Irish Studies

Abstract

Brian Friel has long been acclaimed as Ireland’s leading contemporary playwright. After his
breakout success with the 1966 play Philadelphia, Here I Come!, he went on to script 24 plays for Broadway and West End theatres, many of which depict pivotal moments in Irish history as well as Northern Irish political unrest. In 1980, in response to the brutality of the Troubles, he co-founded the Field Day theatre company, whose first production was Friel’s play Translations, staged in a political space, the Londonderry Guildhall, in the midst of IRA hunger strikes and escalating violence among paramilitaries and the British army. Over the course of his life, Friel won numerous awards, including the 1992 Tony for best play for Dancing at Lughnasa. When he died in October 2015, the New York Times eulogized him as “the Irish Chekhov,” noting his “distinctive blend of melancholy and humor.” The Guardian called him “the father of modern Irish drama.”

His earliest works—radio plays and short stories written between 1956 and 1966—are less well known, however, because Friel rarely gave interviews or discussed the start of his career. This talk will use newly discovered letters and documents from the BBC and New Yorker archives to develop a more detailed understanding of how Ireland’s greatest contemporary dramatist embarked upon his writing life