Brian Friel

Brian Patrick Frielα (9 January 1929α – 2 October 2015) 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, and referred to as an "Irish Chekhov" and "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 more than half-century spanning career that culminated in his election to the position of Saoi of Aosdána. His plays were commonly featured on Broadway throughout this time. 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 the publication of 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 (including Best Play), 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.

The childhood home of Brian Friel, at Omagh in County Tyrone

Friel was born in 1929 at Knockmoyle, close to Omagh, County Tyrone, later moving with his family to beside the old Culmore Primary School on the Tamlaght Road in Omagh in 1935. He was the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel, a primary school teacher and later a councillor (or "corporater") on Londonderry Corporation (as it was, up until 1970, officially called), the local city council in Derry. Friel's mother, Mary McLoone, was postmistress of Glenties, County Donegal. The family moved to Derry when Friel was ten years old. There, he attended St Columb's College, the same school attended by Seamus Heaney, John Hume, Seamus Deane, Phil Coulter, Eamonn McCann and Paul Brady.

Friel received his B.A. from St Patrick's College, Maynooth (1945–48), and qualified as a teacher at St Joseph's Training College in Belfast, 1949–50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has 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 writer, living off his savings. In the late 1960s, the Friels moved from 13 Malborough Street, Derry to Muff, County Donegal, eventually settling outside Greencastle, County Donegal.

After a long illness Friel died at the age of 86 in the early morning of Friday 2 October 2015 in Greencastle, County Donegal. He was survived by his wife Anne and children Mary, Judy, Sally and David. A daughter, Patricia, predeceased him in 2012.

A common setting for Friel's plays is in or around the fictional town of "Ballybeg" (from the Irish Baile Beag, meaning "Small Town"). 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 (1994) and Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), where the characters have health clubs, ethnic restaurants, and regular flights to the world's major cities.

Over the course of a career spanning more than half a century, Friel had 24 original plays published, alongside two short-story collections, as well as eight published (and three more unpublished) adaptations, primarily focusing on Ibsen, Chekov and Turgenev. His plays have been compared favourably to those of contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Tennessee Williams.

1959 – 1975

Friel began writing short stories for The New Yorker in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). His first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and To This Hard House (24 April 1958). These were followed by A Doubtful Paradise, his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. While the play was politely received, such review titles as "Difficulties for cast in Group play" in the Belfast Telegraph and "New Ulster play at Group just avoids bathos" in The News Letter convey the play's reception. While struggling as a working writer, Friel wrote 59 articles for The Irish Press, a Dublin-based party-political newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this diverse 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.

Success was slow in arriving; in 1962, the Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects". In a 1965 interview, Friel spoke of his fear that his play A Doubtful Paradise (1960) contributed to the collapse of the Belfast-based Ulster Group Theatre. While only on the Abbey stage for 9 performances, The Enemy Within (1962) enjoyed some success; 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 (1963), it was by far his 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".

These "things" would come to fruition when, shortly after returning across the Atlantic, Friel wrote Philadelphia Here I Come! (1964). The play made him instantly famous in Dublin, London, and New York. It was turned into a film in 1975, starring Donal McCann, directed by John Quested, screenplay by Brian Friel. Friel followed PHIC! by writing of love. The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), and Lovers (1967) were both successful in Ireland, with Lovers also popular in America. Lovers was adapted into an opera by Richard Wargo entitled Ballymore (1999); the Skylight Opera Theatre of Milwaukee, U.S. premiered it in February 1999. The first part of Ballymore, "Winners" was given its Irish premiere at the Wexford Opera Festival in 2010. The second of the two parts, "Losers", had its premiere at the festival in 2013.

Friel then turned his attention to the politics of the day, releasing The Mundy Scheme (1969) and Volunteers (1975), both pointed, the first bitter, satires on Ireland's government. The latter stages an archaeological excavation on the day before the site is turned over to a hotel developer, and uses Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. In that play, the Volunteers are IRA prisoners who have been indefinitely interned by the Dublin 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.

Between these two satires, Friel released The Freedom of the City (1973), loosely based around the events of Bloody Sunday when, following Operation Demetrius, soldiers of the British 1st Battalion Parachute Brigade massacred a crowd of civilians. Friel himself defied a British government ban by marching with a Civil Rights Association demonstration against internment on 30 January 1972. Although in a 1973 interview with Eavan Boland Friel spoke of working on the play for about ten months before that, he added in a 1982 interview with Fintan O'Toole that Bloody Sunday transformed and sharpened the earlier play that became The Freedom of the City. It became one of Ireland's more popular works on The Troubles, alongside such plays as John Boyd's The Flats (1971), Stewart Love's Me Oul Segocia (1979), and Martin Lynch's The Interrogation of Ambrose Fogarty (1982). Despite this, it is actually set two years before Bloody Sunday.

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 (1977), 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 (1979), 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 (1979) and Translations (1980).

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 (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990); 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 potato 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 (the Gaelic and the English), 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 (including South Africa, Canada, the U.S. and Australia). 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 (granting written and live interviews, casting, arranging tours, etc.) 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 fill out the decade: a translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters (1981), an adaptation of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons (1987), an edition of Charles McGlinchey's memoirs entitled The Last of the Name for Blackstaff Press (1986), 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.

1990 – 2005

Friel returned to a position of Irish theatrical dominance during the 1990s, particularly with the release of Dancing at Lughnasa at the turn of the decade. Partly modelled on The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, it is set in the late summer of 1936 and loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal. Probably Friel's most successful play, it premiered at the Abbey Theatre, transferred to London's West End, and went on to Broadway. On Broadway it won three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play. A film version, starring Meryl Streep, soon followed.

Friel had been thinking about writing a "Lough Derg" play for several years, and his Wonderful Tennessee (less of a critical success after its premiere in 1993 when compared to other plays from this time) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate the birthday of one of their members with alcohol and culinary delicacies. Give Me Your Answer Do! premiered in 1997 and recounts the lives and careers of two novelists and friends who pursued different paths; one writing shallow, popular works, the other writing works that refuse to conform to popular tastes. After an American university pays a small fortune for the popular writer's papers, the same collector arrives to review the manuscripts of his friend. The collector prepares to announce his findings at a dinner party when the existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based upon the writer's daughter forces all present to reassess.

Entering his eighth decade, Friel found it difficult to maintain the writing pace that he returned to in the 1990s; indeed, between 1997 and 2003 he produced only the very short one-act plays "The Bear" (2002), "The Yalta Game" (2001), and "Afterplay" (2002), all published under the title Three Plays After (2002). The latter two plays stage Friel's continued fascination with Chekhov's work. "The Yalta Game" is concerned with Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Lapdog," "Afterplay" is an imagining of a near-romantic meeting between Andrey Prozorov of Chekhov's Three Sisters and Sonya Serebriakova of his Uncle Vanya. It has been revived several times (including being part of the Friel/Gate Festival in September 2009) and had its world premiere at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

The most innovative work of Friel's late period is Performances (2003). A graduate researching the impact of Leoš Janáček's platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work playfully and passionately argues with the composer, who appears to host her at his artistic retreat more than 70 years after his death; all the while, the Alba String Quartet's players intrude on the dialogue, warm up, then perform the first two movements of Janáček's Second String Quartet in a tableau that ends the play. The Home Place (2005), focusing on the aging Christopher Gore and the last of Friel's plays set in Ballybeg, was also his final full-scale work. Although Friel had written plays about the Catholic gentry, this is his first play directly considering the Protestant experience. In this work, he considers the first hints of the waning of Ascendancy authority during the summer of 1878, the year before Charles Stuart Parnell became president of the Land League and initiated the Land Wars. After a sold-out season at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at the Guthrie Theater in September 2007.

The Taoiseach nominated Friel to serve as a member of Seanad Éireann in 1987. He lasted until 1989. In 1989, BBC Radio launched a "Brian Friel Season", a six-play series devoted to his work; he was the first living playwright to receive such an honour. In 1999 (April–August), Friel's 70th birthday was celebrated in Dublin with the Friel Festival, during which ten of his plays were staged or presented as dramatic readings throughout Dublin. A conference, National Library exhibition, film screenings, pre-show talks, and the launching of a special issue of The Irish University Review devoted to the playwright ran in conjunction with the festival. In 1999, The Irish Times extended him the honour of a lifetime achievement award.

On 22 February 2006, President Mary McAleese presented Friel with a gold torc in recognition of his election to the position of Saoi by his fellow members of Aosdána. On acceptance of the gold Torc, Friel quipped: "I knew that being made a Saoi, really getting this award, is extreme unction; it is a final anointment—Aosdana's last rites." Only five members of Aosdána could hold this honour at the time, and Friel joined fellow Saoithe Louis le Brocquy, Benedict Kiely, Seamus Heaney and Anthony Cronin. In August 2006, Heaney (also a friend of the Friels) who had been in attendance at the 75th birthday of Friel's wife in County Donegal, suffered a stroke on the morning after the celebration.

In November 2008, The Queen's University of Belfast announced its intention to build a new theatre complex and research centre, to be named The Brian Friel Theatre and Centre for Theatre Research. Friel attended its opening in 2009.

Friel's 80th birthday fell in 2009. The journal Irish Theatre International published a Special Issue to commemorate the occasion with seven articles devoted to the playwright. The Gate Theatre staged three plays (Faith Healer, The Yalta Game, and Afterplay) during several weeks in September. In the midst of the Gate's productions, the Abbey Theatre presented "A Birthday Celebration for Brian Friel," on 13 September 2009. Although not inclined to seek publicity, Friel attended the performance amid regular seating, received a cake while the audience sang "Happy Birthday," and mingled with well wishers afterwards. The Abbey event was an evening of staged readings (excerpts from Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Translations, and Dancing at Lughnasa), the performance of Friel-specific songs and nocturnes, and readings by Thomas Kilroy and Seamus Heaney.

List

• 1988 Evening Standard Award for Best Play – Aristocrats
• 1989 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play – Aristocrats
• 1991 Laurence Olivier award for Best Play – Dancing at Lughnasa
• 1992 New York Drama Critics Circle award for best play– Dancing at Lughnasa
• 1992 Tony awards, including Best Play – Dancing at Lughnasa
• 1995 New York Drama Critics Circle award for best foreign play – Molly Sweeney
• 2006 Induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame
• 2010 Donegal Person of the Year
• Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
• Member of the British Royal Society of Literature
• Member of the Irish Academy of Letters
• Visiting Writer at Magee College (1970–71 academic year)
• Honorary doctorate from Rosary College, River Forest, Illinois (1974)

• De Breadun, Deaglan. De Breadun, Deaglan (24 July 2010). "Wisdom of former taoisigh should not be ignored". The Irish Times. Choices made by previous taoisigh have included the playwright Brian Friel, distinguished public servants such as TK Whitaker and Maurice Hayes, and prominent Northern Ireland figures such as John Robb, Seamus Mallon, Bríd Rodgers and the late Gordon Wilson 
• "Brian Friel receives award from McAleese". RTÉ News. 22 February 2006. 
• "Prestigious award for playwright Friel". Irish Examiner. 22 February 2006. Archived from the original on 4 October 2015. 
• McCrum, Robert (18 July 2009). "A life of rhyme". The Guardian. 
• "Poet 'cried for father' after stroke". BBC News. 20 July 2009. 
• "Brian Friel 1929 – 2015". Brian Friel Theatre. Archived from the original on 4 October 2015. 
• O'Kelly, Emer (6 September 2009). "Friel's deep furrow cuts to our heart". Sunday Independent. 
• "Brian Friel". Archived from the original on 4 October 2015. 
• "Theater Hall of Fame honors August Wilson, seven others". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 
• Egan, Barry (20 February 2011). "Celebrating the life of Brian". Sunday Independent. 

The National Library of Ireland houses the 160 boxes of The Brian Friel papers (Manuscript Collection List No. 73 [MSS 37,041–37,806], given as a gift to the state in December 2000), containing notebooks, manuscripts, playbills, correspondence, contracts, unpublished manuscripts, programmes, production photos, articles, uncollected essays, and a vast collection of ephemera relating to Friel's career and creative process from 1959 through 2000. It does not contain his Irish Press articles, which can be found in the Dublin and Belfast newspaper libraries.

His papers were valued at n1.2 million.

In 2011, an additional set of Friel's papers (Manuscript Collection List No. 180 [MSS 42,091 – 42,093 and MSS 49,209 – 49,350] were made available in the National Library of Ireland. These additional papers consist mainly of archival materials dating between 2000 and 2010.