Brian Friel

Irish playwright

• Born: January 9, 1929
• Birthplace: Killyclogher, near Omagh, Northern Ireland
• Died: October 2, 2015
• Place of Death: Greencastle, County Donegal, Ireland

Biography

Brian Friel, born Bernard Patrick Friel, was an important literary figure who secured for himself a place among Ireland’s great dramatists. His writing was always powerful, his characters’ struggles always provocative.

Friel was educated first at Derry’s Long Tower School, where his father taught, and later at St. Columb’s College. He then attended Maynooth College in Kildare until 1948, when he left for St. Joseph’s Teacher Training College in Belfast. A Derry schoolteacher for ten years, Friel left the profession in 1960 to turn his efforts entirely to writing. During his ten-year teaching stint, however, Friel was writing stories for The New Yorker and radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). His work was met with enthusiasm: He received the Arts Council Macaulay Fellowship, and in 1965 he was appointed shareholder of the Abbey Theatre. Beginning in 1972, Friel was a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, and in 1979, he received an honorary degree from the University of Chicago. A founder of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, Friel nurtured Irish letters by writing and producing plays and publishing pamphlets that debate aspects of Irish history, politics, and culture.

A Doubtful Paradise was Friel’s first produced play, but the earliest play he regarded as successful was The Enemy Within, performed at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1962. Two years later, his highly acclaimed Philadelphia, Here I Come! played at the Dublin Theatre Festival. It was then moved to Broadway, where it enjoyed a long and seasoned run in 1966. A play about the exile of character Gareth O’Donnell from the dreary life of Ballybeg, Ireland, Philadelphia, Here I Come! is centered on the eve of his voyage to the United States at the invitation of his aunt; it is a poignant portrayal of the young man’s coming to terms with the relationships between him and his uncommunicative father, his dead mother, and his lost sweetheart, Kathy Doogan. Arguably one of the classics of contemporary Irish theater, Philadelphia, Here I Come! dramatizes with humor and psychology the leave-taking of an emigrant. It is also the play that introduced Friel to an international public.

Among his most notable plays in the late 1960s and 1970s were Crystal and Fox, The Freedom of the City, Volunteers, and the highly acclaimed Faith Healer. In Crystal and Fox, Friel presents the character Fox Melarkey, a traveling showman, through a series of caustic rejections that lead him inevitably to destroy his traveling show in an effort to recover an incomprehensible past.

The Freedom of the City is one of Friel’s more overtly political dramas. Set in Londonderry in 1970, the drama unfolds as an unauthorized civil rights march is scattered with the help of tear gas. Three demonstrators take cover in the mayor’s parlor in the town hall, but their number is inflated, through rumor, to forty, and they are besieged by tanks. After they surrender in accordance with instructions shouted from a loudspeaker, holding their hands high above their heads, they are shot. Like The Freedom of the City, many of Friel’s plays are rooted in Ireland, but a number of his later plays concern themselves with the larger issue of history, particularly the writing and creation of history and one’s relationship to it.

Faith Healer, for example, is as much a drama about the artist’s relationship to his community as it is about historiography, the writing of history. Just as art has become cubist in the twentieth century, so, too, has history—it is pieced together, fragmented. A four-act play consisting of four disjointed monologues, Faith Healer details the experiences of Frank, the faith healer; Grace, his wife; and Teddy, Frank’s promotional warm-up man. Dramatically, the trio recounts the story of their short lives together, each describing very differently the events leading up to one fateful night, a faith healing “performance” in Ballybeg. Frank Hardy’s faith healing, which sometimes works and sometimes fails, is a brilliant metaphor for the unintelligible nature of the artistic muse that inspires, abandons, and sometimes destroys its own. As a faith healer, Hardy moves among the crippled, the blind, the disfigured, the deaf, and the barren—those very figures who attract the artist. These figures make up the grotesques of literature, whom writers try to adjust, refashion, and re-create in their art.

In 1980, Friel produced Translations, a play set in late August, 1833. The action takes place in a hedge school attended by the local community in the town of Baile Beag/Ballybeg, an Irish-speaking community in Donegal. Translations dramatizes the change in culture effected in Ireland by the establishment of British-sponsored, English-language primary education in 1831. Taking place nearby is Great Britain’s first Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and the plot centers on the comical but jarring ritual of naming and the resulting “translations” of Ballybeg’s local Gaelic place-names. A play focused on language, emigration, and colonialism, Translations comments on all three issues while it successfully depicts the scholarship of the nineteenth century Irish.

The love story in Translations between Maire, a young Ballybeg woman, and Yolland, a British soldier, reflects the larger clash of cultures. Friel skillfully uses this technique again in Making History, set before and after the Irish defeat at Kinsale in 1601. Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone, marries an Englishwoman whose family has settled in Ireland, Mabel Bagenal, the sister of Queen Elizabeth’s marshal and the daughter of the retired marshal. Friel demonstrates that, no matter what actions O’Neill takes thereafter, history is still written and interpreted by those in power. Despite O’Neill’s insistence that his biography be “the truth,” portraying him as “the schemer, the leader, the liar, the statesman, the lecher, the patriot, the drunk, [and] the soured, bitter émigré” he maintains himself to be, Archbishop Lombard (O’Neill’s self-appointed biographer) instead creates a history that presents O’Neill as a near-mythical national hero for Gaelic Ireland. Just as in Translations, Friel examines the true power of language to make, and remake, history and culture.

Culture is again a focus in Dancing at Lughnasa. Here Friel returns to Ballybeg as a setting, this time in August 1936. The Mundy family is viewed through the memories of Michael, the narrator. The adult Michael recalls his childhood home, where he was the only child in a houseful of unmarried adults: his mother, her four sisters, and their brother, an excommunicated priest recently returned from a mission in Uganda. Interweaving rumors of pagan Celtic rituals (the play takes place during the feast of Lugh, the sun god), Catholicism, and Jack’s knowledge of native Ugandan rituals (his suspected participation was the cause for his dismissal from the priesthood), Friel creates a cross-cultural matrix that conveys a new outlook on the Irish colonial situation. In Molly Sweeney, Friel returns to a dramatic structure similar to that of Faith Healer, using a set of monologues rather than dialogue. Three characters, including Molly, describe the miraculous restoration of her sight at age forty.

In addition to adapting several of Anton Chekhov's plays throughout the late nineties and into the early 2000s, Friel also wrote another original play (his last) that premiered at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in February 2005. Set once again in Ballybeg, The Home Place explores the true meaning of home through a story of Ireland's Home Rule movement in the late nineteenth century. The following year, he was named a Saoi (Wise One) of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish creative artists' highest honor. In 2009, Friel opened the Brian Friel Centre for Theatre Research at Queen's University in Belfast, which is dedicated to research regarding contemporary theater practice and fostering international teaching and creative arts partnerships.

Friel passed away at his home in Greencastle, County Donegal, on October 2, 2015. He was eighty-six years old.

Author Works

Drama:

A Doubtful Paradise, pr. 1959 (also pr. as The Francophile)

The Enemy Within, pr. 1962

The Blind Mice, pr. 1963

Philadelphia, Here I Come!, pr. 1964

The Loves of Cass Maguire, pr. 1966

Lovers, pr. 1967

Crystal and Fox, pr. 1968

The Mundy Scheme, pr. 1969

The Gentle Island, pr. 1971

The Freedom of the City, pr. 1973

Volunteers, pr. 1975

Living Quarters, pr. 1977

Faith Healer, pr. 1979

Aristocrats, pr. 1979

Translations, pr. 1980

Three Sisters, pr., pb. 1981 (adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s play)

The Communication Cord, pr. 1982

Selected Plays of Brian Friel, pb. 1984

Fathers and Sons, pr., pb. 1987

Making History, pr. 1988

Dancing at Lughnasa, pr., pb. 1990

The London Vertigo, pb. 1990 (adaptation of Charles Macklin’s play The True Born Irishman)

A Month in the Country: After Turgenev, pr., pb. 1992

Wonderful Tennessee, pr., pb. 1993

Molly Sweeney, pr., pb. 1994

Uncle Vanya, pr., pb. 1998 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play)

The Yalta Game, pr., pb. 2001 (adaptation of Chekhov’s short story “The Lady with the Lapdog”)

Afterplay, pr., pb. 2002

The Bear, pr., pb. 2002 (adaptation of Chekhov’s play)

Three Plays After, pb. 2002 (includes The Yalta Game, The Bear, and Afterplay)

Performances, 2003

The Home Place, 2005

Hedda Gabler, 2008 (adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's play)

Short Fiction:

The Saucer of Larks, 1962

The Gold in the Sea, 1966

The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland, 1969

Selected Stories, 1979 (reprinted as The Diviner, 1982)

Radio Plays:

A Sort of Freedom, 1958

To This Hard House, 1958

Nonfiction:

Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964-1999, 1999 (Christopher Murray, editor)

Brian Friel in Conversation, 2000 (Paul Delaney, editor)

Bibliography

Bonaccorso, Richard. “Back to ‘Foundry House’: Brian Friel and the Short Story.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17 (1991): 72–77. Print. Claims the story can be read as a satire of two bankrupt worlds or as an elegy of a lost past; argues that part of the problem with the story is Friel’s reticence and use of the dramatic mode without commentary.

Bonaccorso, Richard. “Personal Devices: Two Representative Stories by Brian Friel.” Colby Quarterly 32 (1996): 93–99. Print. Discusses the comic-elegiac tone and the transactions between character and community in “The Flowers of Kiltymore” and “The Saucer of Larks.” Argues that in Friel’s stories technique is embodied in the creation of characters whose hearts are free.

Cronin, John. “‘Donging the Tower’—The Past Did Have Meaning: The Short Stories of Brian Friel.” The Achievement of Brian Friel. Ed. Alan J. Peacock. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1993. 1–13. Print. Discusses how Friel’s stories anticipate themes and techniques used more effectively in his plays. Argues that the stories are largely derivative of other Irish writers but contain hints of what is to come.

Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist. Göteborg: ACTA Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1985. Print. Although most of this study focuses on the plays, a long chapter on the short stories explores the physical and political landscape of Friel’s fiction, including his focus on community, imagination, poverty, the past, and family. Includes a detailed discussion of “Foundry House.”

Kerwin, William, ed. Brian Friel: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997. Print. A selection of essays by leading critics covering most of Friel’s major plays, providing a variety of critical perspectives on themes that range from Friel’s use of history, myth, religion, comedy, and language to his depiction of women.

McGrath, F. C. Brian Friel’s (Post)colonial Drama: Language, Illusion, and Politics. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999. Print. An accessible study by one of Friel’s more ambitious critics that views him working in the same tradition as Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Sean O’Casey, and other authors who blend historical fact and personal memoir to a create a new national mythology that breaks with that of the Ireland’s colonial past.

Maxwell, D. E. S. Brian Friel. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1973. Print. A chapter on the short stories provides a general introduction to Friel’s basic themes, with discussions of several major stories. Argues that although Friel’s stories are not political, they feature recurring motifs of flight, exile, and shifting allegiances.

Murray, Christopher. Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews, 1964–1999. London: Faber, 1999. Print. Chronologically ordered culling of Friel’s own thoughts on the playwright’s craft and specific works. Includes his seminal autobiographical essay “The Theatre of Hope and Despair.”

Nightingale, Benedict. "Brian Friel, Playwright Called the Irish Chekhov, Dies at 86." New York Times. New York Times, 2 Oct. 2015. Web. 2 Nov. 2015. An obituary giving an overview of Friel's life and career.

O’Brien, George. Brian Friel. New York: Twayne, 1990. Print. The first chapter of this general introduction to Friel’s works provides an overview of his short stories. Argues that his stories speak for a culture, not a political entity; thus, Friel does not deal with the ideological division between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Discusses the themes in a number of Friel’s stories.

O’Connor, Ulick. Brian Friel: Crisis and Commitment. Dublin: Elo, 1989. Print. A pamphlet by a well-known playwright and biographer. Addresses the problems of the writer’s social and cultural responsibilities in times of civic crisis, using as its focus the work of Friel in the context of the crisis of authority in Northern Ireland.

Pine, Richard. Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. In his chapter on the short stories, Pine argues that Friel’s main themes are illusion, expectation, and dignity; claims that Friel’s basic technique is to draw the reader into the characters’ illusions, disillusions, and attempts at dignity and thus involve the reader in the resolution of such crises as loss of faith, disintegration of the family, and failure of memory.

Roche, Anthony, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Brian Friel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. Covering Friel’s entire body of works, this collection of essays discusses some common themes in his plays and his depiction of social issues. It offers insight into his texts and into the act of performing them. Includes a time line, biography, and index.