DUBLIN — Brian Friel, Ireland’s best-known playwright of the latter half of the 20th century, whose plays including “Dancing at Lughnasa,” “The Faith Healer” and “Translations” were performed throughout the world, died Friday, Irish media said. He was 86 years old.
In his works, many of which were based in the fictional Irish town of Ballybeg, Friel held up a mirror to Irish society and captured relationships, conflicts and contradictions that had a universal resonance.
“He was forensically interrogating our own history, our history of colonization, our relations with Britain, our relations with the enemy within, sometimes, and he was ruthless about that,” Fiach McConghail, director of the Abbey Theatre, told state broadcaster RTE.
The Abbey, Ireland’s national theater, produced Friel’s first play, “The Enemy Within” in 1962, while he was still working as a teacher.
Sean Doran, an artistic director who mounted a festival of Friel’s plays in August in Belfast and Donegal in cooperation with the playwright and his family, ranked Friel among the giants of modern Irish writing.
“He was one of the great artists of our culture alongside in my view the great known names of (Samuel) Beckett and (James) Joyce,” Doran told Reuters. “What was so special about him was that he wrote so majorly of our island, north and south.”
Born in Killcogher, near Omagh, County Tyrone in Northern Ireland in 1929, Friel moved with his family to Londonderry when he was 10. He attended St. Columb’s College, where his fellow alumni included the poet Seamus Heaney, who died in 2013.
Friel received his Bachelor of Arts from St. Pat’s College, Maynooth in 1948 and qualified as a teacher at St. Joseph’s Training College in Belfast but shortly thereafter became involved in writing and theater.
“He wrote fine short stories, but he committed himself to the theater and to having us develop an understanding of who we were as a people, as a people with a very conflicted history,” Anthony Roche, a professor of literature at University College Dublin and author of a book on Friel, told RTE.
“He never did it in a simplified way; he did it with beautiful language,” Roche said.
Friel won three Tony Awards in 1992 for “Dancing at Lughnasa,” a play about five maiden aunts in Ireland in the 1930s. It was turned into a film starring Meryl Streep in 1998.
His plays also won the Evening Standard Award, the Olivier Award and the New York Drama Critic’s Circle Award.
Friel wrote 24 published plays, two short-story collections and adapted works by Ibsen, Chekhov and Turgenev.
Irish President Michael D. Higgins described Friel as “a giant of Irish literature and thought.”
Prime Minister Enda Kenny said in a statement: “The nation and the world have lost one of the giants of theater.
“His mythical stories from Ballybeg reached all corners of the world from Dublin to London to Broadway and onto the silver screen,” Kenny said, referring to the fictional town where Friel set many of his works.
“All of his plays, including ‘Translations’, ‘Faith Healer’, ‘Philadelphia, Here I Come!’ and ‘Dancing at Lughnasa,’ will forever form part of the canon of greatness in dramatic writing,” Kenny said.
Friel died after a long illness at his home in Donegal, RTE reported. He is survived by his wife, Anne, and five children.