FIACH MAC CONGHAIL, director of the Abbey Theatre

"There is no question that the identity of the Abbey Theatre would not be fully realised without the work of Brian Friel, especially considering that the Abbey had eight world premieres, and over 50 productions of different Friel plays. He’s had a substantial influence and has made a substantial contribution to the debate about national identity, the debate about politics, and the presentation of great theatre at the Abbey.

When you think of eight world premieres, I suppose that in itself has helped sustain the raison d'être of a national theatre. It is inconceivable to think of the Abbey Theatre and the history of the Abbey Theatre without thinking of the contributions of Brian Friel. From as far back as 1962, to Dancing at Lughnasa in the early 1990s, with the last world premiere here in 1997, it is an extraordinary, intricate history that the Abbey Theatre and Brian Friel have had.

I personally had the pleasure as a young arts administrator of working with Brian Friel on Dancing at Lughnasa. I was Noel Pearson’s assistant and worked with Noel and Brian on the casting and transfer of Dancing at Lughnasa to the National in London, to the West End and then to Broadway. What Brian Friel gives you is full-frontal honesty. He’s astute, and he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. I learned a lot from him in those early days, and when I took over the Abbey he was one of my big supporters. He encouraged me to apply for the job: he wrote me a beautiful card saying he was going to light a candle for me. He has been a great personal friend to me.

CATHERINE BYRNE , actor

"The first time I met Brian Friel was in 1990. I was playing the part of Claire in The Aristocrats in the Gate Theatre, and Brian came to see the run-through. It was all very unnerving because I'd never been in a Brian Friel play, but he was very sweet. When you see him, you always think he's going to be a bit cranky and frightening, and I always think he looks very schoolmasterish, but he's not at all like that.

I must have done something right that day, because the next day he cast me in Dancing at Lughnasa! [ Touring that play] was a fantastic journey, and he came on the journey with us, and stayed with it to the end. Himself and Anne always brought a fantastic atmosphere with them when they came to see it, and you felt that he was excited every time he saw it.

He'd give you ideas and notes on the production - he was always really diligent. In 1994 he wrote Molly Sweeney, directed it himself and he cast me as Molly.

It was his first time as a director and it was the first time I played a leading role, so it was a new thing for us both, and we became really good friends. I like to think that Brian is a good friend of mine, and I thought he was a great director.

Since then I've worked an awful lot with him, and I can say that he loves actors, and respects and values actors. Every actor I know adores him and feels it's a real gift to get a part in one of Brian's plays.

He's also a really funny man to be with - he's fantastic company. He brings an atmosphere to a rehearsal room that I find really comfortable to work with. He's got a fantastic sense of humour so that although you're working, you don't feel you're working. I wish him a very happy birthday"

"Every actor I know adores him and feels it's a real gift to get a part in one of his plays

JOE DOWLING, Director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and former Artistic Director at the Abbey Theatre.

"Brian Friel's place in Irish theatre is unparalleled, both in the quality of his work and the longevity of his contribution. Brian has stayed absolutely loyal to Irish theatre: his plays are always given their first productions in Ireland.

There is a sense of continuity in contemporary Irish writing that begins with him, and his influence on the next generation of Irish writers is profound. Younger Irish playwrights such as Frank McGuinness, Conor McPherson or Enda Walsh have acknowledged his huge influence on their work. His plays speak with an Irish sensibility and, by extension, appeal to people all over the world.

Philadelphia, Here I Come! is hugely popular in the United States because it resonates in a country founded on immigration. Translations, which is one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century, has a universal appeal and will still be performed into the next century.

I've had the honour of working with him for over 30 years, and I have learned more from working with Brian Friel than from any other colleague, with the exception of the late Donal McCann.

What you learn from Brian is the sheer discipline of the writer, and the need for directors and actors to listen carefully to the text and treat it as an exact musical score.
I saw Philadelphia, Here I Come! when I was 16 years old, and it changed my life. I don't know that I would ever have really had the courage to go into the theatre had I not seen that play.

It never occurred to me when I was watching it in 1964 that I would ever get to work with him and become friends with him and his family - his wife Anne is godmother to our son - and the warmth of that relationship over the years has been one of the great pleasures of my life.

KATHLEEN WATKINS, broadcaster

"Anne Friel has been one of my closest friends over my lifetime. One time a few years back, Mrs Friel and Mrs Byrne looked at each other and decided we could leave Mr Friel writing and Mr Byrne broadcasting and travel a bit. We started to go on trips a deux to all sorts of places   - Paris, Hamburg, London -  and have done that all through the years while the men were busy. We and the Friels go back a long way because they are Donegal people and we would see them there when we visited there.

My funny Brian Friel story is that one time I was sitting at a lovely Dublin dinner party, with probably no more than 10 at the table, and a gentleman who shall remain nameless said “Well, we all know that Brian Friel’s play was not a success on Broadway.” I permitted myself a huge smile because I had just come back from New York and seen out the old Irish cast of Dancing at Lughnasa and seen in the new American cast, and they were the toast of Broadway

I suppose not everybody is always pleased at somebody else’s success, but we rejoiced all our lives on the success of Brian Friel. We are so lucky to have such a wonderful writer among us, and we certainly wish him 80 more years."

STEPHEN REA, actor

"I love Brian Friel's plays, but even more I prefer his company. I do think that having four daughters and a beautiful wife helps him to write quite well about women. He has a very, very cunning mind, but he's great fun, and terribly gregarious. The Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa are from Glenties in Donegal, and of course Glenties, where his aunts were from, was a stone's throw from where my own heritage comes from.

In the 1970s I made a little movie that he wrote called The Magic Sovereign, with Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, in Donegal. Tommy and Liam were very good actors, and it was directed by a great friend of Brian Friel's, David Hammond. I met Brian and he sent me a copy of it the next day - he's always meticulous about his posting and he said he found it beautiful and terrifying. I was thrilled to see it. I just want to wish him a very happy birthday."

Rosaleen Linehan, actor,

"I love Brian Friel's plays, but even more I prefer his company. I do think that having four daughters and a beautiful wife helps him to write quite well about women. He has a very, very cunning mind, but he's great fun, and terribly gregarious. The Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa are from Glenties in Donegal, and of course Glenties, where his aunts were from, was a stone's throw from where my own heritage comes from.

In the 1970s I made a little movie that he wrote called The Magic Sovereign, with Tommy Makem and Liam Clancy, in Donegal. Tommy and Liam were very good actors, and it was directed by a great friend of Brian Friel's, David Hammond.

I [ recently] met Brian and he sent me a copy of it the next day - he's always meticulous about his posting - and he said he found it beautiful and terrifying. I was thrilled to see it. I just want to wish him a very happy birthday."

DERBHLE CROTTY, actor

"I have worked on four of Brian's plays: The Home Place, Dancing At Lughnasa, The Three Sisters, and A Month In The Country, and it seems almost miraculous to me that one man can imagine and describe such a panorama of human diversity. That he achieves it with such a certain lightness of touch and conjures such delight in an audience is inspiration itself. I wish I had a fraction of his complex simplicity.
It is very exciting to play a Friel woman. His characterisation has such depth that it is possible to be one thing and the very opposite of that thing at the same time or in the next moment.

Anything might happen. The moment in Lughnasa where Maggie declines to make peace with her terrible disappointment and instead abandons herself to a dance of savage longing is a glorious example of this volatility. I have greatly enjoyed being in the company of these characters, whom Brian Friel has fashioned through words on a page and, by God, what words. Every phrase describes perfectly the emotional contours of these vivid women, the rhythms of speech capture the essence of the person, each word is another breadcrumb on the trail to the soul of this fallible human. There is little for me to do but turn up and stay faithful!"

PATRICK MASON, director 

"Brian Friel is an absolute master of the craft of playwrighting, and over the years that has been an extraordinary resource for the Irish theatre. He's also an incredible example, an absolutely dedicated artistic craftsman, and the work is actually quite astonishing, both in quality and quantity, as is the sheer commitment and courage of the man, the way he has continually reinvented himself, confounded all expectations and come up with this extraordinary body of work.

He is a universally known playwright and he has obviously enhanced greatly the reputation of Ireland and Irish theatre. Friel is an example to us all. It's not just the clear genius of his work, but it is this dedication to the art, the discipline of the man, the kind of relentless, self-critical, Yeatsian "cold eye" on his own work, the way he has given himself to that - and God knows, the cost of that is enormous - but the achievement is equally great.

As a friend and a mentor in the most delightfully informal way, my relationship with Brian Friel is one of the most challenging and stimulating I've had. Ezra Pound said you should never accept criticism from someone who doesn't have a body of work: well, you listen very hard to everything Brian Friel tells you.

He has a huge commitment to Irish theatre, a passion for it and a deep concern for its future. That is expressed in great generosity, in many acts of support and critique and mentoring, but all of it is done with great tact and great modesty. . . He is an absolute model to us all, on a human level and an artistic level. It's an extraordinary grace to be working in the Irish theatre at the same moment as he is."

PETER FALLON, publisher
"I wrote to Brian 30 years ago expressing my admiration for his work and my hope to extend Gallery's list of plays. He responded by proposing a new edition of The Enemy Within and a selection of his stories. We followed these with Aristocrats on its opening night and, in the intervening years, we've published more than 20 other titles.
For a small press to be publishing a writer of Brian's stature is an honour and privilege. An added bonus is Brian's friendship. I've called my seasonal trips to Donegal - first Muff, now Greencastle – "pilgrimages".

I've marvelled for years at the way he balances his art and its public life and his own private, domestic life. He is properly strict, keeping an all-seeing vigil from the lookout post of Drumaweir, keeping an eye on us all. It's no surprise that someone who writes so sympathetically is warm, enthralling and delightfully mischievous company. It's long since I told Brian and Anne that if they'd ever like to adopt somebody, I hoped it would be me.

In August I sent him a draft blurb for Hedda Gabler. All he quibbled with was my assertion that he is "the greatest living playwright". Clearly he'd prefer if I qualified this. That I agreed to it is one of my regrets. What other playwright sustained such a pitch for so long? Not Arthur Miller. Not Eugene O'Neill. Though his light burned shorter, Tennessee Williams is the only playwright since Shakespeare whose work I treasure as I treasure Brian's.

Simply and plainly, I've loved him too, as one loves an uncle one's in some awe of. When he's approved of something I've done, a new book of poems or whatever, I've felt somewhat taller. The dedication of Performances touched me deeply. There are worse things I can think of on a headstone than that I was Brian Friel's  friend and publisher. Slainte as saol to the Master."

EAMON MORRISSEY , actor

"He is the major influence in this day and from the past 40 years, and he's certainly been a huge influence personally because from the early days I was in a number of the first productions of his plays. I was in the first Philadelphia Here I Come! that went to Broadway, and I went to Broadway withLovers.

This year, I was in The Three Sisters, which is his version of Chekhov. You can't really be in Irish theatre without being influenced in all sorts of ways by Friel. What you have to respect is that his plays arrive so perfectly written that not a word needs to be or should be changed in them.

The apparent simplicity of his text really masks huge depths of exploration of the human condition. On top of that, he's a lovely man. He will be well and hale and hearty for many years to come, but his writings will live on after him.

I find Faith Healer to be the most wonderful, magical piece of theatre. In some ways, it is posing the question of what the artist can do to heal the wounds of society, and whether he can do anything.

I think we understand more about ourselves and others when we've sat through a Friel play. We understand our humanity a bit better, and that's a great contribution."

MICHAEL COLGAN , director of the Gate Theatre

"I call him The Master because I just think there is something about that word that suits him. I think Faith Healer is a masterpiece and I think he is masterful. I've always had three heroes in the theatre, Beckett, Pinter and Friel, and it's sad that I've only got one of them left. I suppose what makes them so, besides their well-known and extraordinary talent, is that for me they were all friends. In particular I'm a very close friend of Brian Friel, and I like the fact that I can say that without fear ofcontradiction.

What he gives to me and to actors is that we're like foot soldiers who need to trust our generals. You constantly need to be reminded that this theatre thing is worth fighting for and holding on to, and when you have a leader that has the integrity and the ability that Brian Friel has, that makes us keep going. Even above Pinter and Beckett, the thing about Brian Friel is that he was the one who gave most to the theatre.

He didn't dabble in prose, he didn't dabble in poetry, he didn't dabble in movies and he didn't dabble in television: the theatre was his first love, and he became our master, like our leader in a way and that's what is so wonderful about him.

If you ever lose faith and begin to give up hope about the area that you work in, you look at Brian Friel, with his extraordinary intellect, and you say, 'That's what he has chosen', and that keeps you going. It's important to have these people who believe in theatre, and never stray. Above all, he is a really truly great man of the theatre, in any century."

CONOR McPHERSON , playwright

"I don't think any Irish playwright can help but somehow be influenced by Brian Friel's work. He's such a deceptive playwright, in that his work is so sophisticated, but it's the mark of a true master that he makes it so accessible and seem so simple for hisaudience.

I like the philosophical heart of his work – there are often very complex concepts there – and I think he captures the essence of that while making the audience just be happy to watch a story unfolding which they can be moved by. We can all write down our ideas about what we think about language or politics or morality or love or God, but to try and wrap it up in a lovely parcel that's also funny and moving is very difficult, and it's a mark of his major talent that he manages to ring all those bells.

I've met him over the years, and even kind of worked with him in 2003, if obliquely, for an evening of one-act plays at the Gate theatre. There was a play by Brian Friel, an adaptation of Chekhov, a play by Neil Jordan and one by me.

In a way, we shared the playwright's Gethsemane of the opening night together. It was a privilege, and hugely educational for me, I learned so much from just watching his play. That was such an amazing opportunity for me, and something I really cherish, and I learned a lot.

Brian Friel is very, very generous to younger people, on a personal level, to young actors, and those involved with his plays, and young playwrights. He is very encouraging, and kind – he's a really nice man."