Ireland will celebrate its greatest modern playwright, Brian Friel, in a major two-part festival with performances, talks, discussions, music, dance and good food between 20 and 31 August 2015.
The Lughnasa International Friel Festival, directed by Sean Doran, will take place in locations in County Donegal (Republic of Ireland), known as 'Friel Country', and in Belfast (Northern Ireland), making it the first annual Festival in Ireland to bring both sides of the border together.
"Friel's work is an Irish treasure for the entire world," said President Bill Clinton, Founder of the Clinton Foundation & 42nd President of the United States, who has been closely associated with Northern Ireland's future over the past three decades. "Although many of his plays are set in his small town of Ballybeg, the themes and issues explored in them-identity, family, and conflict-have a universal appeal. It is his extraordinary understanding of people, their motivations and their dreams, and their sense of themselves and others that keeps pulling us back to Friel again and again."
At the heart of the programme every year will be a signature production of one of Brian Friel's key plays, presented in both of the Festival locations, Donegal and Belfast. In the first year, it will be a brand new production of Dancing at Lughnasa, produced by the Lyric Theatre Belfast and directed by Annabelle Comyn.
Starting on Thursday 20 August, the first chapter of the celebration will open with a journey across the Foyle estuary from Magilligan to Greencastle, Co Donegal, where Brian Friel lives, launching four days of unique events and performances from 21-23 August that evoke the relationship between the writer and the place. These include an opening lecture given by Fintan O'Toole at The Guildhall Derry, the setting for Friel's play, Freedom of the City introduced by Gary McKeone, to whom Brian Friel dedicated his last and final play The Home Place.
The Festival then moves on to Belfast from 27 - 31 August, with celebrations, many of them free, right across the city, including classical and traditional music, five open air stages for dancing, a harvest food festival, Belfast's first ever kite flying festival and Amongst Women, an all women talks programme curated by Deputy Artistic Director Liam Browne featuring amongst many others, Shami Chakrabarti, Director, UK Liberty; Kamila Shamsie, Pakistani novelist and commentator; Kathy Lette, comedian and author; Ahdaf Soueif, Egyptian novelist and political and cultural commentator, and Sandi Toksvig, writer, presenter, comedian and politician. The new production of Dancing at Lughnasa will be presented at the Lyric Theatre Belfast.
During the Festival, Queen's University Belfast will launch the Festival's first Brian Friel Summer School in Redcastle, Inishowen, County Donegal from 24 - 26 August, providing opportunities for students to experience the work of the writer right in the heart of 'Friel Country'. Queen's has the only theatre in the world named after Brian Friel.
Brian Friel was born in 1929 in Omagh, Country Tyrone, his father a schoolmaster from Derry and his mother a postmistress from Glenties, Co Donegal. He was educated at St Columb's College Derry, the same school that Seamus Heaney and John Hume attended, and St Patrick's College, Maynooth, where he studied for a career in the priesthood. He eventually decided to follow his father into the teaching profession, attending St Joseph's teaching college in Belfast and working as a school-teacher in and around Derry from 1950-1960. In 1967, Friel moved to Donegal, where he continues to live to this day.
Friel's first major stage success was Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). Subsequent plays include Lovers (1967), The Freedom of the City (1973), Volunteers (1975), Living Quarters (1977) Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), Wonderful Tennessee (1993), Molly Sweeney (1994) and Give me Your Answer Do! (1997). He has also written adaptations of works by Turgenev and Chekhov.
In 1980, Friel co-founded the hugely influential Field Day Theatre Company with actor Stephen Rea. Field Day was to become an artistic response to the violence, history and politics which divided Northern Ireland, a 'fifth province' that transcended the fractious conflicts of Irish politics at the time. They staged Friel's Translations as their first production in Derry's Guildhall, and went onto stage new productions every year and publish extensively - to date 24 titles in the fields of literary criticism, history, Irish art music, cultural studies, art history and 18th century Irish poetry.
Commenting on the programme, Brian Friel said: "If you want a festival that is tame and conventional and mildly entertaining don't ask Sean Doran to organise it. Witness his Beckett Festival in Enniskillen - it is wild and imaginative and creative and riveting. I have total confidence he'll do the same with the Friel Festival."
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