Peter CostelloThe death of Brian Friel at the age of 86 marks an epoch in Irish literature. Along with Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel was an Irish writer with an international reputation, who was never tempted into exile.
Friel was one of the group of Ulster writers and critics who came to prominence in the 1960s, and whose work represents the intellectual aspect of the troubled decades that followed in the North. In his play Faith Healer the four speakers, as one critic pointed out, “question whether art leaves any imprint on a world where the debased rhetoric of politics, of authority, of group or community declares its strident claims”.
Though born in Omagh, Brian Fried’s life and work is more closely connected with his mother’s place, the Glenties in Donegal – the model for the town of Ballybeg in his work.
He was educated in Derry at St Colman’s College. He entered Maynooth for two years, but left to become a teacher. He taught in Derry for the decade before 1960.
His first great success as a dramatist (after a series of plays for BBC radio he preferred to let die) was Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), which showcased the extraordinary talents of Donald McCann. This launched a career as a playwright, with many notable productions at the Dublin Gate Theatre, which were later taken abroad.
He often lingered over the sense of a lost landscape of the rural past, but beginning with Freedom of the City (1974), his plays took on a new urgency, a reaction to the on-going Troubles.
Along with Stephen Rea, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin and Seamus Deane and others, he created the Field Day Theatre Company in Derry. From this sprang other activities, such as a long series of pamphlets which provoked wide discussion, and the Field Day Anthology, which revived interest in many neglected writers and so questioned ideas North and South about received ideas of the nature of Irish literature.
However, it should not be forgotten that Friel had begun his literary career as short story writer. He was one of the few Irish writers of his day who work was regularly published in the prestigious New Yorker, a last stronghold of that literary form. They were collected in The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966). These placed him in the great Irish tradition of the short story along with George Moore, James Joyce, Frank O’Connor and William Trevor.
Despite his acclaim as a dramatist there are many early admirers who felt that these collections (now long out of print) represent some of his finest work. But in later years they seemed to be neglected and Friel gave up the lonely voice of the short story for the more communal world of the theatre. But in any eventual estimate of his lasting position in literature his stories (with so many echoes of the themes of loss and nostalgia that emerge later in his plays) will have to be given a special place.