The success on Broadway of Philadelphia, Here I Come in 1964 made the playwright an global figure in the arts. It follows a young man from small-town Ireland to America.
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Beloved of professional and amateur theatre groups, Friel’s work remains extremely popular in Ireland. It was nominated for best play at the 1966 Tony Awards.
Friel’s most famous play is Dancing At Lughnasa.
His masterpiece was “Faith Healer”, a haunting 1979 play about three people and their interlocking memories. He was also regularly honored.
His short stories were published in The New Yorker before his first two collections, The Saucer Of Larks and The Gold In The Sea.
“His writing is always beautifully crafted, so subtle and, of course, he wrote great characters”. He was also renowned for his adaptation of other works, including plays by Chekhov.
“The reason for the worry is that the playwright is never fully his own man”, he said in 1971.
His talent produced works such as Dancing at Lughnasa and Philadelphia, Here I Come, earning him fame and recognition around the world.
Two years later he moved from Derry to Greencastle in Co Donegal, where among other works he penned The Loves Of Cass McGuire, Lovers, The Mundy Scheme, The Freedom Of The City, Volunteers, Living Quarters and Faith Healer.
Friel often set his dramas in and around the fictional Irish town of Ballybeg, County Donegal, a quasi-rural place that saw its fair share of human joy and sadness.
His mother Mary McLoone was formerly a postmistress in Glenties. Its inaugural work, “Translations”, proved its greatest stage triumph, and Field Day inspired a parallel literary project involving future Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney. Friel qualified as a teacher at St. Joseph’s Training College in Belfast in 1950.
President Michael D Higgins led tributes to Brian Friel, describing the teacher-turned-writer as a warm and gritty friend, full of generosity. In the meantime an unseen father, a retired judge, disintegrates offstage as the traumas and secrets of his children are steadily brought to light – and from which, finally, they may be delivered.
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Mr. Friel was so clear-sighted that he could even write about Irish politics without sinking into the fever swamp of knee-jerk ranting. Symbolic and profound, the play itself might serve as evidence: it bombed on Broadway but later created a theatrical legend in Donal McCann’s celebrated Abbey performance, and it is now widely considered to be Friel’s greatest work.
