A cross border festival celebrating the life of the late Philadelphia Here I Come playwright Brian Friel will not take place this year but organisers say plans for 2017's festival are already well advanced.
The inaugural Lughnasa International Friel Festival took place in August last year in Donegal and Belfast, just a month before the playwright’s death in October 2015.
The decision not to go ahead with the Friel festival follows news of the cancellation of this year's Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival due to the loss of one of its core funders.
Billed as a new two-part festival, organisers said that the Lughnasa International Friel Festival was to become Ireland's only cross-border annual cultural festival celebration. An Grianán Theatre in Letterkenny, which enjoyed a long association with Friel over the years, was one of the festival partners.
Friel (left) in conversation with poet Seamus Heaney
Speaking to TEN, festival organiser and arts curator Sean Doran said: "We founded the festival last year in order to celebrate Brian's work while he was with us. We came up with a cross border model inspired by Brian Friel, which worked very well but it was one of three new festivals we initiated last year, all highly successful so we are looking at how we fit them all together to work as a set in different geographic locations long term, some biennially and some annual."
A scene from Friel's 1968 play Crystal and Fox
He added: "We are already planning 2017 and are exploring an option to focus the festival more in the north-west. We have just signed off on the rights for the signature play in 2017.
"Whether it will become biennial or annual from then I don't know yet. We did the festival on a shoe string last year but we now need to properly look at a proper funding base to build on last year's success before presenting the next edition. Biennial could be its future."
Brian Friel was born in Killyclogher, near Omagh in 1929. He wrote over 30 plays and is best known for Dancing at Lughnasa, which won three Tony Awards in 1992, and Philadelphia, Here I Come.
