The Geography of Brian Friel
The Irish playwright’s fictional Ballybeg in real-life Donegal
Lantern Theater Company’s newly filmed production of Molly Sweeney, streaming January 22 through March 7, 2021, is a 1994 play by Brian Friel, one of Ireland’s most esteemed playwrights. His work is deeply steeped in Ireland and Irishness. While his characters sometimes place their hopes in places across the sea, as in titles like Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Wonderful Tennessee, Ireland is always at their core.
Friel is never content to simply examine Ireland as it factually exists or existed, however. He explores more liminal dimensions of the country, like what it means to be Irish — which internal borders are crossed, eliminated, or fortified in the negotiation between cultural heritage and political divides, even if the politics themselves rarely appear onstage. As part of that exploration, Friel invented a fictitious town called “Ballybeg” as a setting for 14 of his plays — Molly Sweeney is one of the last.
Some context is useful in discussing the shape-shifting Ballybeg. In 1994, Ireland was itself a kind of “borderline country,” to borrow a phrase from Molly Sweeney. This is the last play Friel wrote during the primary time of the Troubles, the period of violence and unrest in Northern Ireland between those who wished to remain with England and those who wished to join the Republic of Ireland. In fact, the play was written just a month before the first ceasefire was declared after three decades of violence. While the play is set in the Republic, Donegal — the county where this and many other Friel plays are set — is a border county, near to the conflict.
Friel himself was born in Northern Ireland but he visited Donegal in the Republic frequently as a child and came to live there as an adult. Though this political and personal context is never mentioned in Molly Sweeney, Friel’s life- and career-long exploration of borders — including the border around “Irishness” as an identity — is suffused throughout his characters and writing.
In 14 of these explorations, Friel’s characters live, love, and work in Ballybeg, which is an Anglicization of “Baile Beag,” an Irish-language phrase meaning simply “small town.” Even its name performs a type of border-crossing, using an English-friendly pronunciation and spelling while retaining an essentially Irish core. This town moves around Donegal in line with each play’s themes and concerns; it cannot be consistently pinned to a physical location on the map. In Dancing at Lughnasa, it is located in the southwest of Donegal, but in Molly Sweeney the “remote” Ballybeg is in the “far northwest” of Donegal — itself the most remote county in the Republic of Ireland.
Donegal is the northernmost county in the Republic, noted for its rugged landscapes. It is the most mountainous region in the Ulster province and has vast stretches of beach, some ringed with cliffs. It is bordered by the Atlantic on the west and north sides and Northern Ireland on its east and most of its south side, with only a very small land border connecting it to the rest of the Republic. Donegal was particularly hard hit by the potato famine. Later, despite being part of the Republic, the island’s partition was also a source of difficulty — it was cut off from Northern Ireland’s Derry, which had been Donegal’s main port and nearest financial center.
Its geographic isolation from the Republic coupled with its complicated political and financial ties to both the Republic and the North means Donegal has maintained a distinct cultural identity. It is also home to one of the island’s largest populations of Irish-language speakers — though their dialect isn’t the same as what is spoken in much of the rest of the Republic.
The Ballybeg of Molly Sweeney, rooted as it is in the real-life isolation of Donegal, is nevertheless built in a personal rather than geographical map. This version of Ballybeg is near Tramore Beach — a real location on the northwest coast of Donegal, whose name, like Ballybeg’s, is an Anglicization of the Irish for “big beach.” But Lough Anna, a lake said to be in or just outside Molly Sweeney’s Ballybeg, is in reality about an hour and a half south. And like Ballybeg, Lough Anna recurs throughout Friel’s work, regardless where on the map he places his small town. The real Lough Anna is near the town of Glenties, the Donegal village where Friel’s mother grew up and the destination of many of Friel’s childhood trips across the border from his Northern Irish home. He and his father would fish on Lough Anna during these trips, and Friel is buried in Glenties.
Brian Friel writes characters seeking to understand themselves, their circumstances, and the world they have built — or the one that has been built around them. This quest is mirrored in his geography and its ever-changing mix of reality and fiction. No matter where the fictional Ballybeg moves, its heart is with the real-life Glenties and Lough Anna. In Friel’s work, the geography of place always comes second to the geography of the soul.
Go behind the scenes: Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon on filming Molly Sweeney and bringing theater alive safely onscreen
Molly Sweeney was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in fall 2020, with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming January 22 — March 7, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
