Brian Friel

Brian Patrick Friel was an Irish dramatist, short story writer and founder of the Field Day Theatre Company. He had been considered one of the greatest living English-language dramatists. He has been likened to an "Irish Chekhov" and described as "the universally accented voice of Ireland". His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.
Recognised for early works such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Faith Healer, Friel had 24 plays published in a career of more than a half-century. He was elected to the honorary position of Saoi of Aosdána. His plays were commonly produced on Broadway in New York City throughout this time, as well as in Ireland and the UK. In 1980 Friel co-founded Field Day Theatre Company and his play Translations was the company's first production. With Field Day, Friel collaborated with Seamus Heaney, 1995 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney and Friel first became friends after Friel sent the young poet a letter following publication of his book Death of a Naturalist.
Friel was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the British Royal Society of Literature and the Irish Academy of Letters. He was appointed to Seanad Éireann in 1987 and served until 1989. In later years, Dancing at Lughnasa reinvigorated Friel's oeuvre, bringing him Tony Awards, the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. It was also adapted into a film, starring Meryl Streep, directed by Pat O'Connor, script by Frank McGuinness.

Personal life

Friel was born in 1929 at Knockmoyle, Northern Ireland, before the family moved to nearby Killyclogher, both places close to Omagh in County Tyrone. His exact birth date and name are ambiguous. His father was Patrick Friel, a primary school teacher and later a councillor on Londonderry Corporation, the local city council in Derry. Friel's mother was Mary, postmistress of Glenties, County Donegal. The family moved to Derry when Friel was ten years old. There he attended St Columb's College.
Friel received his B.A. from St Patrick's College, Maynooth, and qualified as a teacher at St. Joseph's Training College, Belfast in Belfast, 1949–1950. He married Anne Morrison on 28 December 1954; they had four daughters and one son. Between 1950 and 1960, he worked as a maths teacher in the Derry primary and intermediate school system, taking leave in 1960 to pursue a career as a writer, living off his savings. In the late 1960s, the Friels moved from Derry to Muff, County Donegal, before settling outside Greencastle, County Donegal.
Friel supported Irish nationalism and was a member of the Nationalist Party. Taoiseach Charles Haughey nominated Friel to serve as a member of Seanad Éireann in 1987, where he served until 1989.
After a long illness, Friel died on 2 October 2015 in Greencastle and is buried in the cemetery in Glenties, also in Donegal. He was survived by his wife Anne and children Mary, Judy, Sally and David. Another daughter, Patricia, predeceased him. While leaving the bulk of his estate to his wife, he bequeathed a house or apartment to each of his living children, and shared his literary estate between them and the children of Patricia. His literary executors were his wife and a friend, the former director for literature at the Arts Council of England, Paul McKeone.

Literary career

A common setting for Friel's plays is in or around the fictional town of "Ballybeg". There are fourteen such plays: Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Crystal and Fox, The Gentle Island, Living Quarters, Faith Healer, Aristocrats, Translations, The Communication Cord, Dancing at Lughnasa, Wonderful Tennessee, Molly Sweeney, Give Me Your Answer Do! and The Home Place, while the seminal event of Faith Healer takes place in the town. These plays present an extended history of this imagined community, with Translations and The Home Place set in the nineteenth century, and Dancing at Lughnasa in the 1930s. With the other plays set in "the present" but written throughout the playwright's career from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, the audience is presented with the evolution of rural Irish society, from the isolated and backward town that Gar flees in the 1964 Philadelphia, Here I Come! to the prosperous and multicultural small city of Molly Sweeney and Give Me Your Answer Do!, where the characters have health clubs, ethnic restaurants, and regular flights to the world's major cities.

1959 – 1975

Friel's first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom and To This Hard House. Friel began writing short stories for The New Yorker in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks and The Gold in the Sea. These were followed by A Doubtful Paradise, his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. Friel also wrote 59 articles for The Irish Press, a Dublin-based party-political newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this series included short stories, political editorials on life in Northern Ireland and Donegal, his travels to Dublin and New York City, and his childhood memories of Derry, Omagh, Belfast, and Donegal.
Early in Friel's career, the Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects". Friel's play, The Enemy Within enjoyed success, despite only being on the Abbey stage for 9 performances. Belfast's Lyric Theatre revived it in September 1963 and the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann both aired it in 1963. Although Friel later withdrew The Blind Mice, it was by far the most successful play of his very early period, playing for 6 weeks at Dublin's Eblana Theatre, revived by the Lyric, and broadcast by Radio Éireann and the BBC Home Service almost ten times by 1967. Friel had a short stint as "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie's theater in early-1960s Minneapolis; he remarked on it as "enabling" in that it gave him "courage and daring to attempt things".
Shortly after returning from his time at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Friel wrote Philadelphia Here I Come!. The play made him instantly famous in Dublin, London, and New York. The Loves of Cass McGuire, and Lovers were both successful in Ireland, with Lovers also popular in The United States. Despite Friel's successes in playwriting, Friel in the period saw himself as primarily a short story writer, in a 1965 interview stating, "I don't concentrate on the theatre at all. I live on short stories."
Friel then turned his attention to contemporary Irish political issues, writing The Mundy Scheme and Volunteers. Both plays heavily satirised the government of Ireland. The latter depicted an archaeological excavation on the day before the site was turned over to a hotel developer, using Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. The play's title refers to a group of Irish Republican Army detainees who have been indefinitely interned by the Irish government, and the term Volunteer is both ironic, in that as prisoners they have no free will, and political, in that the IRA used the term to refer to its members. Using the site as a physical metaphor for the nation's history, the play's action examines how Irish history has been commodified, sanitized, and oversimplified to fit the political needs of society.
By 1968, Friel was again living in Derry, a hotbed of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement, where incidents such as the Battle of the Bogside inspired Friel's choice to write a new play set in the city. The play Friel began drafting in Derry would eventually become The Freedom of the City. Defying a government ban, Friel marched with members of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against the policy of internment on 13 January 1972, an event that would become known as Bloody Sunday. During the march, British troops from the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment opened fire on the marchers, killing 14 people and wounding a further 26. His personal experience of being fired at by soldiers during the march greatly affected the drafting of The Freedom of the City as a heavily political play. In the interview, Friel recalled: "It was really a shattering experience that the British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot thirteen people... to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is really a terrifying experience."

1976 – 1989

By the mid-1970s, Friel had moved away from overtly political plays to examine family dynamics in a manner that has attracted many comparisons to the work of Chekhov. Living Quarters, a play that examines the suicide of a domineering father, is a retelling of the Theseus/Hippolytus myth in a contemporary Irish setting. This play, with its focus on several sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother, serves as a type of preparation for Friel's more successful Aristocrats, a Chekhovian study of a once-influential family's financial collapse and, perhaps, social liberation from the aristocratic myths that have constrained the children. Aristocrats was the first of three plays premiered over a period of eighteen months which would come to define Friel's career as a dramatist, the others being Faith Healer and Translations.
Faith Healer is a series of four conflicting monologues delivered by dead and living characters who struggle to understand the life and death of Frank Hardy, the play's itinerant healer who can neither understand nor command his unreliable powers, and the lives sacrificed to his destructive charismatic life. Many of Friel's earlier plays had incorporated assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, portraying dead characters in "Winners" of Lovers, ''Freedom, and Living Quarters, a Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in Freedom of the City, metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in Living Quarters. These experiments came to fruition in Faith Healer. Later in Friel's career, such experimental aspects became buried beneath the surface of more seemingly realist plays like Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa ; however, avant-garde techniques remain a fundamental aspect of Friel's work into his late career.
Translations was premiered in 1980 at Guildhall, Derry by the Field Day Theatre Company, with Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, and Ray MacAnally. Set in 1833, it is a play about language, the meeting of English and Irish cultures, the looming Great Famine, the coming of a free national school system that will eliminate the traditional hedge schools, the English expedition to convert all Irish place names into English, and the crossed love between an Irish woman who speaks no English and an English soldier who speaks no Irish. It was an instant success. The innovative conceit of the play is to stage two language communities, which have few and very limited ways to speak to each other, for the English know no Irish, while only a few of the Irish know English. Translations went on to be one of the most translated and staged of all plays in the latter 20th century, performed in Estonia, Iceland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, along with most of the world's English-speaking countries. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for 1985. Neil Jordan completed a screenplay for a film version of Translations that was never produced. Friel commented on Translations: "The play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost."
Despite growing fame and success, the 1980s is considered Friel's artistic "Gap" as he published so few original works for the stage: Translations in 1980, The Communication Cord in 1982, and Making History in 1988. Privately, Friel complained both of the work required managing Field Day and of his fear that he was "trying to impose a 'Field Day' political atmosphere" on his work. However, this is also a period during which he worked on several minor projects that filled out the decade: a translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters, an adaptation of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, an edition of Charles McGlinchey's memoirs entitled The Last of the Name for Blackstaff Press, and Charles Macklin's play The London Vertigo in 1990. Friel's decision to premiere Dancing at Lughnasa'' at the Abbey Theatre rather than as a Field Day production initiated his evolution away from involvement with Field Day, and he formally resigned as a director in 1994.