A common setting for Friel's plays is in or around the fictional town of "
Ballybeg" (from the Irish
Baile Beag, meaning "Small Town").
Translations,
The Communication Cord,
Dancing at Lughnasa,
Wonderful Tennessee,
Molly Sweeney,
Give Me Your Answer Do! and
The Home Place, while the seminal event of
Faith Healer takes place in the town. These plays present an extended history of this imagined community, with
Translations and
The Home Place set in the nineteenth century, and
Dancing at Lughnasa in the 1930s. With the other plays set in "the present" but written throughout the playwright's career from the early 1960s through the late 1990s, the audience is presented with the evolution of rural Irish society, from the isolated and backward town that Gar flees in the 1964
Philadelphia, Here I Come! to the prosperous and multicultural small city of
Molly Sweeney (1994) and
Give Me Your Answer Do! (1997), where the characters have health clubs, ethnic restaurants, and regular flights to the world's major cities.
1959 – 1975 Friel's first radio plays were produced by
Ronald Mason for the
BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958:
A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and
To This Hard House (24 April 1958). Friel began writing short stories for
The New Yorker in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections:
The Saucer of Larks (1962) and
The Gold in the Sea (1966). These were followed by
A Doubtful Paradise, his first stage play, produced by the Ulster Group Theatre in late August 1960. Friel also wrote 59 articles for
The Irish Press, a Dublin-based party-political newspaper, from April 1962 to August 1963; this series included short stories, political editorials on life in Northern Ireland and Donegal, his travels to Dublin and New York City, and his childhood memories of Derry, Omagh, Belfast, and Donegal. Early in Friel's career, the Irish journalist Sean Ward even referred to him in an
Irish Press article as one of the Abbey Theatre's "rejects". Friel's play,
The Enemy Within (1962) enjoyed success, despite only being on the Abbey stage for 9 performances. Belfast's Lyric Theatre revived it in September 1963 and the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann both aired it in 1963. Although Friel later withdrew
The Blind Mice (1963), it was by far the most successful play of his very early period, playing for 6 weeks at Dublin's Eblana Theatre, revived by the Lyric, and broadcast by Radio Éireann and the BBC Home Service almost ten times by 1967. Friel had a short stint as "observer" at
Tyrone Guthrie's theater in early-1960s Minneapolis; he remarked on it as "enabling" in that it gave him "courage and daring to attempt things". Friel then turned his attention to contemporary Irish political issues, writing
The Mundy Scheme (1969) and
Volunteers (1975). Both plays heavily satirised the
government of Ireland. The latter depicted an archaeological excavation on the day before the site was turned over to a hotel developer, using Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference. The play's title refers to a group of
Irish Republican Army detainees who have been indefinitely interned by the Irish government, and the term
Volunteer is both ironic, in that as prisoners they have no free will, and political, in that the IRA used the term to refer to its members. Using the site as a physical metaphor for the nation's history, the play's action examines how Irish history has been commodified, sanitized, and oversimplified to fit the political needs of society. By 1968, Friel was again living in Derry, a hotbed of the
Northern Ireland civil rights movement, where incidents such as the
Battle of the Bogside inspired Friel's choice to write a new play set in the city. The play Friel began drafting in Derry would eventually become
The Freedom of the City (1973). Defying a government ban, Friel marched with members of the
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against the policy of internment on 13 January 1972, an event that would become known as
Bloody Sunday. During the march, British troops from the
1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment opened fire on the marchers, killing 14 people and wounding a further 26. His personal experience of being fired at by soldiers during the march greatly affected the drafting of
The Freedom of the City as a heavily political play. In the interview, Friel recalled: "It was really a shattering experience that the
British army, this disciplined instrument, would go in as they did that time and shoot thirteen people... to have to throw yourself on the ground because people are firing at you is really a terrifying experience."
Living Quarters (1977), a play that examines the suicide of a domineering father, is a retelling of the Theseus/Hippolytus myth in a contemporary Irish setting. This play, with its focus on several sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother, serves as a type of preparation for Friel's more successful
Aristocrats (1979), a Chekhovian study of a once-influential family's financial collapse and, perhaps, social liberation from the aristocratic myths that have constrained the children.
Aristocrats was the first of three plays premiered over a period of eighteen months which would come to define Friel's career as a dramatist, the others being
Faith Healer (1979) and
Translations (1980). Many of Friel's earlier plays had incorporated assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in
Philadelphia, Here I Come!, portraying dead characters in "Winners" of
Lovers, Freedom, and
Living Quarters, a Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in
Freedom of the City, metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in
Living Quarters. These experiments came to fruition in
Faith Healer. Later in Friel's career, such experimental aspects became buried beneath the surface of more seemingly realist plays like
Translations (1980) and
Dancing at Lughnasa (1990); however, avant-garde techniques remain a fundamental aspect of Friel's work into his late career.
Translations was premiered in 1980 at
Guildhall, Derry by the Field Day Theatre Company, Friel had been thinking about writing a "
Lough Derg" play for several years, and his
Wonderful Tennessee (less of a critical success after its premiere in 1993 when compared to other plays from this time) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate the birthday of one of their members with alcohol and culinary delicacies.
Give Me Your Answer Do! premiered in 1997 and recounts the lives and careers of two novelists and friends who pursued different paths; one writing shallow, popular works, the other writing works that refuse to conform to popular tastes. After an American university pays a small fortune for the popular writer's papers, the same collector arrives to review the manuscripts of his friend. The collector prepares to announce his findings at a dinner party when the existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based upon the writer's daughter forces all present to reassess. Entering his eighth decade, Friel found it difficult to maintain the writing pace that he returned to in the 1990s; indeed, between 1997 and 2003 he produced only the very short one-act plays "The Bear" (2002), "The Yalta Game" (2001), and "Afterplay" (2002), all published under the title
Three Plays After (2002). The latter two plays stage Friel's continued fascination with Chekhov's work. "The Yalta Game" is concerned with Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Lapdog," "Afterplay" is an imagining of a near-romantic meeting between Andrey Prozorov of Chekhov's
Three Sisters and Sonya Serebriakova of his
Uncle Vanya. It has been revived several times (including being part of the Friel/Gate Festival in September 2009) and had its world premiere at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The most innovative work of Friel's late period is
Performances (2003). A graduate researching the impact of
Leoš Janáček's platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work playfully and passionately argues with the composer, who appears to host her at his artistic retreat more than 70 years after his death; all the while, the
Alba String Quartet's players intrude on the dialogue, warm up, then perform the first two movements of
Janáček's Second String Quartet in a tableau that ends the play.
The Home Place (2005), focusing on the ageing Christopher Gore and the last of Friel's plays set in Ballybeg, was also his final full-scale work. Although Friel had written plays about the Catholic gentry, this is his first play directly considering the Protestant experience. In this work, he considers the first hints of the waning of Ascendancy authority during the summer of 1878, the year before Charles Stuart Parnell became president of the Land League and initiated the Land Wars. After a sold-out season at the
Gate Theatre in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at the
Guthrie Theater in September 2007. ==List of works==