Editing Brian Friel (section)

===1976 – 1989===
By the mid-1970s, Friel had moved away from overtly political plays to examine family dynamics in a manner that has attracted many comparisons to the work of Chekhov.<ref name="dantanus2"/><ref name="pine2"/><ref name=andrew>Andrews, Elmer, ''The Art of Brian Friel.'' St. Martin's, 1995.</ref> ''[[Living Quarters]]'' (1977), a play that examines the suicide of a domineering father, is a retelling of the Theseus/Hippolytus myth in a contemporary Irish setting. This play, with its focus on several sisters and their ne'er-do-well brother, serves as a type of preparation for Friel's more successful ''[[Aristocrats (play)|Aristocrats]]'' (1979), a Chekhovian study of a once-influential family's financial collapse and, perhaps, social liberation from the aristocratic myths that have constrained the children. ''Aristocrats'' was the first of three plays premiered over a period of eighteen months which would come to define Friel's career as a dramatist, the others being ''[[Faith Healer]]'' (1979) and ''[[Translations (play)|Translations]]'' (1980).<ref name="obituary_irish_times2"/>

''Faith Healer'' is a series of four conflicting monologues delivered by dead and living characters who struggle to understand the life and death of Frank Hardy, the play's itinerant healer who can neither understand nor command his unreliable powers, and the lives sacrificed to his destructive charismatic life.<ref>{{cite news|first=Ben|last=Brantley|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/26/theater/review-theater-faith-healer-3-versions-shared-past-vision-memory-s-power.html|title=Faith Healer; From 3 Versions of a Shared Past, a Vision of Memory's Power|newspaper=The New York Times|date=26 April 1994|access-date=4 October 2015}}</ref> Many of Friel's earlier plays had incorporated assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in ''Philadelphia, Here I Come!'', portraying dead characters in "Winners" of ''Lovers,'' ''Freedom'', and ''Living Quarters'', a Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in ''Freedom of the City'', metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in ''Living Quarters''. These experiments came to fruition in ''Faith Healer''. Later in Friel's career, such experimental aspects became buried beneath the surface of more seemingly realist plays like ''[[Translations (play)|Translations]]'' (1980) and ''[[Dancing at Lughnasa]]'' (1990); however, avant-garde techniques remain a fundamental aspect of Friel's work into his late career.

''Translations'' was premiered in 1980 at [[Guildhall, Derry|Guildhall]], Derry by the Field Day Theatre Company,<ref name=londonderry_sentinel_bidding/> with Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, and Ray MacAnally. Set in 1833, it is a play about language, the meeting of English and Irish cultures, the looming [[Great Famine (Ireland)|Great Famine]], the coming of a free national school system that will eliminate the traditional hedge schools, the English expedition to convert all Irish place names into English, and the crossed love between an Irish woman who speaks no English and an English soldier who speaks no Irish. It was an instant success. The innovative conceit of the play is to stage two language communities (the Gaelic and the English), which have few and very limited ways to speak to each other, for the English know no Irish, while only a few of the Irish know English. ''Translations'' went on to be one of the most translated and staged of all plays in the latter 20th century, performed in Estonia, Iceland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, along with most of the world's English-speaking countries (including South Africa, Canada, the U.S. and Australia). It won the [[Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize]] for 1985. [[Neil Jordan]] completed a screenplay for a film version of ''Translations'' that was never produced. Friel commented on ''Translations'': "The play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by that political element, it is lost."<ref name="obituary_irish_times2"/>

Despite growing fame and success, the 1980s is considered Friel's artistic "Gap" as he published so few original works for the stage: ''Translations'' in 1980, ''[[The Communication Cord]]'' in 1982, and ''[[Making History (play)|Making History]]'' in 1988. Privately, Friel complained both of the work required managing Field Day (granting written and live interviews, casting, arranging tours, etc.) and of his fear that he was "trying to impose a 'Field Day' political atmosphere" on his work. However, this is also a period during which he worked on several minor projects that filled out the decade: a translation of Chekhov's ''[[Three Sisters (play)|Three Sisters]]'' (1981), [[Fathers and Sons (play)|an adaptation]] of Turgenev's novel ''[[Fathers and Sons (novel)|Fathers and Sons]]'' (1987), an edition of Charles McGlinchey's memoirs entitled ''[[The Last of the Name]]'' for Blackstaff Press (1986), and Charles Macklin's play ''[[The London Vertigo]]'' in 1990. Friel's decision to premiere ''[[Dancing at Lughnasa]]'' at the Abbey Theatre rather than as a Field Day production initiated his evolution away from involvement with Field Day, and he formally resigned as a director in 1994.<ref name="obituary_irish_times2"/>