Aisling O'Neill as Chris (left) looks on while Derbhle Crotty (Maggie) and Catherine Walsh (Agnes) dance during a rehearsal of Dancing at Lughnasa

The geography of  Brian Friel's work is moulded in County Donegal, and the surrounds of Glenties, but his characters speak far beyond the history and the borders of place forging the characters in his plays. But place carries the weight not only of history and geographical location character, writes Sara Keating

BRIAN FRIEL'S PLAYS have been shaped as much by place as by politics. Born in Omagh, Co Tyrone, reared and schooled in Derry, resident in Donegal for the past 40 years, Northern Ireland and its shifting boundaries have put a distinctive shape on Friel's imaginative world, where a place is not bounded by walls or even landscape but by the fluid ways in which individuals engage with it. For Brian Friel, place and personality are inextricably linked, and at the centre of every dramatic crisis is an unstable, unmoored sense of belonging that draws its roots from the romantic idea that home - whether that's a house, a town or a nation - is the key to our identities.

It is the nebulous political and cultural borders of the world in which he has spent his life that have forged the formative vision of Brian Friel's work. Specifically Derry city, where contesting cultural spaces split the geography of the city in two, and the remote village of Glenties in Co Donegal, which lent him the fictional physical metaphor of Ballybeg where he would set nearly all of his plays. With its devastating rugged beauty, its treacherous cliffs and its gentle valleys, its primitive charm and its wildness, the double-edged allure of Donegal seems etched into the very landscape of Friel's plays, while the cultural fissures that defined Derry during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s would influence the effect that the mythical Ballybeg, that symbolic site, would wreak on its various inhabitants over the years.

The invented geography of Ballybeg (Ballybeg, from the Irish Baile Beag, literally means small town) has offered Friel an archetypal site from which to explore the vicissitudes of small-town life in Ireland; the conflict between the deep ties of community bonds and the suffocating stranglehold of community interference. It is such conflicts that cleave the individual consciousnesses of Friel's characters, what he calls their "dual personality", the added pressure of a society undergoing rapid change completing the schizophrenic vision of a world where individuality is constantly compromised by loyalty to the tribe.

Ballybeg first appears in Philadelphia, Here I Come! where it is "a bloody quagmire, a dead-end, a backwater", especially when measured up against "the impermanence and anonymity" of that "vast restless place of America", which "doesn't give a curse about the past". "Ireland, America: What's the difference?" the American visitor Ben asks, "It's just another place to live!"

But it is not. The adolescent Gar is literally torn apart by his desire to leave Ballybeg, which will necessitate severing his deep-rooted attachment to his home, his family, and his country. Friel's bold dramaturgical choice of representing this split physically, through the creation of the two separate characters of Private Gar and Public Gar, reinforces the traumatic nature of these ties.

It seems no accident that Gar's affection for Ballybeg is linked to the landscape of the place: a day he may or may not have spent fishing with his father in a blue boat. Ballybeg is a composite of Gar's memories as well as his contemporary experiences: it is both the people who live there and the place itself, and everything that he hopes it will be. It is both imaginary and real, and despite being a failure, it remains an ideal.
In his two great family dramas of the 1970s, Living Quarters and Aristocrats, the importance of place is internalised. Both plays are set on the outskirts of Ballybeg in the remote "wilds of County Donegal", and the shadow of Ballybeg - the claustrophobia of the community, its gossiping, its judgments - looms large upon the households in both plays, but it is the family itself, "a domestic life bruised, damaged, by the stern attitudes that are necessary", that proves more stifling.

Both plays are set around the occasion of a homecoming, but instead of joyous celebration, the family reunions are haunted by harbingers of unease. In Living Quarters it is literally a family affair that tears the Butlers apart, as a father finds out that his son has betrayed him while the rest of the community has turned a blind eye. In Aristocrats it is the weight of family history and its oppressive ghosts, the heavy burden "of reticence and things unspoken", which reinforces the fractures in the fabric of the O'Donnell family. If home has the facility to forge us, it also has the ability to destroy us.

Dancing at Lughnasa is also set on the outskirts of Ballybeg, in 1936, in the home of the Mundy family, who are desperately clinging to each other as the uncertain future is thrust upon them.

BALLYBEG IN LATE SUMMER IS A beautiful but dangerous place. It is a feverish place, fecund in time for the harvest, abundant in bilberries for making jam. But up in the back hills the harvest celebrations are spilling over into grotesque revelries; the festival is turning carnivalesque. Men are lighting fires in pagan rituals. Young men are being burned to death. The late-summer happiness remembered in the play is a fragile one; for all the music and passion and nostalgia there is "a sense of unease, some awareness of a widening breach between what seemed to be and what was, of things changing too quickly ... of becoming what they ought not to be."

By the end of the play, as the narrator Michael tells us, the "industrial revolution had finally caught up with Ballybeg", shaking the very foundations upon which the Mundys forged their family values. Their brief, fleeting happiness has all but dissolved along with the rural idyll of Ballybeg.

Faith Healer is set in no place; an abstract, purgatorial world, where three characters convene to make their confessions. Each one comes with their own version of the same events: the birth and death of a child, the success and failure of an artist, and a final homecoming to Ballybeg in which the relief of return, the final acknowledgment of belonging, will provide bittersweet solace to Frank Hardy, the faith healer who has ultimately lost faith in himself. The geography of the characters' journey is significant for the itinerant entertainers, because place - the various towns that they visited, the exact locations in which they chose to perform - becomes a mnemonic: a key to understanding the events that came to pass there and the crucial events that would shape their future together. Each of the characters recite the place names like a prayer.
They are a "mesmerism", a "sedation", an "incantation", a "consecration", a "blessing". They are the sites of concrete fact: where people were healed, where babies were buried. If the real truth that binds Frank and Grace and Teddy together has become distorted, the idea of place - a solid site of remembrance - becomes crucial. However, in his brilliance as a dramatist, Friel refuses the audience even that, as the characters' contradictory versions of events are left unresolved. It is the resonances of their heartbreaking convictions that remain.

TRANSLATIONS IS SET in 1836 in the Irish-speaking area of Baile Beag. The play unfolds against the backdrop of the British army's Ordance Survey expedition, in which the map of Ireland is being redrawn for colonial convenience. The action of the play involves the translation of original Irish Gaelic place names - the translation of Baile Beag to Ballybeg, among others - but the linguistic interests of the play have a physical reality too.

Just like in Faith Healer, place names themselves take on extraordinary significance, providing a site of communion when language breaks down. In the stunning love scene, the Irish-speaking Maire and the army officer Yolland seduce each other with the geography of Baile Beag. The landscape of Donegal is their only shared language, although this mutually valuable coinage is disintegrating too under the pressures of modernity.

The full etymological weight of the word translation - "to remove from one place to another" - bears its true significance in the denouement of Friel's play, and as the names of the towns around Baile Beag change, so the world itself becomes de-familiarised. Sentimentality, like the romantic Yolland's, has no place in the march of modern time. As the schoolmaster Hugh warns, the "landscape of fact" must take precedence: "We must learn where we live", he tells his confused, rebellious students. "We must make [these words] our own. We must make them our new home."

Later in the play Hugh urges that "it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language"  and here we might add landscape; "we must never cease renewing those images, because if we do we fossilise".

Hugh's remarks resonate throughout Friel's rich body of plays, which continue to probe the unsettled fluidity of human existence. For - despite secluding himself exclusively in the inspirational, isolated beauty of Donegal - his ceaselessly restless imagination still recognises that the physical landscape, geography, is not a constant expression of reality, but a manifestation of the human spirit, and human identity: the very force of life in motion.