Brian Friel was born in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1929. Originally intending to enter the priesthood, he studied at St. Patrick's College seminary in Maynooth from 1946 to 1948. By 1949, however, his vocational plans had changed, and he entered St. Joseph's Teacher Training School in Belfast, where he studied for one year. Beginning in 1950, he spent a decade as a school teacher in Londonderry. In 1954 he married Anne Morrison; together they have had five children.
Friel began his literary career as a short story writer, and by 1960 his work was regularly being accepted for publication by The New Yorker magazine. This success led him to quit his teaching job and devote his full time to writing. Meanwhile, he had been developing as a dramatist as well, and by 1963 he had had two plays produced on Irish radio, and three staged in theaters in Belfast and Dublin. One of these, The Enemy Within, was produced at the prestigious Abbey Theater, a stamp of approval which brought Friel's work wide notice in Ireland.
Despite these early accomplishments in the theater, Friel believed that his practical understanding of the stage was seriously deficient. Accordingly, he spent several months in 1963 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis observing the work of its brilliant and innovative artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie.
In 1964, the Dublin Theatre Festival presented Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Friel's first international success. Produced in London and New York as well as in Ireland, this work was widely praised for its unconventional approach to staging (the main character is played by two actors, representing his private and public selves), as well as for its "honest, lyrical, unaffected and affecting" emotions.
Over the course of the next two decades, Friel would go on to write some twenty plays including such well-known works as Lovers (1967), The Freedom of the City (1973), Translations (1980), and his most successful work to date, Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a Tony Award winner for 1992.
Friel's most successful work deals with the recurrent themes of Irish literature. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! a young man must come to terms with his conflicting emotions as he says good-bye to his native Irish village on the eve of his emigration to America. Friel strikes a more public and political note in The Freedom of the City and Translations. In the former, three civil-rights demonstrators are killed by British forces during a 1970 disturbance in Londonderry, while the latter play, set in Donegal in 1833, concerns the resistance of native Gaelic-speakers to Britain's policy of imposing the English language on their Irish subjects.
In each of these plays, as Jane Schlueter has noted, Friel explores the "interplay of reality, memory, and dream suggest[ing] the spiritual flux of a people whose sense of tradition and place is frequently at war with contemporary realities." Charles Murray notes that for "Friel there was [a]. . . gap between the individual mind . . . and a social reality which was crumbling at an alarming rate, so that old beliefs, old values, and settled lifestyles . . . no longer retained a satisfying viability."
Dancing at Lughnasa returns to the theme of Irish identity under siege in a changing world. The play combines "reality, memory, and dream" in a way that has become a hallmark of Friel's work as a playwright.
Friel began his literary career as a short story writer, and by 1960 his work was regularly being accepted for publication by The New Yorker magazine. This success led him to quit his teaching job and devote his full time to writing. Meanwhile, he had been developing as a dramatist as well, and by 1963 he had had two plays produced on Irish radio, and three staged in theaters in Belfast and Dublin. One of these, The Enemy Within, was produced at the prestigious Abbey Theater, a stamp of approval which brought Friel's work wide notice in Ireland.
Despite these early accomplishments in the theater, Friel believed that his practical understanding of the stage was seriously deficient. Accordingly, he spent several months in 1963 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis observing the work of its brilliant and innovative artistic director, Tyrone Guthrie.
In 1964, the Dublin Theatre Festival presented Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Friel's first international success. Produced in London and New York as well as in Ireland, this work was widely praised for its unconventional approach to staging (the main character is played by two actors, representing his private and public selves), as well as for its "honest, lyrical, unaffected and affecting" emotions.
Over the course of the next two decades, Friel would go on to write some twenty plays including such well-known works as Lovers (1967), The Freedom of the City (1973), Translations (1980), and his most successful work to date, Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a Tony Award winner for 1992.
Friel's most successful work deals with the recurrent themes of Irish literature. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! a young man must come to terms with his conflicting emotions as he says good-bye to his native Irish village on the eve of his emigration to America. Friel strikes a more public and political note in The Freedom of the City and Translations. In the former, three civil-rights demonstrators are killed by British forces during a 1970 disturbance in Londonderry, while the latter play, set in Donegal in 1833, concerns the resistance of native Gaelic-speakers to Britain's policy of imposing the English language on their Irish subjects.
In each of these plays, as Jane Schlueter has noted, Friel explores the "interplay of reality, memory, and dream suggest[ing] the spiritual flux of a people whose sense of tradition and place is frequently at war with contemporary realities." Charles Murray notes that for "Friel there was [a]. . . gap between the individual mind . . . and a social reality which was crumbling at an alarming rate, so that old beliefs, old values, and settled lifestyles . . . no longer retained a satisfying viability."
Dancing at Lughnasa returns to the theme of Irish identity under siege in a changing world. The play combines "reality, memory, and dream" in a way that has become a hallmark of Friel's work as a playwright.