It’s the end of August and I’m crammed into the window seat of a small artisan’s cottage preserved in the spirit of turn-of-the-century Donegal, Ireland. The fireplace, still in regular use, gives out the smoky tang of burnt turf; opposite me there’s a sideboard full of china, an illuminated image of the Sacred Heart and a bed poorly hidden by gingham curtains from the rest of the main room, from within which comes the occasional sound of snoring.
The Weaver’s Cottage, as it is known in the nearby area of Dunlewey, was once the home of local tweedmaker Manus Ferry and is now usually a museum. With 20 of us squeezed around the edges of the front room, it has been coopted for an immersive performance of Brian Friel’s play Translations, set in 1833. The dates of the cottage aren’t an exact fit for the play’s era, but this setting nevertheless reflects the houseproud poverty of Friel’s world. From the window, we can see Lake Dunlewey, or Dún Lúiche, named for the Irish god Lugh. The power of pagan gods and ancient names hovers over all of Friel’s plays.
Translations tells the story of an earlier Manus: the unfortunate teacher of an unofficial local school—known as a “hedge school”—who becomes caught up in the tension surrounding a British Ordinance Survey expedition to standardise spellings of Irish place names. I’ve seen this modern classic several times before, but never from the perspective of one of Manus’s many pupils, all of us taking seats in his home classroom as some of Ireland’s best known young actors burst through the door to play the speaking roles.
This version of Translations, directed by Conall Morrison, is being performed script-in-hand after only a few days’ rehearsal as part of Friel Days, a new annual festival which stages Friel’s work in places closely associated with the playwright across both sides of the northwestern Irish border. To international audiences, Friel is most famously associated with the Donegal town of Glenties, the setting of his play Dancing at Lughnasa. Friel renamed the town “Ballybeg” but dedicated it “in memory of those five brave Glenties women”, his mother and four aunts whose stories of hardship are loosely reimagined in that play.
Many of his other plays, including Translations, are also set in this fictional Donegal town of Ballybeg. Yet Friel was born in County Tyrone and spent much of his working life in Derry/Londonderry, where in 1972 he was among the marchers on Bloody Sunday. So Friel Days has chosen to produce his work in meaningful sites across these three historic counties. When I see The Home Place, one of Friel’s last plays, it’s staged at Sion Mills in Tyrone, once the home of well-liked Protestant landowners not unlike those featured in the play. The local audience seethes with justified indignation when the landlord’s less benevolent “ethnographer” cousin arrives to conduct racist experiments on the local population, but laughs with glee as he runs through stereotypes about rival spots such as Kilkenny and South Mayo.
Friel Days isn’t an entirely new affair: it is the latest project from Seán Doran and Liam Browne, an experienced local-born duo who have been producing similar festivals throughout Europe for over a decade, with the organisation Arts Over Borders. This summer saw productions of five plays, but the festival will expand each year for five years until it climaxes in 2029, the centenary of Friel’s January 1929 birth.
Friel Days is not the only arts organisation taking advantage of a renewed interest in his writings. This month, a major new production of Dancing at Lughnasa opened at Sheffield’s Crucible theatre and will transfer to Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre to run until 8th November. And earlier this year, Penguin reissued Friel’s own curated collection of some of his best short stories, under the title Stories of Ireland.
No one ever needs an excuse to stage Lughnasa, a beautifully structured tale of five women’s futile attempts to remain self-sufficient, set against a classically Irish struggle between Catholic respectability and pagan unruliness. (The Lughnasa of the title refers to a harvest festival in honour of the god Lugh; oldest sister Kate is a teacher at a local Catholic school and firmly disapproves.) This latest production, however, coincides with a broader UK fashion for Irish drama. The Old Vic took us to 1980s Sligo this spring with The Brightening Air, a new play by Conor McPherson. And one of best shows now on in London is a revival of McPherson’s 1997 debut, The Weir. (The Weir itself is heavily indebted to Friel’s Faith Healer—both feature old soaks who peddle tales of the supernatural.)
By contrast with Josie Rourke’s 2023 production of Lughnasa at the National Theatre, Elizabeth Newman’s new production suffers from the lack of a uniformly strong ensemble cast. The developmental difficulties faced by “simple” sister Rose are less obvious in Newman’s production than in Rourke’s, which muddies the clarity with which we should realise that she has been exploited by a married man. But Siobhán O’Kelly shines as Maggie, the boisterous sister who relies on “wild” woodbine cigarettes to perk up a life of housekeeping. And Francis O’Connor’s set expertly captures the deceptively idyllic pastoral of Friel’s Ballybeg—all sunshine and haymaking, until the economic injustice sets in.
Friel Days is only possible because its organisers can zip across the unchecked border between EU Ireland and Brexit Britain...
Interest in Friel will grow and grow until his centenary in 2029, but I suspect the arts world’s broader interest in Irish drama is currently being piqued by the rise of Sinn Féin and the many unresolved questions about how Brexit will reshape the future of the island. As a crossborder festival, Friel Days is only possible because its organisers can zip back and forth across the unchecked border between EU Ireland and Brexit Britain but, locally, this status quo feels unsustainable.
Spend much time exploring Northern Ireland’s political spaces online, and you’ll find an alarming romanticisation of the Troubles among those too young to remember them. The glorification of paramilitary groups also lurks beneath the “dark tourism” sites springing up in Northern Irish cities.
Doran and Browne have never shied away from the hard questions that come with making art in a sectarian landscape. In 2018, they made headlines for effectively gatecrashing the controversial Apprentice Boys parade, an annual loyalist show of strength, by staging a reading of Homer’s Iliad beside Derry’s ancient city walls just as the parade passed by. (The Iliad is Europe’s foundational text about conflict and its costs, Doran points out when I ask him about it.) Doran and Browne, who are from Derry’s Catholic community, even placed a wooden horse beside the main gates, through which 140 loyalist bands processed during the day—but it helped that festival director Jonathan Burgess was a Protestant Apprentice Boy who obtained the necessary permissions.
“Many urged me to do it another weekend in August, given that so many people—Catholics mostly—would flee the city that weekend, usually to Donegal,” Doran tells me. “But it’s too good a theatrical opportunity, and I always feel strongly that the arts have to somehow happen at these heightened moments from one or other side of the community, rather than avoid them.”
This approach feels true to Friel himself: a classicist, Catholic and committed nationalist who was nonetheless fascinated by encounters between communities. Next year, the festival will include a performance of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Incongruous programming? Not if you know that this opera premiered around 1688, just before James II’s unsuccessful Siege of Derry, which still shapes the region’s politics and is marked by the Apprentice Boys parade. Even when Friel Days looks back on the past, it looks squarely at the present.
