How Brian Friel redefined drama

By Irving Wardle

Should you be passing through the depths of the Irish countryside, you may well run into people who will jerk a thumb at some venerable ruin and say it’s the work of Elizabeth I or Oliver Cromwell, as though these English vandals had struck only the other week. However, if you confine your Irish experience to theatre-going, you will rarely find a play in which the dead and the living similarly rub shoulders.

That they do so a little more nowadays is largely thanks to the master dramatist, Brian Friel, who died last week aged 86, and who redefined the form of Irish playwriting no less than Beckett. The two are complementary: in life, Beckett followed the standard pattern of Irish playwrights, by getting out and beating the British and French on their own soil. Friel disdained the escape route and achieved universality by staying put. Thus, Beckett’s dramatic territory is anywhere on earth, while Friel’s remained his childhood holiday home in Donegal, renamed Ballybeg (meaning “small town”), which has turned out to be a home to all the world. He expanded this patch of land by mining it. Increasingly as time went by, his people came to inhabit a fragile, present-tense shell, while beneath them and sometimes striking through it, lurk the still commanding spirits of the Irish past—Victorian colonialists, the fleeing aristocratic “Wild Geese”, down to Ireland’s pre-Christian gods who cause women to dance.