Word: friels
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DANCING AT LUGHNASA by Brian Friel...
...play games with character and chronology, yet achieve a conclusion that is even more emotionally satisfying because of the sense of surprise and revelation in how it all comes together. For more than three decades, in such works as Aristocrats and Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Ireland's Brian Friel has been a good dramatist. In Dancing at Lughnasa, which opened on Broadway last week, he has become a great...
From all this Friel evokes great sadness, made sadder still by hints and outright warnings from the narrator about what else will befall the beleaguered clan in the half-century between the time he recalls and the time he now inhabits. Yet the play also evokes great joy, in small but vivid exchanges of everyday talk and, most boldly, when the sisters erupt, at home and alone, in the life-embracing energy with which they might once again have danced at Lughnasa...
...Friel has been much influenced by Chekhov. Aristocrats was unabashedly Chekhovian, a sort of Ballybeg version of The Cherry Orchard. But Chekhov never attempted anything like Lughnasa's narrative complexity, and never wrote so richly about the unprivileged. This time there are no echoes of homage in Friel's work, just authentic originality...
...aisle, hit the chaplain in the face, grabbed his microphone and started yelling obscenities into it. As the revolt spread, inmates brutalized other prisoners and smashed and set fire to the facility. Some climbed on roofs and threw tiles at riot police who gathered below. Strangeways governor Brendan O'Friel described the outburst as "an explosion of evil . . . possibly the worst incident in the history of the prison service...