Modern Irish Literature - Christopher Murray (essay 1989)

Christopher Murray (essay 1989)

SOURCE: “Friel and After: Trends in Theater and Drama,” in New Irish Writing: Essays in Memory of Raymond J. Porter, edited by James D. Brophy and Eamon Grennan, Twayne Publishers, 1989, pp. 13-34.

[In the following excerpt, Murray discusses the drama of Brian Friel, John B. Keane, Eugene McCabe, Thomas Kilroy, Bernard Farrell, Hugh Leonard, Graham Reid, and Tom McIntyre.]

In concluding his book on Brian Friel in 1973 D. E. S. Maxwell quoted him as saying: “I would like … to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and indeed material flux, that this country is in at the moment. This has got to be done, for me anyway, at a local, parochial level, and hopefully this will have meaning for other people in other countries.”1 Maxwell seemingly found this to be a “fair description” not only of Friel's plays up to 1973 but even of those written and staged in the 1970s and...

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