BRIAN FRIEL

The central character of this play is Hugh ONeill, Earl of Tyrone, who led an Irish and Spanish alliance against the armies of Elizabeth I in an attempt to drive the English out of Ireland. The action takes place before and after the Battle of Kinsale, at which the alliance was defeated: with ONeill at home in Dungannon, as a fugitive in the mountains, and finally exiled in Rome. In his handling of this momentous episode Brian Friel has avoided the conventions of historical drama to produce a play about history, the continuing process.

With the production of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964, Brian Friel established his claim to be the true heir of such distinguished predecessors as Yeats, Synge, OCasey and Beckett. Since then his work has consistently demonstrated that his strength is an equal awareness of the conditions of individual lives and the historical and political forces affecting them. The plays in this first volume (Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Freedom of the City, Living Quarters, Aristocrats, Faith Healer and Translations) are introduced by Professor Seamus Deane of University College, Dublin.

Three exquisite masterpieces from Brian Friel, based on works by Chekhov: The Bear: A Vaudeville; Afterplay (where Sonya from Uncle Vanya and Andrey from Three Sisters meet), and The Yalta Game (from a theme in Chekhovs 1899 story, The Lady with the Lapdog). The Yalta Game: from a theme in Chekhovs 1899 story The Lady with the LapdogTwo strangers meet on holiday and almost manage to convince one another that disappointments are merely the postponement of the complete happiness to come...The Bear: A VaudevilleElena Popova, a young and attractive widow, has immersed herself in the role of mourning for her philandering but now dead husband. Luka, her frail and ancient man-servant, tries in vain to snap her out of it. Then Smirnov barges in...Afterplay 1920s Moscow, a small run-down cafe. Uncle Vanyas niece, Sonya Serebriakova, now in her forties, is the only customer. Until the arrival of the Three Sisters put-upon brother Andrey Prozorov.Two Plays After (Afterplay and The Bear) premiered at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in March 2002 and Afterplay transferred to the Gielgud Theatre, London, in September 2002.

This enthralling play considers the relationship between the private life and public work of the composer Leos Janácek, the passion he felt for a married woman nearly forty years his junior, and his final surge of creative energy.Performances premiered at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 2003.

This second collection of Brian Friels plays includes some of his most acclaimed work for the stage. The plays included are Dancing at Lughnasa, Fathers and Sons, Making History, Wonderful Tennessee and Molly Sweeney. The collection is introduced by Christopher Murray.

Fed up with the dreary round of life in Ballybeg, with his uncommunicative father and the humiliating job in his fathers grocery shop, with his frustrated love for Kathy Doogan who married a richer, more successful young man and with the total absence of prospect and opportunity in his life at home, Gareth ODonnell has accepted his aunts invitation to come to Philadelphia. Now, on the eve of his departure, he is not happy to be leaving Ballybeg. With this play Brian Friel made his reputation and it is now an acknowledged classic of modern drama.

Brian Friel, aclamado como el "Chéjov irlandés", es considerado el más grande dramaturgo viviente en lengua inglesa. Las tres obras reunidas en este volumen, publicadas por el autor bajo el título de Three Plays After (2002), son un abierto homenaje al autor ruso. El juego de Yalta (2001) es una transposicion dramatica del cuento "La dama del perrito". El encuentro amoroso de dos personas casadas en el balneario de Yalta da lugar a un tratamiento moderno en que los personajes alternan el dialogo entre ellos con soliloquios dirigidos al publico. Asi, la soledad, el amor y el destino van urdiendo una tematica propia en contrapunto con la del cuento de Chejov. El oso (2002) esta basada en su homonimo ruso, comedia breve en un acto que Chejov calificara de vaudeville. Un hombre rudo reclama una deuda contraida con el marido de su joven y refinada vecina, viuda empeñada en mantener su luto despues de ya un año. Afterplay (2002) retrata el encuentro de dos personajes salidos de dos obras diferentes de Chejov. Veinte años despues, Andrei Prozorov de Tres hermanas y Sonia Serebriakova de Tio Vania entablaran una conversacion en la que sus identidades surgiran gradualmente de un juego de engaños. El lector sera testigo del futuro de aquellos entrañables personajes

The year is 1878. The widowed Christopher Gore, his son David and their housekeeper Margaret, the woman with whom they are both in love, live at The Lodge in Ballybeg. But in this era of unrest at the dawn of Home Rule, their seemingly serene life is threatened by the arrival of Christophers English cousin, who unwittingly ignites deep animosity among the villagers of Ballybeg.The Home Place premiered at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in February 2005.

This third collection by Brian Friel contains two original works: Performances, which considers the relationship between the private life and public work of the composer Leos Janácek; and The Home Place, set in Ballybeg, Donegal, at the dawn of Home Rule. There are three masterful plays based on stories by Chekhov; and Friels exquisite versions of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya, of Ibsens Hedda Gabler and of Turgenevs A Month in the Country.PerformancesA minor work the way Thomas Manns Death in Venice or Becketts Endgame is a minor work. Deceptively brisk and light in tone but taut and gravely pregnant with meaning... for Friel, life creates its own symbolism and poetry, and so it does in this play.Sunday TimesThe Home PlaceA rich, allusive, densely layered play, which has echoes of Friels masterly Translations while reminding one that he has spent much of his recent life adapting and translating Chekhov... Friel hauntingly conveys the pathos of exile and the delusion of ownership.GuardianHedda GablerAcross the gulf of the 20th century one great playwright is talking to another... neither a simple translation nor, as the official title has it, or a new version, but something altogether larger.The Irish Times

One of the masterpieces of Irelands greatest living playwright, Faith Healer weaves together the stories of a travelling healer, his wife and his manager. From their different versions of the healers performances and a terrible event at the centre of the drama, Friel creates a powerful and haunting work of art.

August 1833 - the first Royal Ordnance Survey is translating the local Gaelic place names of the townland of Baile Beag in County Donegal into English, with far reaching personal and cultural effects

The action takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag, an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes of cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and rendered into English. In examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative."Translations" is a modern classic. It engages the intellect as well as the heart, and achieves a profound political and philosophical resonance through the detailed examination of individual lives, of particular people in particular place and time." Daily Telegraph"This is Brian Friels finest play, his most deeply thought and felt, the most deeply involved with Ireland but also the most universal: haunting and hard, lyrical and erudite, bitter and forgiving, both praise and lament."Sunday Times

It is 1936 and harvest time in County Donegal. In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet, their ages ranging from twenty-six up to forty. The two male members of the household are brother Jack, a missionary priest, repatriated from Africa by his superiors after 25 years, and the seven-year-old child of the youngest sister. In depicting two days in the life of this menage, Brian Friel evokes not simply the interior landscape of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape, interior and exterior, Christian and pagan, of which they are a part.