A writer of deceptively daring genius

As a sophisticated storyteller who has chosen to present his stories in the theatre, Brian Friel has concerned himself with exploring the impossibility of writing, the folly of trying to record history and the ultimate failure of reconciling memory with truth, writes Eileen Battersby

His deceptively daring genius rests at the heart of a thesis concerned with the tension between the easy comfort of illusion and the sad horror of reality.

Better any day the myth of memory over the hard fact of truth. But Friel's characters, in common with the creations of Tennessee Williams, his theatrical kindred spirit, invariably end up facing the stone wall of fact. It gives his vision a poignancy too profound to slip into sentimentality and places a discreet toughness within the eloquence - both of which may explain why his dramas never quite become fully melodramatic. There is also the realisation that among Irish writers the imagination that most closely shares Friel's dark artistic vision, if not his political intelligence, is that of William Trevor.

Over the next few weeks three productions of plays from Friel's large and diverse canon - 22 volumes of which are published in handsome uniform editions by the Gallery Press - engage in a relay race from Belfast to Dublin and beyond. The contrasts are intriguing. His early masterpiece, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, from 1964, is joined next week by Dancing At Lughnasa, from 1990, the play that compounded the success in 1979 of Aristocrats, his other "family" drama, and made him an international playwright. Lovers, first staged in 1967 in advance of his political plays of the 1970s, and now on tour, continues to suggest the darkness with which Friel views love and life.

Three plays spanning close to 30 years. All very different from the master of self-reinvention. Few writers have as skilfully balanced the shrewdness of a countryman with the angst of the intellectual. Always subtle and often humorous, he succeeds by force of imagination and through the very language he doubts. His sensibility reflects that of the Russians he reveres and has adapted. His is a writer's theatre, not a technician's.

Artists have been concerned with private inner turmoil and public change for almost 300 years. But Friel has proved better than most at catching the essential impossibility of it all. Romance is as doomed as the future proves for the unfortunate pair of couples in Lovers, just as the chronicling of history is fraught. In Making History, from 1988, Mary Bagenal argues that "superstition must yield before reason". Hugh O'Neill does not accept this. The underlying theme of pagan ritual both Irish and African creates tension in Dancing At Lughnasa. Jack's return is not romantic; it brings upheaval. So literary a writer is Friel, so casual is he about the sheer physical look of his theatre, that it would be easy to define him as a writer more concerned with the word than with the act, yet he consistently defies this.

His poetic language presents a challenge to actors and directors: both must work at making the language real and true to the demands of characterisation. It is too easy to be complacent about a Friel text; they emerge complete, apparently not in need of a group effort. But a good director intent on substrata complexities looks beyond even texts as well conceived as Friel's to those vital subplots, rooted as they are in the public and the private; in the context of histories that are both domestic and national.

It could be said Friel the artist absorbed the responsibility more usually accepted by novelists, the pursuit of the cultural and political development of a society. Joe Dowling, currently rehearsing Dancing At Lughnasa at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, speaks of Friel's "engagement with his community". Friel is also an accomplished short-story writer. Yet it is as a playwright that, in the absence of willing novelists and in the company of the poets from the north of Ireland, he looked at, examined and defined his changing society.

In accepting this responsibility - after all, it was Friel who founded Field Day Theatre Company in 1980, to confront the political and cultural dilemma that is Ireland - has he restricted himself as a dramatist? Could it be argued that Tom Murphy, in setting his work largely within the context of the bitterness of small-town life, offers a tighter and more sustained theatre created more by dramatic exchanges between characters? Perhaps Friel's characters often do sound more like philosophers and poets than the authentically unhappy people populating Murphy's theatrical universe.

Yet no, the achievement of Friel lies in his engaging not only with characters who refuse to accept or who simply fear change in their lives but also with his many portraits of society in flux. He is politically astute without being a political writer. Tom Kilroy is another strongly intellectual playwright of ideas; his sense of the practicalities and collaborative effort of theatre, as well as the mechanics and possibilities of stagecraft, may be stronger, but his interest in the social and cultural evolution surrounding the personal is not as defined.

Friel's engagement with the public face of the Irish community began most brilliantly with the painful legacy of emigration in Philadelphia, Here I Come! Only his second published play, it was first staged at the Gaiety Theatre, in Dublin, where it has now returned. To suggest that it remains his most complete and achieved stage work does no disservice to the several masterpieces that have followed. It is in the divided character of the two selves, Gar Public and Gar Private, that Friel most coherently gives voice to an individual in turmoil - aided, of course, by the vital information provided by Madge the housekeeper, a fascinating precursor of Michael the narrator in Dancing At Lughnasa.

In Gar, Friel captures the tension between need and desire faced with choice. It is different for the majestic Mundy sisters: they have no choices. The world, or at least marriage, has left them behind, and only Chris has had a child.

Instead the sisters seek comfort in routine. Ceremony is more palatable than specific facts. There is a larger, more pressing reality. Kate, the schoolteacher and family breadwinner, the only sister who daily leaves the protected world of the household, utters the prophetic, near Yeatsian comment that "hair cracks are appearing everywhere; that control is slipping away; that the whole thing is so fragile it can't be held together much longer". Change arrives. The new factory will put an end to Rose and Aggie knitting at home for useful pennies. Gerry, who has a wife and another son back home in Wales, will never marry Chris. Jack won't recover. It is Chekhov, the factory echoing the loss of the cherry orchard, but it is also Friel looking at a changing Ireland.

If romance fails in Friel, so too do imagination and idealism. He had already made this clear in Faith Healer, from 1979, an extraordinary essay on the failure of love and vision delivered by three characters through four monologues. This is most fully compounded in Wonderful Tennessee (1993). His first original play after Dancing At Lughnasa, which had been followed by versions of Russian works, Wonderful Tennessee - to date seriously underrated and meriting revival - offers sustained quick-fire dialogue ricocheting between mutually engaged characters. Like Dancing At Lughnasa, it is among Friel's least internalised works. It is complex and multilayered even by his standards and tests any director and cast to their limits.

In it three married couples, including Terry the wealthy bookmaker, have set off on an excursion. They wait for a boatman to take them to an island. The wait turns into an all-night vigil. More pilgrims than day trippers, the six ape happiness only to confront failure and truth. Frank, the dreamer who talks too much ever to write his great book, has a theory for everything. In the course of explaining the motivation of medieval monks he sets off on an interesting digression about the essence of mystery. When asked by Terry, "Is that going to be in your book?" Frank, in a moment of poetry, replies, "Maybe. Why not? Anything to explain away the wonderful, the mystery." Pressed by Terry about how much of this he believes, Frank refers to the monks having "a rage for the absolute". It is typical of Friel to place the central truths of the play in the mouth of as unlikely a philosopher as Frank, who when asked to define this absolute replies with the grace of a poet. "Whatever it is we desire but can't express. What is beyond language. The inexpressible. The ineffable . . . a book without words . . . the last book ever written - and the most wonderful."

Later in the play it is Frank who again articulates what it is to see magic slip from one's grasp. He describes seeing a dolphin rise up out of the sea. "And for 30 seconds, maybe a minute, it danced for me. Like a faun, a satyr; with its manic, leering face. Danced with a deliberate, controlled, exquisite abandon . . . with that manic, leering face . . . somehow very disturbing."

For Frank it is a ceremonial dance. It is also an echo of the primaeval dance in Dancing At Lughnasa and the mention of a murder that was a ritual killing, just as there is a ritual bonfire in Lughnasa that goes seriously wrong.

In this play that draws on a homecoming, as does the Chekhovian Aristocrats, Friel brings together threatening change and comforting ritual. Whereas in Aristocrats Casimir is the romantic on the run from life, in Dancing At Lughnasa the entire family, bar Kate the realist, find refuge in illusions. Music has always been important to Friel, whether music hall or Chopin. It supplants words and language, the very essence of meaning, which present such a problem for the characters in Translations, from 1980. Music creates mood and aids memory. By the close of Dancing At Lughnasa Michael is confirming that memory "owes nothing to fact". Movement has taken over. "Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary."

Dancing At Lughnasa opens at the Gate Theatre on Tuesday; Philadelphia, Here I Come! ends at the Gaiety tomorrow; Island's Lovers is touring until February 28th