SOURCE: "Telling Stories and Making History: Brian Friel and Field Day," in Irish University Review, Vol. 24, No. 2, Autumn/Winter 1994, pp. 186-97.

In the following essay on Friel's drama and his association with Field Day Theatre Company, Pelletier examines Friel's treatment of Irish history.

As a short-story writer and as a playwright Brian Friel has been busy telling his audience stories; but as co-founder of the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 one could argue that he has also literally been 'making history'. Whereas the early plays tend to concentrate on the individual's need for consoling or enabling fictions and the role of the artist as story-teller, the more political plays written after 1972 address another key issue which he felt he could no longer ignore in the light of the tragic events taking place in Northern Ireland at the time and of the debate surrounding revisionism in the South: the...