THE COMMENDABLE Irish habit of praising the dead is often practised at the expense of a tendency to ignore the living. It was all the more commendable therefore that this week's vibrant MacGill summer school in Glenties, Co Donegal, was devoted to a writer who is very much alive. The master playwright Brian Friel will be 80 next January. This year is also the 50th anniversary of his debut as a dramatist, with two radio plays for the BBC.
Very few writers have remained productive in such a difficult field for so long, yet Friel still has plenty to say. His most recent play, The Home Place, had its acclaimed North American premiere just last year, and his new version of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler will grace this year's Dublin Theatre Festival.
Friel shares with his most illustrious Irish predecessor, Samuel Beckett, a horror of self-promotion and an ambivalence towards praise. His masterpiece, Faith Healer, in which he explores his own art, is haunted by self-doubt. He remains reluctant even to sanction productions of some of his plays that he considers failures, even when others beg to differ. He attended many of the events in Glenties this week, but found the experience, as he told Rosita Boland, "almost like hearing people talk about someone else".
Yet Glenties, which is the nearest thing Friel has to an imaginative home, clearly matters a great deal to him, and there was something lovely in seeing such large crowds fill the community hall to see his plays and listen to discussions of his work. And, without diminishing Friel's standing as an international artist, it is important to acknowledge the very real contribution his art has made to life on this island.
Friel's early plays explored the psychological costs of the prevailing reality of mass emigration at a time when the official culture was largely in denial. His dramas on love and the family played out an understanding of human emotions and relationships far more truthful than the accepted images. The plays in which he explored the mental and linguistic undercurrents of the Northern Ireland conflict kept open, in times of murderous certainty, a sense of fluidity and ambiguity.
That ambiguity is perhaps his greatest gift. Friel has managed to create beautiful and moving works out of a deep sense of uncertainty. Through decades when change, conflict and the collapse of old meanings have marked our common experience, his plays have offered, not just comfort, but courage.