The Geography of Brian Friel
The Irish playwright’s fictional Ballybeg in real-life County Donegal
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company February 1 through March 3, 2024, Faith Healer was written by legendary Irish playwright Brian Friel, whose work is deeply steeped in Ireland and Irishness. While Friel’s characters sometimes place their hopes in places across the sea (as in his plays Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Wonderful Tennessee) or spend their lives running from their homeland (as in Faith Healer), 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 and 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; in Faith Healer, the characters spend a short but pivotal period in this town, endowing it with almost mystical significance.
Some context is useful in discussing the shape-shifting Ballybeg. When Friel was writing Faith Healer in the late 1970s, Ireland was itself a kind of “borderline country,” to borrow a phrase from Molly Sweeney, another of his monologue memory plays. Though Faith Healer ends before the official start of the Troubles, Friel wrote it a decade into 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. While a critical portion of the story takes place in the Republic, Donegal — the Irish 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 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 Faith Healer, the play is in part about a man from the Republic and a woman from Northern Ireland, both of whom are running from their homes by touring Wales and Scotland, just across the sea. 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. In Faith Healer, it’s “not far from Donegal town,” placing it near to the bustle of a major town but just outside of it — another example of the liminal space its characters inhabit both physically and within their own searching psyches.
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, Northern Ireland on its east and most of its south side, and only a very small land border connecting it to the rest of the Republic. Donegal was hit particularly hard 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 Faith Healer is a more mythic place than in many of Friel’s other works. No matter where he places the town on the map, it is generally inspired by 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. In Friel’s adulthood, he settled in another Donegal town, but it is in Glenties where he is buried. Sometimes, the geographical features of Glenties are part of the fictional Ballybeg; other times, as in Faith Healer, it is not the physical features of the town but the siren song of home and homecoming, of hoped-for and perhaps unattainable restoration, that Glenties lends to Ballybeg.
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. In Friel’s work, the geography of place always comes second to the geography of the soul.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Faith Healer by Brian Friel is onstage February 1 through March 3, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
