Brian Friel
born Jan. 9, 1929, near Omagh, County
Tyrone, N.Ire.
playwright noted for his portrayals of
social and political life in both Ireland
and Northern Ireland.
Educated at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth
(B.A., 1948), and St. Joseph’s Training
College, Belfast (1949–50), he taught school
in Londonderry (Derry) for 10 years. After
The New Yorker began regular publication of
his stories, he turned to writing full time
in 1960, issuing short stories and radio and
stage plays. After a six-month tutelage at
the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis,
Minn., U.S., in 1963, he wrote his first
dramatic success, Philadelphia, Here I
Come!, produced first by the Dublin Theatre
Festival (1964) and subsequently appearing
in New York City and London to critical and
popular acclaim. The play told of a young
Irishman’s mood changes in contemplating
emigrating from Ireland to America. Soon,
Friel himself was settled in County Donegal,
Ireland.
After writing The Loves of Cass McGuire
(1966), Lovers (1967), Crystal and Fox
(1968), and The Mundy Scheme (1969), he
turned more to political themes, relating
the dilemmas of Irish life and the Troubles
in Northern Ireland in such plays as The
Freedom of the City (1973), Volunteers
(1975), Living Quarters (1977), and Making
History (1988). Many of his plays—notably
Aristocrats (1979), Translations (1980), and
the Tony award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa
(1990; film adaptation, 1998)—deal with
family ties, communication and mythmaking as
human needs, and the tangled relationships
between narrative, history, and nationality.
In Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney
(1994) Friel constructed plays consisting
entirely of monologues.
Beginning in the late 1990s he wrote a
number of adaptations of the work of Anton
Chekhov, including Uncle Vanya (1998), The
Yalta Game (2001, based on Chekhov’s story
“The Lady with a Lapdog”), and The Bear
(2002). Friel explored the tensions implicit
in English stewardship over Irish land
during the burgeoning years of the Irish
Home Rule movement of the late 19th century
in The Home Place (2005), and in 2008 he
presented an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s
Hedda Gabler.
In 1980 Friel founded the Field Day
Theatre Company in Londonderry, N.Ire., with
the actor Stephen Rea, and in 1983 the
company began publishing pamphlets, and
later anthologies, aimed at the academic
community on a wide variety of historical,
cultural, and artistic topics.
