Brian Friel Bücher

This enthralling play considers the relationship between the private life and public work of the composer Leos Jan�cek, 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.

A collection of six plays by Irish playwright Brian Friel.

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 skilfully reveals the far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative. -- from back cover

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 twenty-five 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 nonetheless a part.

Fed up with the dreary round of life in Ballybeg, with his uncommunicative father and the humiliating job in his father's 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 O'Donnell has accepted his aunt's 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.

Exploring mid-century Irish life, this collection showcases Brian Friel's masterful storytelling through a series of vivid short stories. Each narrative captures the essence of beauty, struggle, and discovery, from the haunting drowning in Lough Keeragh to the camaraderie of potato gatherers in County Tyrone. Friel's uncanny ability to reveal the extraordinary within the ordinary shines through, making these tales both humorous and profoundly moving. Renowned author Edna O'Brien praises them as exemplary short stories, deftly blending skill and emotion.