Brian Friel (b. 1929)

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LINKS

Emory University: Brian Friel
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Friel.html

Part of the Postcolonial Studies Web site at Emory University, this page includes an excellent biography of Ireland's most prominent playwright, along with other useful information about Friel and his works.

Brian Friel
http://www.eng.umu.se/lughnasa/brian.htm

This site offers information on Friel's life, his plays, and a helpful bibliography for anyone interested in outside research.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, in 1929, Brian Friel has become Ireland's major playwright. His distinction has grown in recent years with dramatic successes in Ireland, London, and New York. From 1950 to 1960 he was a schoolteacher, but since 1960 he has been a full-time writer. His first well-received play was Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), which tells the story of Gar O'Donnell, who is about to emigrate to the United States from his tiny hamlet of Ballybeg, County Donegal, the village Friel usually uses for his settings.

The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966) was first broadcast as a radio play and then produced in New York, Belfast, and London. It tells the story of an old woman whose hopes in life have been dashed by circumstances, none of which improve during the play. Friel developed several strains in his work after demonstrating an interest in the pathos of individual lives such as those of Gar O'Donnell and Cass McGuire. He showed a satirical streak in the political play The Mundy Scheme (1969), which focuses on a crazy plan of Irish politicians to capitalize on the Irish specialty of holding wakes for the dead. Freedom of the City was produced in Dublin, London, and Chicago in 1973 and in New York the following year. It tells the story of three very different people — Michael, twenty-two, and Skinner, twenty-one, both with differing social attitudes, and Lily, forty-three, mother of eleven—who occupy the mayor's office in the Guildhall (town hall) of Derry City during a student protest march.

The most highly regarded of Friel's plays, until Dancing at Lughnasa, was Translations (1980). Produced in Derry, London, and New York to appreciative crowds, it is set in 1833 in Baile Beg (Ballybeg) and follows the efforts of English surveyors to rename Irish places while making survey maps.

Much of Friel's work has concerned Irish political issues, but plays such as Translations are easy for non-Irish audiences to understand and appreciate. Despite its portrayal of the English as unconscious oppressors, it generated wild enthusiasm in audiences in London's National Theatre during its extensive 1981 run. Making History (1989), set in Elizabethan Ireland, again concerns English oppression and is part of a historical cycle of plays. Friel's play Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) is a personal examination of a childhood in Ballybeg in the 1930s.

Brian Friel makes his characters' speeches rich with rhythms of everyday Irish country life and the color and metaphor of people whose joy in language is intense and satisfying. He has published Selected Stories (1979) and The Diviner (1983), a book of short stories. In addition to all this, he has also translated Chekhov's Three Sisters (1981) and adapted Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1987) for the stage. Friel’s most recent play is Give Me Your Answer, Do! (2000).

Friel is a prodigious figure in contemporary literature. According to June Schuslter, Friel’s emphasis on communication—spoken and unspoken—and his "commitment to dramatizing the Irish national character and dilemma are responsible for Friel’s deserved place among Ireland’s most important contemporary playwrights."

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