Brian Friel was not always a master of his genre. In Self-Portrait, broadcast by the BBC, he claimed that in his early career he was ‘almost totally ignorant of the mechanics of play-writing and play production’. But when the renowned director Tyrone Guthrie read a Friel story in The New Yorker the consequences were to shape the Irish playwright’s creative destiny.
Guthrie invited him to his repertory theatre in Minneapolis, USA. For weeks Friel skulked ‘about in the gloom of the back seats’ before coming closer to the stage and winning the trust of the actors. He developed respect for the ‘iron discipline of theatre’ and discovered the collaborative nature of producing plays — how they are ‘designed’ and ‘built’. Guthrie also taught Friel that ‘a playwright’s first function is to entertain, to have audiences enjoy themselves, to move them emotionally, to make them laugh and cry and gasp and hold their breath and sit on the edge of their seats’.
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