Brian Friel

Ill-fated love affair between British soldier and Irish peasant girl set in 1833 Ireland during British attempt to replace native language, Gaelic, with English.

A Play

Translations

Broadway hit about a young Irishman on the eve of his emigration to America.

Philadelphia, Here I Come!

Despite their hardships, five sisters living in rural Ireland in 1936 are able to embrace life and all its complexities and dance with joy in their hearts.

Dancing at Lughnasa

The central character of this play is Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who led an Irish and Spanish alliance against the armies of Elizabeth I in an attempt to drive the English out of Ireland. The action takes place before and after the Battle of Kinsale, at which the alliance was defeated: with O'Neill at home in Dungannon, as a fugitive in the mountains, and finally exiled in Rome. In his handling of this momentous episode Brian Friel has avoided the conventions of 'historical drama' to produce a play about history, the continuing process.

Making History

Friel - Kelly - McGahern - Montague - Mac Mathúna - Daly - Healy - Devlin

Contemporary Irish Short Stories

The Freedom of the City

Dancing at Lughnasa, Fathers and Sons, Making History, Wonderful Tennessee and Molly Sweeney (Contemporary Classics (Faber & Faber))

Brian Friel: Plays 2

Plays (Faber Contemporary Classics)

“Dispassionate eloquence and psychological honesty…. Brian Friel’s writing has such vitality and warmth, such kindly accuracy of observation.” – London Sunday Times From one of Ireland’s best living playwrights, this striking piece of dramatic writing is a daring piece of theater. Keeping the play’s three characters on stage at all times to speak directly to the audience, Brian Friel presents three points of view to the same intriguing tale. Molly herself, blind since she was an infant, tells of her world before and after an operation to try to restore her sight. Her husband, itinerant champion of good causes, talks of his passion to help her. Her once famous eye surgeon, now a whiskey-sodden recluse in Donegal, sees the operation as his chance to reclaim his reputation. Each of their voices interweaves, threading in and out with details, spinning a lush and sensate narrative, and carrying us effortlessly to an unexpected and poignant conclusion. Deceptively simple, yet richly multilayered—combining both an insightful story about the way we perceive our existence with an allegory for our times—Molly Sweeney is an Irish storyteller’s art to create an unforgettable theater piece, painting scenery and rousing emotions with nothing more than the simple purity of beautifully rendered words.

Molly Sweeney

Lauded for his rhythmical and supple writing, charged with despair and enchantment, Brian Friel's play Faith Healer was first produced at the Longacre Theatre, New York, in 1979 and revived by the Almeida Theatre, London, in 2001

Faith Healer

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

A translation of Chekhov's play presents its characteristics' resolution to return to Moscow, their great passion, and their gradual self-realization.

A Translation of the Play by Anton Chekhov

Three Sisters

The Best Stories of Brian Friel

The Diviner

Lovers

Winners ; Part 2: Losers

This third collection by Brian Friel contains two original works: Performances, which considers the relationship between the private life and public work of the composer Leos Janácek; and The Home Place, set in Ballybeg, Donegal, at the dawn of Home Rule. There are three masterful plays based on stories by Chekhov; and Friel's exquisite versions of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler and of Turgenev's A Month in the Country. Performances 'A minor work the way Thomas Mann's Death in Venice or Beckett's Endgame is a minor work. Deceptively brisk and light in tone but taut and gravely pregnant with meaning... for Friel, life creates its own symbolism and poetry, and so it does in this play.' Sunday Times The Home Place 'A rich, allusive, densely layered play, which has echoes of Friel's masterly Translations while reminding one that he has spent much of his recent life adapting and translating Chekhov... Friel hauntingly conveys the pathos of exile and the delusion of ownership.' Guardian Hedda Gabler 'Across the gulf of the 20th century one great playwright is talking to another... neither a simple translation nor, as the official title has it, or a 'new version', but something altogether larger.' The Irish Times

Three Sisters; A Month in the Country; Uncle Vanya; The Yalta Game; The Bear; Afterplay; Performances; The Home Place; Hedda Gabler

Brian Friel: Plays 3

Drama / 9 m., 6 f. / Var. sets. In rural Russia in the mid nineteenth century, a brilliant, anarchic young medical student arrives at the provincial family villa of his best friend, Arkady, for the summer vacation. He wants to despise the family for their imperturbable complacency and bourgeois effeteness, but he is tormented by conflicting emotions. His desperate action has tragic consequences. "The evening leaves you pondering not just the play's political implications but the ageless tragedy

Fathers and Sons

Selected Plays

Christopher Murray

Since the success of "Philadelphia, Here I Come!" in 1964, Brian Friel has written over twenty plays, successively confirming his reputation as a major dramatist of the twentieth century. But Friel had written plays and short stories before that, giving up his teaching job to become a full-time writer in 1960 and living for part of that time in the United States. This collection of essays, diary extracts and interviews from 1964 to 1999 delves into his work and life both before and after his landmark play. Highlighting his working processes and analyzing the work in relation to both social and political sensibilities, the volume offers a wealth of material in celebration of a writer described by the Observer as "the most profound and poetic of contemporary Irish dramatists."

Essays, Diaries, Interviews : 1964-1999

Plays

With the production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964, Brian Friel established his claim to be the true heir of such distinguished predecessors as Yeats, Synge, O'Casey and Beckett. Since then his work has consistently demonstrated that his strength is an equal awareness of the conditions of individual lives and the historical and political forces affecting them. The plays in this first volume (Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Freedom of the City, Living Quarters, Aristocrats, Faith Healer and Translations) are introduced by Professor Seamus Deane of University College, Dublin.

Brian Friel

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