New Brian Friel 'FrielDays' Cross-Border Project Details Announced

FrielDays, the five-year project celebrating one of Ireland’s greatest writers, Brian Friel (1929-2015), is to feature an annual strand of special birthday events inspired by the playwright.

Each year, the birthday events will happen around Friel’s two birth dates – January 9 and 10 – to reflect the duality of Friel’s art and life in both Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland. Friel held two birth certificates and was unclear about which was correct.  When asked about the ambiguous nature of his birth date, Friel once replied: “Perhaps I’m twins.”

From August 1 this year until December 2029, FrielDays: A Homecoming will create 92 productions of Friel’s 29 plays within resonant cross-border locations in his homeland of 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. 
 
2025 Early bird tickets will be on sale from February 1 2025 via Arts Over Borders.
 
Brian Friel was born in Omagh, the county capital of Tyrone, NI, soon after the partition of Ireland and spent the first half of his life in Northern Ireland. For the last 43 years of his life, when most of his work was written, he lived in the Inishowen Peninsula, County Donegal, the most northerly part of Ireland, but in the Republic.  
 
Seán Doran, Creative Director of Arts Over Borders, said: “Brian Friel’s life and work contain inspiring dualities and ambiguities from the start, from the personal puzzle of his two birthdays and the lifetime divided between Northern Ireland and the Republic, to themes within his plays, the past and the present, two sides of the border, even one character played by two actors. Friel is Ireland’s ultimate ‘shared island’ dramatist, and FrielDays will be an authentic transnational cross-border response, bringing the stories and characters of Friel’s life’s work to the locale and locals that inspired their creation.”

FrielDays’ 2025 programme will run August 1 - 31 with each play opening at the time of year in which it was set by Friel and on a significant anniversary including: 

• Dancing at Lughnasa – early August 2025, 35th anniversary of the play
• Translations - August 2025, 45th anniversary of the play
• The Home Place - August 2025, 20th anniversary of the play
• Volunteers – late August 2025, 50th anniversary of the play 

Fourteen of Friel’s 29 plays take place in his fictional village of Ballybeg. For FrielDays, a wide range of locations across north-west Ireland, including Glenties, Bundoran, Culdaff, Rathmullan, Gweedore, Portnoo and Glencolmcille and smaller locations outside Omagh, Letterkenny and Derry-Londonderry, will become Ballybeg settings.
 
Brian 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, with Friel’s blessing a few months before his death in October 2015.