Brian Friel in Spain: An Off-Centre Love Story

Spanish theatres are not prolific in the staging of Irish playwrights. However, the Northern Irish writer Brian Friel (1929-2015) has been a curious exception, his plays having been performed in different cities in Spain since William Layton produced Amantes: vencedores y vencidos (Lovers: Winners and Losers) in 1972. The origin of Friel's popularity in this country may be attributed to what many theatre directors and audiences considered to be a parallel political situation between post-colonial Ireland and the historical peripheral communities with a language other than Spanish: Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia; the fact is that the number of Catalan directors who have staged wor…