Friel, Brian

Friel, Brian (1929– ), Ulster dramatist, whose favourite theme is the interaction between various kinds of institutional failure—of government, Church, class, and family—and that of the individual personality. His play This Doubtful Paradise was produced by the Ulster Group Theatre, Belfast, in 1959, but his first outstanding success was Philadelphia, Here I Come! (Dublin, 1964; NY, 1966; London, 1967), in which a despairing young Irishman contemplating emigration to America seeks some sign of regret from an unresponsive father. It was followed by The Loves of Cass McGuire (NY, 1966; Dublin, 1967); Lovers (Dublin, 1967; NY, 1968; London, 1969), consisting of two plays Winners and Losers; and Crystal and Fox (Dublin, 1968; NY, 1973). In The Freedom of the City (London and Dublin, 1973; NY, with Kate Reid, 1974) three innocent people are shot dead during a Derry demonstration. Faith Healer (NY, 1979; Dublin, 1980; London, 1981) was followed by two of his finest plays: Aristocrats (Dublin, 1979; London, 1988), about the decline of a family of Catholic gentry; and Translations, premièred in Derry in 1980 by Field Day Theatre Company of which he was co-founder. Produced in New York and London in 1981, it is set in a ‘hedge school’ in Donegal in 1833, telling with humour and compassion of the resentment caused by the arrival of a British Army unit to make the first maps, the rationalization of Celtic place-names into English symbolizing the cultural rape of Ireland. Friel's translation of Chekhov's Three Sisters was staged in Derry in 1981, and his adaptation of Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons at the National Theatre in 1987. He also wrote The Communication Cord (1983) and Making History (1988), a companion piece to Translations which re-examines the life of an Irish national hero. Dancing at Lughnasa (NT, 1990; NY, 1991) movingly shows five spinster sisters coping with poverty and frustration in Ireland in the 1930s.