Ireland is to celebrate its greatest living playwright with an annual festival based around the work of Brian Friel.
Details will be announced on Monday for the Lughnasa International Friel festival which will have, at its heart, a production of one of Friel’s plays presented on both sides of the border in Donegal and Belfast.
The festival is being supported by former US president and Friel fan, Bill Clinton. “Friel’s work is an Irish treasure for the entire world,” he said. “Although many of his plays are set in his small home town of Ballybeg, the themes and issues explored in them – identity, family and conflict – have a universal appeal.
“It is his extraordinary understanding of people, their motivations and their dreams, and their sense of themselves and others, that keeps pulling us back to Friel again and again.”
The festival will be directed by Séan Doran, who is also in charge of the Samuel Beckett festival, now in its fourth year and due to open next week in Enniskillen.
They are good hands, said Friel. “If you want a festival that is tame and conventional and mildly entertaining don’t ask Séan Doran to organise it. Witness his Beckett festival in Enniskillen – it is wild and imaginative and creative and riveting. I have total confidence he’ll do the same with the Friel festival.”
The first festival, taking place between 20-31 August this year, will feature a new production of Dancing at Lughnasa, produced by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and directed by Annabelle Comyn.
As well as performances, the festival will include talks, discussions, music, dance and food.
In Belfast, there will be a programme of all-women talks called Amongst Women, featuring speakers including Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, novelist Kamila Shamsie, and writer and presenter Sandi Toksvig.
Friel, aged 86, was born in Omagh and educated at St Columb’s College, Derry, the same school that Seamus Heaney and John Hume attended, and St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where he studied for a career in the priesthood. However, instead of going into the church, he followed his father’s example into teaching, working at schools in and around Derry in the 1950s. In 1967, he moved to Donegal where he lives to this day.
His first stage success was in 1964 with Philadelphia, Here I Come! and his plays since then include The Freedom of the City (1973), Volunteers (1975), Translations (1980) Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Molly Sweeney (1994). Translations was also the first production for the important and influential Field Day theatre company, which Friel founded with the actor Stephen Rea.
• The first Lughnasa International Friel festival runs 20-31 August.
