Marilynn Richtarik,Stewart Parker: A Life.Christopher Murray,The Theatre of Brian Friel: Tradition and Modernity.

Keith Hopper

doi:10.1093/notesj/gjv226

Marilynn Richtarik,Stewart Parker: A Life.Christopher Murray,The Theatre of Brian Friel: Tradition and Modernity.

Notes and Queries ◽

10.1093/notesj/gjv226 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 63 (1) ◽

pp. 164-167

Author(s):

Keith Hopper

Keyword(s):

Brian Friel ◽

Stewart Parker

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Endogamy and Education: Brian Friel and Stewart Parker

Breaking Enmities ◽

10.1007/978-1-349-27726-1_3 ◽

1999 ◽

pp. 72-103

Author(s):

Patrick Grant

Keyword(s):

Brian Friel ◽

Stewart Parker

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‘A disoriented vision of … fact’: Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2020.0473 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 50 (2) ◽

pp. 319-336

Author(s):

Zosia Kuczyńska

Keyword(s):

Creative Process ◽

Francis Bacon ◽

Major Influence ◽

Artistic Practice ◽

Archival Research ◽

Faith Healer ◽

Brian Friel ◽

History Of ◽

Composition Process

The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.

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