakers, led by Lorcan Cranitch as Hugh and the writer Michael Harding as Jimmy Jack.
1975 was hugely significant in Irish literary culture, being the year of the premiere of Friel’s Volunteers and the publication of Seamus Heaney’s collection, North. The genesis of both works was the discovery of the bog bodies in Jutland (and P. V. Glob’s book on them) and an increasing awareness, through archeological digs, of the importance of the history beneath our feet. Both works are brought together across weekend of August 29th - 31st in Derry. Co-produced by Derry’s Playhouse, performed by Kabosh Theatre and with Patrick O’Kane in the role of Keeney, Volunteers will be presented in the Keep of Ebrington Square, a location redolent with martial history and in which the audience will feel as if they are actually seated within an archaeological dig.
That same weekend, the poems of North will be read by locals from Derry’s two cultural traditions, each reader chosen through a thematic connection to a specific poem, and the readings accompanied by snatches of melody from a harp, a wooden flute, a Lambeg drum, a bodhrán and a fiddle. The four venues include First Derry Presbyterian Church, the Gasyard Centre in the Bogside, and Heaney's old school building, Lumen Christi College.
FRIELDAYS – A HOMECOMING
Dates and venues for August 2025:
Dancing at Lughnasa (35th anniversary production): 1st - 23rd August at St. Columba’s Comprehensive School, Glenties, Co. Donegal.
Faith Healer: 8th - 10th & 15th -17th August at Edeninfagh, Portnoo, Ardara and Glenties, west Donegal.
Translations (45th anniversary production): 22nd - 25th August at Gweedore, Co. Donegal
The Home Place (20th anniversary production): 23rd - 25th August at Sion Stables Heritage Education Centre, Co. Tyrone.
Volunteers (50th anniversary co-production with The Playhouse): 29th - 31th August at The Keep, Ebrington Square, Derry~Londonderry.
North (50th anniversary production) 30th - 31st August in Derry~Londonderry.
Find out more about the Frieldays programme here
