I was all on about the history, about the fight between the Irish and their English masters (the play is set in 1833 in rural Ireland, in the fictional town of Ballybeg, to which Friel would return again and again as setting for his works).
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“Brian was Ireland’s Chekhov”, he said.
He said Friel’s plays “touched on the parochial and the universal”.
“He is one of the great Irish playwrights of our time”, the Irish Arts Council said in a statement.
Brian Friel distrusted the reliability of mere facts.
“These were talents he delivered with great humour, grit and compassion”.
Mr Doran added: “As a person it was the sheer radiance of him as a person and his integrity”.
The nobel prize-winner Seamus Heaney and filmmaker Neil Jordan were collaborators of Friel’s.
“He had a unique ability to transform the local to the global and bring the past to the present which enthralled people the world over”.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the world had “lost one of the giants of the theatre”.
“Now that he has died we can begin to see his work as one huge but intimate symphony”, said the Toscaireacht, the governing committee of Aosdána.
Two of this Irish writer’s works in particular strike me as masterpieces – Faith Healer and Translations.
“His legacy is a truly remarkable canon of work – work which has already achieved classic status in his lifetime, and which will go on to be produced for many years to come”.
Friel was born on either 9 or 10 January 1929, with the precise date never being confirmed. Friel once described himself in a radio documentary as the “son of a teacher and grandson of peasants who could neither read nor write”. Told in four successive but dissenting accounts by three speakers – the consummate performer (or dazzling huckster) Frank Hardy, his wife and their English manager, Teddy – the play traces the mixed fortunes of their touring show and a fateful homecoming, but it is also as a meditation on the creative act.
(1964) and “Dancing at Lughnasa” (1990), had more than middling success on Broadway, and though both were also filmed, his genius was for the stage, not the screen.
In 1980, he founded the Field Day Theatre company alongside actor Stephen Rea in the hope of making Derry a theatrical centre.
The groundbreaking and controversial collaboration, also involving Heaney and Deane, attempted to artistically engage with The Troubles raging on the streets of Northern Ireland at the time. Brian made an immeasurable contribution to our cultural heritage which will long survive any of us.
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His other plays included The Gentle Island, The Freedom of the City and Translations.
