Five-Year Brian Friel Centenary Begins With Five Plays Over Five Weeks

FrielDays: A Homecoming is a theatrical celebration throughout August marking the centenary of the Irish playwright Brian Friel.

It will begin with a 35th anniversary production of his most celebrated play, Dancing at Lughnasa, staged only 50m from the house in which it is set, and end with a combined 50th anniversary celebration of Friel’s close friend, the poet Seamus Heaney.

Curated by Ireland’s Arts Over Borders, FrielDays will bring 29 plays to locations of resonance across Brian Friel’s homeland of the three north-west border counties of Donegal, Tyrone and Derry, a part of Ireland he rarely left. FrielDays will build each year adding new plays and places so that by 2029, the centenary of Friel’s birth, all 29 plays will be performed across the full calendar year.

Five anniversary plays are being rolled out this August, with each opening at the time of year in which it was set and taking place in settings which will become a newly chosen ‘Ballybeg’ and ‘Ballymore’, the fictional towns at the heart of 14 of Friel’s 29 plays. 

“This is arguably the largest and most ambitious cross border cultural initiative celebrating the work of a single Irish artist and his relationship with the landscape and communities he grew up in and worked within," said Seán Doran and Liam Browne of Arts Over Borders. "Brian Friel was very particular about the seasons, months, days and times of day in which his plays took place, so we will present each play in a setting relevant to its theme and at the time, of year and day, in which it was set."

On its 35th anniversary, Dancing at Lughnasa will be presented at St Columba’s Comprehensive School in Glenties, Co. Donegal, close to The Laurels, the home of Friel’s grandparents and the five daughters who inspired the play’s central characters, the Mundy sisters. This production, with a newly-commissioned score by electro-acoustic composer John D’Arcy, will be the first multi-racial reading of the play in Ireland and the UK, as a series of stage and screen actors reads the role of Michael, The Narrator.

During the run of Dancing at Lughnasa, Faith Healer will also take place in Glenties and west Donegal, with audiences boarding the FrielDays bus for unique site-specific readings in three west Donegal community halls and the Highlands Hotel, an area that was the boyhood summer spot for Friel.

A play about language, colonialism and identity, Translations will be performed on its 45th anniversary at the Dunlewey Centre in north-west Donegal, a Gaeltacht, Irish-speaking area. The play is set in Donegal in the 1830s, a time when place names were being translated into English for Ordnance Survey maps. While the FrielDays presentation will be in English, the Irish roles will be taken by actors who can also speak Gaelic, while the two English soldier roles will be filled by English actors coming to Donegal for the first time. As part of their ticket, audiences will take a short trip across Lake Dunlewey to visit Glentornan, an early 19th century ghost village, where they will experience a Seanchaí, traditional Gaelic storyteller and music.

2025 marks the 50th golden anniversary of Volunteers which premiered in 1975 at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Friel’s tale of excavation by political prisoners is reflected by its FrielDays stage setting of an archaeological site overlooking the River Foyle in the Keep area at Ebrington Square, a former British army barracks in Derry~Londonderry. The first professional production this century of Friel’s most contentious play, is a co-production with The Playhouse Derry~Londonderry, staged by Kabosh Theatre in a specially constructed outdoor ‘dig’ set.  

Rounding off this year’s programme is The Home Place, Friel’s final full-length play which will be staged at Sion Stables Heritage Education Centre in Co. Tyrone, close to his own childhood home in Killyclogher, in a building constructed at the time when the play takes place.

The full schedule is:

• Dancing at Lughnasa: August 1-23 at St. Columba’s Comprehensive School, Glenties, Co. Donegal
• Faith Healer:  August 8-10 and 15-17 at Edeninfagh, Portnoo, Ardara and Glenties, west Donegal
• Translations: August 22-25  at Gweedore, Co. Donegal
• The Home Place: August 23-25 at Sion Stables Heritage Education Centre, Co. Tyrone
• Volunteers: August 29-31 at The Keep, Ebrington Square, Derry~Londonderry
• North: August 30-31 in Derry~Londonderry