Brian Friel

We just strip the stage and we just put our stuff down in the middle of the stage, put our 10 chairs down and off we go.

People might know you from your work from the theatre, your production of Brian Friel's Dancing at Linus in 1992.

You won a Tony Award for that for direction on Broadway.

It's a very obvious question, but I'm going to ask it anyway.

Born in Derry in 1940, he emerged from the remarkable generation, educated at St Colm's College, becoming a founding director and defining thinker of field day and editing the monumental Field Day anthology of Irish writing, and he wrote the Booker shortlisted novel Reading in the Dark.

A new collection, Early Dean, brings together 26 of his early essays on Derry, Irish politics, the role of the intellectual, Field Day and writers from Burke and Singh to Mary Lavan, Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel.

Its editor is the writer and filmmaker Morris Fitzpatrick, whose documentary The Boys of St.

Columns brought Seamus Dean and Seamus Heaney together to reflect on their shared formation.

And really even suggesting that the translations was very influenced.

Yeah, absolutely.

And again, this is visible in the letters Brian Friel wrote to Dean.

There's this hesitation.

Again, I literally turned up with a pen.

I also had a play called Translations by Brian Friel.

Oh God, I know that name.

Yeah, that was okay.

And that goes for any play that you love well enough to direct.

You're like, if I'm directing any play, like, let's say Faith Healer, do I know better than Brian Friel?

No.

No, I don't.

We did a series of Irish plays.

We did Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come.

And I was discovered by an agent who came backstage and said, you should be on television.

I said, yeah, okay.

But it's happened that same year and it is a shift, you know.

And there are those, of course, who are what the playwright Brian Friel called practising lapsed Catholics.

That's how he described himself, which, you know, sums up a particular... a particular stance, I suppose, of people that, you know, they're not rejecting the faith.

But, you know, a lot of it's very superficial.

Now, the first...

Would I be right in saying Brian Friel was one of his nominations? So he'd be well known in Irish, Ireland and internationally as a writer and a poet.

So there's also those type of people as well.

Yeah,

Favorite play, what are you going for?

Well, Brian Friel's play, Translations, um, I thought was, I thought it very tender, but it was also very profound.

Um, I liked the way that it wasn't taking s- sides.

Um, there's a, a line in it that one of the characters says which says, "Confusion is not an ignoble condition," and I thought that was a very good description or aphorism for the relationship between Ireland and Britain.

Let's call a spade a shovel here.

Chekhov was one of the funniest playwrights ever, and the only person who's ever written good adaptations of Chekhov, Brian Friel.

Ireland's own Brian Friel, because he saw the humor, and he saw the humanity, which is exactly...

You read Chekhov's letters.

It's gag after gag.