Editing Brian Friel (section)

===1990 – 2005===
Friel returned to a position of Irish theatrical dominance during the 1990s, particularly with the release of ''[[Dancing at Lughnasa]]'' at the turn of the decade. Partly modelled on ''[[The Glass Menagerie]]'' by [[Tennessee Williams]], it is set in the late summer of 1936 and loosely based on the lives of Friel's mother and aunts who lived in Glenties, on the west coast of Donegal.<ref name="obituary_irish_times2"/> Probably Friel's most successful play, it premiered at the [[Abbey Theatre]], transferred to [[West End of London|London's West End]], and went on to Broadway. On Broadway, it won three [[Tony Awards]] in 1992, including Best Play. A film version, starring [[Meryl Streep]], soon followed.<ref name=londonderry_sentinel_bidding>{{cite news|url=http://www.londonderrysentinel.co.uk/news/local/londonderry_beats_norwich_sheffield_and_birmingham_to_the_bidding_punch_1_2101970|title=Londonderry beats Norwich, Sheffield and Birmingham to the bidding punch|newspaper=Londonderry Sentinel|date=21 May 2010|access-date=17 July 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111002223928/http://www.londonderrysentinel.co.uk/news/local/londonderry_beats_norwich_sheffield_and_birmingham_to_the_bidding_punch_1_2101970|archive-date=2 October 2011|url-status=dead}}</ref>

Friel had been thinking about writing a "[[St Patrick's Purgatory|Lough Derg]]" play for several years, and his ''[[Wonderful Tennessee]]'' (less of a critical success after its premiere in 1993 when compared to other plays from this time) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate the birthday of one of their members with alcohol and culinary delicacies. ''[[Give Me Your Answer Do!]]'' premiered in 1997 and recounts the lives and careers of two novelists and friends who pursued different paths; one writing shallow, popular works, the other writing works that refuse to conform to popular tastes. After an American university pays a small fortune for the popular writer's papers, the same collector arrives to review the manuscripts of his friend. The collector prepares to announce his findings at a dinner party when the existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based upon the writer's daughter forces all present to reassess.

Entering his eighth decade, Friel found it difficult to maintain the writing pace that he returned to in the 1990s; indeed, between 1997 and 2003 he produced only the very short one-act plays "The Bear" (2002), "The Yalta Game" (2001), and "Afterplay" (2002), all published under the title ''[[Three Plays After]]'' (2002). The latter two plays stage Friel's continued fascination with Chekhov's work. "The Yalta Game" is concerned with Chekhov's story "The Lady with the Lapdog," "Afterplay" is an imagining of a near-romantic meeting between Andrey Prozorov of Chekhov's ''[[Three Sisters (play)|Three Sisters]]'' and Sonya Serebriakova of his ''[[Uncle Vanya]]''. It has been revived several times (including being part of the Friel/Gate Festival in September 2009) and had its world premiere at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.<ref>{{cite news|first=Patrick|last=Jackson|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2254294.stm|title=Chekhov revived in Afterplay|work=BBC News|date=20 September 2002}}</ref>

The most innovative work of Friel's late period is ''[[Performances (play)|Performances]]'' (2003). A graduate researching the impact of [[Leoš Janáček]]'s platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work playfully and passionately argues with the composer, who appears to host her at his artistic retreat more than 70 years after his death; all the while, the [[Alba String Quartet]]'s players intrude on the dialogue, warm up, then perform the first two movements of [[String Quartet No. 2 (Janáček)|Janáček's Second String Quartet]] in a tableau that ends the play. ''[[The Home Place]]'' (2005), focusing on the ageing Christopher Gore and the last of Friel's plays set in Ballybeg, was also his final full-scale work. Although Friel had written plays about the Catholic gentry, this is his first play directly considering the Protestant experience. In this work, he considers the first hints of the waning of Ascendancy authority during the summer of 1878, the year before Charles Stuart Parnell became president of the Land League and initiated the Land Wars.<ref>{{cite web|first=Charlotte|last=Loveridge|url=http://www.curtainup.com/homeplace.html|title=A CurtainUp London Review: The Home Place|publisher=CurtainUp|year=2005|access-date=4 October 2015}}</ref> After a sold-out season at the [[Gate Theatre]] in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at the [[Guthrie Theater]] in September 2007.