FrielDays: A Homecoming 2025-2029, a five year celebration of Brian Friel, to be held in Derry, Donegal and Tyrone
A ground-breaking five-year celebration of the work of one of Ireland’s greatest writers will be set in motion in 2025.
FrielDays: A Homecoming will bring all 29 plays by Irish playwright Brian Friel (1929-2015) to a series of resonant cross-border locations in his homeland - the north-west of Ireland - a constant inspiration to Friel and a part of the world he rarely left.
Beginning in 2025, the 10th anniversary of Friel’s death, FrielDays will build each year, so that by 2029, the centenary of Friel’s birth, all 29 of his plays will be performed across the whole year.
Early bird tickets will be on sale from February 1, 2025.
The 2025 programme of five plays will begin on August 1 and run until September 1, with each play opening at the time of year in which it was set by Friel:
Dancing at Lughnasa – early August 2025, 35th anniversary of the play
Translations - August 2025, 45th anniversary
The Home Place - August 2025, 20th anniversary
Faith Healer - August 2025
Volunteers - early September 2025, 50th anniversary
Curated with a contemporary sense of place, throughout the border communities and landscapes of Donegal, Derry and Tyrone, FrielDays will present each play in a setting relevant to its theme and in the season and time of day in which it was set.
Brian Friel was born in Omagh soon after the partition of Ireland and moved to Derry when he was 10.
For the last 43 years of his life, when most of his work was written, he lived in Inishowen.
Fourteen of Friel’s 29 plays take place in his fictional village, Ballybeg. For FrielDays, a wide range of locations, including Culdaff, Rathmullan, Gweedore, Glenties, Bundoran and Glencolmcille and smaller locations outside Derry, Letterkenny and Omagh will become Ballybeg settings.
One of Friel's most acclaimed plays, Translations, includes a hedge-school.
Hedge-schools were small, secret locations, often a house, barn or corner of a field, where children were given a Catholic education. They originated in the 18th century at a time when the teaching of Catholicism was illegal.
Inspired by these illegal pockets, FrielDays will set up its own series of hedge-schools to accompany the festival, each emerging in a secret, remote location close to the setting of each play.
Buses will take audiences to their hedge-school classes; once inside, they will be able to explore each play in detail, finding out more about the social, cultural and political backdrop to its writing from writers, scientists, social and political commentators, musicians, archaeologists and historians, before, during and after each performance.
Friel was very particular about the seasons, months, days and times of day in which his plays took place. As the majority are set in August, the peak of each FrielDays year will be the continuation of the summer Lughnasa FrielFest, founded by Arts Over Borders in 2015.
Sean Doran and Liam Browne of Arts Over Borders said: “Brian Friel is Ireland’s preeminent dramatist of the late 20th century. He is the ultimate ‘shared island’ dramatist, the 86 years of his life shared almost equally between NI and the Republic of Ireland.
“Fittingly, FrielDays is a truly transnational cross-border project, bringing the stories and characters of Friel’s life’s work to the very locations that inspired their creation.”