Brian Friel

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > Theater: Biographies

Brian Friel , 1929–, Irish playwright, b. Killyglogher, Northern Ireland. Treating themes that enmesh both Irelands, he has become the most acclaimed contemporary Irish dramatist. Friel's family moved to Derry (1939), and he attended St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (B.A., 1949) and a teacher's training college. He taught for 10 years, published short stories, produced radio plays, and became a full-time writer in 1960. He studied (1963) with Tyrone Guthrie at his theater in Minneapolis, and while there wrote his first successful play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which deals with a young Irishman considering emigration to the United States. Since the 1970s Friel has written much about the political realities of the two Irelands, as in The Freedom of the City (1973) and Living Quarters (1977). In 1980 he and actor Stephen Rea formed the Field Day Theater Company, Northern Ireland, which soon (1981) produced Friel's Translations. Friel has also written of Irish family life, skillfully mingling it with surreal effects, in such plays as Aristocrats (1979) and the internationally known Dancing at Lughnasa (1990; Tony Award). Among his other plays are Lovers (1968), Volunteers (1975), Faith Healer (1979), Making History (1988), and Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1999). Friel also continues to write short stories.

Bibliography: See biography by G. O'Brien (1980); studies by E. S. Maxwell (1973), U. Dantanus (1985), E. Andrews (1995), and R. Pine, ed. (1997).

Friel, Brian (1929– ), Irish playwright, born Omagh, Co. Tyrone. The suspicious, often despairing sensibility of Brian Friel's plays may be traced to the experience of growing up as a Catholic outsider in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. His great theme is the gulf between private experience and the public world. Friel began as a short story writer and retains a strong interest in monologue and direct narration, evident in such plays as Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994). His first international success, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), in which different actors play the main character's public and private selves, established both his reputation and his central concerns. Typically, as in Translations (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), the world on stage is about to implode, a way of seeing that gives substance to his identification as an Irish Chekhov. Three short plays based on Chekhov's works, performed in 2001 and 2002, were published as Three Plays After (2002).