Hailed as “The Irish Chekhov”, Brian Friel’s recent passing marks a sad day for theatre. Born in Tyrone in 1929, Friel later moved to Glenties, Donegal, the renowned home of his fictional Ballybeg. Over a remarkable career that spanned half a century, Friel published an incredible total of 24 plays. An early success, Philadelphia, Here I Come! first premiered at the Gaiety Theatre as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964. This year, 51 years later, the Gaiety welcomed back another Friel play, Dancing at Lughnasa, for what would be his final Festival.

Although widely regarded as one of the greatest modern Irish dramatists, Friel’s career was slow to begin. Having worked as a struggling writer for years, with some small success on stage with the likes of The Enemy Within (1962) and The Blind Mice (1963), it wasn’t until Friel moved to Minneapolis for a few weeks to work at Tyrone Guthrie’s new Guthrie Theatre that things began to click into place. It was there, watching from the eaves, that he was first given the title of “observer”, a role that Friel would play his entire life – he maintained that there are no small people and no small experiences. Through watching others at work, he developed the courage to experiment himself and, shortly after returning to Ireland, the acclaimed Philadelphia, Here I Come! was written. Often seen as a breakthrough moment in Irish theatre, the play did more than address the rather conventional topic of immigration; it split the main character, Gar O’Donnell, in two: the public and the private. This was revolutionary at a time when Irish theatre had been, to some extent, limited by the principles of representational naturalism, as inherited from playwrights such as Seán O’Casey. It was the breakthrough Friel needed to catapult him from the Dublin stage to London and New York.

As the 1960s progressed, Friel’s career grew. With the turn of the decade, his theatrical emphasis moved towards the political landscape which embroiled Ireland at the time. Freedom of the City (1973) was completed in between his two political satires, The Mundy Scheme (1969) and Volunteers (1975). Freedom of the City, however, was his most directly political play and was hugely influenced by Bloody Sunday ― an event which shook both Friel and Ireland. The play particularly served as a furious response to the Widgery Report: whilst Friel had always been a committed nationalist, the blatant bias of the tribunal report scandalised him to a new level. The heightened scepticism and cynicism many now felt towards “official” documents added to Friel’s increasing scrutiny of the fallibility of memory and storytelling. His concern with the representation of experience, given the unreliability of language, was one which had influenced his work from an early stage. One of the great problems he found with language was with translation itself, as he explores in his 1980 play, Translations. Heavily influenced by George Steiner’s work on the impossibility of translation, Friel used a considerable amount of text from Steiner’s After Babel (1975) in the play. The question both works ask is: if there is always a level of translation between language, even a shared native language, then how might we accurately interpret an inherited language such as that handed-down through colonial imposition? For Friel, as for Steiner, all “communication interprets between privacies,” highlighting the difficult problem of decoding the intricate meanings of individual language.

Although it may be said that Freedom of the City was Friel’s most overtly political play, one of his greatest cultural and political projects may be the Field Day Theatre Company which he set up in 1980 with actor Stephen Rea in Derry. Originally intended to establish a significant theatre company in Northern Ireland, it was there that Translations first premiered. The excitement surrounding the play and the Company momentarily dissipated the boundaries separating the many factions, offering people of all political and religious persuasions images of a shared national identity to reflect upon. All involved agreed on the power of arts and culture to unite a community ― a vital function at a time of instability in the North. Friel’s own experiences in life, particularly with the Troubles, may have indeed corroborated his rather tragic view of life. His work highlighted the sympathy he had for those who suffered, were confused or defeated. Although Friel’s characters are often pitifully on the brink of destruction or extinction, they are notably ordinary. It is this consideration of somewhat inconsequential things as fundamental that makes him, in some respects, a characteristic modern playwright. Ordinary people with their messy, confused, and inadequate lives are in fact worthy of drama: one of Friel’s most quoted lines is, “My friend, confusion is not an ignoble condition”. By utilising the ordinariness of life as the substance of drama, Friel asserted himself as a remarkable modern dramatist.

First and foremost, Brian Friel was the Irish playwright. Although he wrote in a very colloquial Irish-English voice, he wrote in one which was incredibly accessible. Thus, in this way, his writing went further internationally than the likes of Tom Murphy, whose writing is slightly more idiosyncratically Irish. Friel’s lyrical language allowed him success both at home and abroad in the niche market of the Irish play. Indeed, the two overarching themes of Friel are both his remarkable kindness and his impressive business cunning. By making his plays as accessible as possible he ensured success critically and financially. His linguistic capabilities firmly established him as a central figure in the language-based tradition of Irish theatre and it is this sharpness and prowess that will ensure he remains a landmark for Irish playwrights.

The countless moving eulogies and praise offered across Ireland and the world after Brian Friel’s passing are a testament to not just the playwright, but the man himself. As well as being a savvy businessman and a giant of theatre, repeated reference is given to Friel’s incredible generosity of heart. Following the opening night of the Lyric Theatre’s recent production of Dancing at Lughnasa at the Gaiety, Jimmy Fay, Executive Producer of the Lyric, gave a heart-wrenching eulogy to the man we will all miss. As the last theatre to work with Brian Friel, the Lyric’s immense gratitude and sadness was palpable. The tears and emotion shown by Fay and the actors alike honoured the man who not only “rescued the humanity, the spirit of a people, from the ‘wrecking ball’ of history”, but who touched so many people in theatre and beyond. It is this man, the master playwright, the man who made the local universal, the linguist who eloquently explored the theatre of language, whose legacy shall endure.