Brian friel: pushing the boundaries
A look back at the life and the key works of the “Irish Chekhov” Brian Friel.
One of Ireland’s most talented playwrights passed away aged 86 on 2 October. Brian Friel was born near Omagh, Co Tyrone and was the son of a schoolmaster and postmistress who were both from Glenties, Co Donegal. An intensely private person, Friel studied for a career in the priesthood before working as a maths teacher in Derry for ten years. He then moved to Donegal in the 1960s and focused on his plays.
Friel’s works have been performed across the globe, his most well-known plays include Philadelphia here I come! (1964), Translations (1980) and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990). Frequently Friel explores different types of borderline states, including the complex relationship between the present and past alongside conflicting personal, religious and political identities.
The fictional Donegal village of Ballybeg features in several of his works, representative of both north and south, and frequently shows traditional Irish values and culture struggling against modernisation. Friel has pushed the boundaries of theatre and is often an unreliable narrator, leaving his audience to rely more on hazy memories and his imagination rather than facts.
Friel had a distinctive sense of humour and irony and produced over 30 plays in 60 years. Covering a wide range of issues, he had the ability to create flawed, engaging and complex characters. Friel recognised his audience’s desire to be challenged and remarked that “the theatre is becoming more and more an intellectual exercise”.
One of Friel’s most political plays, The Freedom of the City (1973), was a response to the events of Bloody Sunday, which he took part in just a year earlier. Set in 1970 it follows three protesters fleeing from police and tear gas, who mistakenly find themselves in the Mayor’s office at Guildhall and are killed as terrorists.
Friel was appointed to Seanad Éireann and served from 1987 to 1989. He was also elected in 1982 to Aosdana, the Irish association for individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts. He married Anne Morrison in 1954 and together they had four daughters and a son.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny remarked that: “The nation and the world have lost one of the giants of theatre. His mythical stories from Ballybeg reached all corners of the world from Dublin to London to Broadway and onto the silver screen. All of his plays will forever form part of the canon of greatness in dramatic writing.”
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)
“Hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile, it can’t be held together much longer”
Arguably one of Friel’s most successful works, Dancing at Lughnasa depicts the lives of the five Mundie sisters and their priest brother who has just returned from Africa as they struggle to maintain their rural way of life. It is an autobiographical play in many respects and when Friel casts his mind back to that summer of 1936, his hazy memories guide the audience back to a time when changes in Catholic beliefs, traditional rural values and nationalism begin to show. First staged at the Abbey, it received three Tony Awards in 1992, including Best Play. It was made into a film in 1998 starring Meryl Streep.
Philadelphia here I come! (1964)
“Impermanence – anonymity – that’s what I’m looking for; a vast restless place that doesn’t give a damn about the past.”
Friel’s first stage success Philadelphia here I come! focuses on the alter ego of a young man named Gar O’Donnell on the eve of his departure from Ballybeg to begin a new life in America. Gar is portrayed by two characters, his internal ‘private’ persona and external ‘public’ self. Fantasising about life in the USA, ‘private’ Gar is unheard by other characters. Unable to communicate with his father and having lost the girl he loves to another man, he is keen to escape the limitations of life in Ireland, but is secretly torn by his attachment to it.
Translations (1980)
“…that it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.”
Described by Friel as “a play about language and only about language”, he uses the physical act of speaking to highlight problems in communication. Translations focuses on the mapping of Ireland by the Ordnance Survey in the 1830s and the translation of Gaelic places into English. Characters speak their respective languages, Irish and English, and cannot understand each other. They are unwilling to learn the each other’s language, symbolic of wider divisions. However, on stage the main language spoken by actors is English so that the audience can understand.
Aristocrats (1979)
“Less than 24 hours away from London and already we’re reverting to drunken Paddies. Must be the environment, mustn’t it?”
The most “Chekhovian” of Friel’s plays, Aristocrats shows the decline and decay of a once great Georgian house, Ballybeg Hall, and its residents the Catholic O’Donnell family. Set in the 1970s, the patriarch district judge father of the family is dying and mostly heard shouting at his children through an intercom. His daughters suffer from depression, alcoholism and the eldest has given up her illegitimate child to an orphanage. His son is a failed solicitor now working in a sausage factory in Germany with a wife and three children who may be imaginary. The family are distant, isolated and unsettled. By the end of the play they have lost their ancestral home and place in society.
