Search results for "brian friel"
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Brian Friel in Spain: An Off-Centre Love Story
2021
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…
In the Beginning Was Silence: Brian Friel's Revisitation of the Artist
2017
When writing his 1997 play Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Brian Friel made an “exciting discovery”: Harpocrates, the God of Silence. For a writer who had been so much at pains to show on stage the inability of words to communicate the innermost feelings, this infant god was readily embraced as the perfect symbol with which to begin and end, as in the Ancient Rome, this transcendent performance. By placing the character of Bridget, an inarticulate autistic girl, at the beginning and at the ending of Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Friel counterbalances the “sound and the fury” that pervades modern life as reflected in the three couples of the play, while, at the same time, this reminds the audience of …