The fact that at the time of Friel’s birth the Protestant bureaucracy discouraged the registration of ‘Gaelic’ names may account for the substitution of the Anglicisation ‘Bernard’ as his given name. And the fact that ‘O’ means ‘son of’ in Gaelic may account for the difficulty surrounding his family name. “Perhaps I’m twins,” he has joked about this muddle, which may have influenced his decision to divide Gareth O’Donnell, the hero of his first major success in the theatre, Philadelphia, Here I Come, into two personae, Gar Public and Gar Private. Or maybe, like Stephen Dedalus’s artist in Joyce’s Portrait, he is ‘invisible, refined out of existence’.
His father, Patrick Friel, a native of Derry, taught at a local primary school, and his mother, who hailed from Glenties, Co Donegal, was a postmistress. When he was ten, Friel’s family moved to Derry, where his father had obtained another teaching post, and the young writer-to-be spent many holidays just across the border with his mother’s people. This relocation gave rise to more dualities in Friel’s background. For, while the town is known to the Nationalist community as ‘Derry’, and to the Unionists as ‘Londonderry’, the city has only partially been recognised in the official lexicon as Derry since the Nationalist (or Catholic) controlled city council voted to change its name; meanwhile the county surrounding it remains Londonderry, by similarly democratic decision of the Unionist (or Protestant) County Council. Thus, this geographical space has what Seamus Heaney has called ‘an obstinate bilingual determination to live in and through its two names’. Again, Inishowen, in northern Donegal, where Friel has lived since 1969 and where most of his plays are set, in the fictional town of Ballybeg, is only narrowly linked to the rest of the Republic, and although part of the ‘South’, is more northerly than almost all of ‘Northern’ Ireland.
He went to secondary school in St Columb’s College, Derry, and university in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, where he explored a vocation for the priesthood but decided against it. He taught in Derry for the next ten years, and wrote short stories, for which he had a contract with The New Yorker. He published two collections, A Saucer Of Larks and The Gold In The Sea, and also had radio plays produced. Philadelphia was the hit of the 1964 Dublin Theatre Festival, and launched his highly productive career as a playwright. In 1980 he founded Field Day Theatre Company with actor Stephen Rea, and fellow-writers and ex-St Columb’s boys, Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane. In 1987 he was appointed to the Irish Senate. Among his best-known plays are Faith Healer, Translations, Making History and Dancing At Lughnasa.
One striking facet of Friel’s work is his concern with form, which gives rise to his dramaturgical innovations. As he wrote in 1968: ‘...the days of the solid, well-made play are gone, the play with a beginning, a middle and an end, where in Act I a dozen carefully balanced characters are thrown into an arena and are presented with a problem, where in Act II they attack the problem and one another according to the Quennsberry Rules of Drama, and in Act III the problem is cosily resolved and all concerned are a lot wiser, a little nobler, and preferably a bit sadder. And these plays are finished because we know that life is about as remote from a presentation-problem-resolution cycle as it can be.’ So in different plays of his we have seen two aspects of the same character represented on stage, a character addressing the audience and then later not being able to find it, plus use of flashback and other chronological disorientations.
Friel is notoriously reluctant to give interviews, and dislikes attention from the press, but actress Aideen O’Kelly, who plays Maggie in his new play Give Me Your Answer, Do!, says of working with him: “He never tells you anything explicit about a character, but leaves you alone to find the truth of a part for yourself, and just smiles when you get what he wants. He’s such a genius.” The enigma which began with his being named has grown over the years and continues to this day, spawning work which, while it addresses local themes, has universal significance, as is only to be expected from a man who personally embodies many of the contradictions of his native land, and of the human condition.

First published in The World of Hibernia