The Freedom Of The City, or How Reality Contaminates Art

2012

The Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929) wrote his first play in 1958 and his last play-to-date in 2008 ¿ which makes five decades dedicated to the stage, with no less than thirty plays. UK society and culture have undergone deep changes in these fifty years, even more so in Ireland, and, still more dramatically so in Northern Ireland. The different tendencies in drama, the political and social circumstances in both nations ¿ the Republic and the North ¿ the evolution in the way of understanding family and religion, and the different attitudes towards gender roles have always marked Friel¿s oeuvre, so that he is regarded as a spokesman for a community that was still a British…

Agur; Eire...agur, una particular traducción de Translations

2010

When Heroes become heroines: Brian Friel re-makes history

2016

In Brian Friel's Making History (1988), the author presents the process by which minority discourses are obviated and advocates the need for silenced narratives to be given a voice in retrospect. This play, based on O'Faolain's The Great O'Neill (1942), presents the events which resulted in the infamous Flight of the Earls with a dismantling of O'Neill's myth. Friel brings awareness to the erasure of the role of women in Irish history while enacting its recovery by means of the stage. Consequently, Mabel Bagenal, O'Neill's third wife, moves from a backward position to centre stage, becoming the Earl's main counsellor. Furthermore, this character, together with that of her sister, exhibits a…

Liminality in Brian Friel's Wonderful Tennessee

2013

After the worldwide success of the 1990 play Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929), a playwright known for his search for new ways of dealing with his old preoccupations, created what many critics understood as a sequel to that play. Wonderful Tennessee, which premiered in 1993 at the Abbey Theatre, has been frequently considered Lughnasa"s younger and plainer sister. Whereas the seductiveness of the former cannot be denied, I intend to defend in this article the importance in Friel"s oeuvre of Wonderful Tennessee, a play rich in meaning and original in form that presents a complete rite of passage as described in Victor Turner"s anthropological studies. Friel unites elements that …