The action takes place in late August 1833 at a hedge-school in the townland of Baile Beag, an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes of cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and rendered into English. In examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative.

Contents: Philadelphia, Here I Come; The Freedom of the City; Living Quarters; Aristocrats; Faith Healer; Translations Brian Friel was born in County Tyrone in 1929 and worked as a teacher before turning to full-time writing in 1960. His first stage success was in 1964 with Philadelphia, Here I Come, which established his claim as heir to such distinguished predecessors as Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, and Behan. In 1979 he and actor Stephen Rea formed the Field Day Theatre Company, whose first theatrical production was Friel's Translations in 1980. Also included in this selection are The Freedom of the City, set in Londonderry in 1970; Living Quarters, which Desmond MacAvok in the Evening Presscalled "one of the most fascinating and, in the end, truly moving evenings. . .in Irish Theatre"; Faith Healer, a metaphoric depiction of the artist and his gift' and Aristocrats, "as fine and as stimulating and as warm a piece of writing as had appeared on the Irish stage for many years," according to David Nowland, the Irish Times. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A collection of jokes, riddles, tongue twisters, tricks, games, poems, and stories.

THE STORY: This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in l936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken

First published in 1997

The year is 1878. The widowed Christopher Gore, his son David and their housekeeper Margaret, the woman with whom they are both in love, live at The Lodge in Ballybeg. But in this era of unrest at the dawn of Home Rule, their seemingly serene life is threatened by the arrival of Christopher's English cousin, who unwittingly ignites deep animosity among the villagers of Ballybeg. The Home Place premiered at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in February 2005.

Brian Friel is Ireland's most important living playwright, and this book places him in the new canon of postcolonial writers. Drawing on the theory and techniques of the major postcolonial critics, F. C. McGrath offers fresh interpretations of Friel's texts and of his place in the tradition of linguistic idealism in Irish literature. This idealism has dominated Ireland's still incomplete emergence from its colonial past. It appeals to Irish writers like Friel who, following in a line from Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey, challenge British culture with antirealistic, antimirnetic devices to create alternative worlds, histories, and new identities to escape stereotypes imposed by the colonizers. Friel grew up in Northern Ireland's Catholic minority and now lives in the Irish Republic. McGrath maintains that all Friel's work is marked by colonial and postcolonial structures. Like his predecessor Wilde, Friel mixes lies, facts, memories, and individual perception to create new myths and elevates blarney to a realm of aesthetic and philosophical distinction. An important, accessible, scholarly introduction, this book illustrates how Friel playfully subverts the English language and transcends British influence. Friel's reality is constructed from personal fiction, and it is his liberating response to oppression.

Broadway hit about a young Irishman on the eve of his emigration to America.

Reflections by the author of Dancing at Lughnasa on Irish writers, the theater, nationalism, Catholicism, and his childhood