The Freedom Of The City, or How Reality Contaminates Art

The Northern Irish playwright Brian Friel (Omagh, 1929) wrote his first play in 1958 and his last play-to-date in 2008 ¿ which makes five decades dedicated to the stage, with no less than thirty plays. UK society and culture have undergone deep changes in these fifty years, even more so in Ireland, and, still more dramatically so in Northern Ireland. The different tendencies in drama, the political and social circumstances in both nations ¿ the Republic and the North ¿ the evolution in the way of understanding family and religion, and the different attitudes towards gender roles have always marked Friel¿s oeuvre, so that he is regarded as a spokesman for a community that was still a British colony at the beginning of the 20th century and found itself negotiating the foundations that would definitely end up with the conflict derived from its de-colonization at the beginning of the 21st century. In Friel¿s career several plays act as landmarks. As we will see, The Freedom of the City (1973), written after Derry¿s `Bloody Sunday¿, in which thirteen marchers were killed by the British army, is Friel¿s first mature attempt to bring together his artistic vein and his commitment to the troubled nation to which he belongs