Brian Friel Digital Archive

The Digital Archive was created in partnership between Queen’s University, the NLI and JSTOR. At the time of launch it includes 2,850 scanned items, drawn from five plays. These range from initial notes on themes, narratives and characters – often jotted in pen or pencil on loose sheets – to drafts of scenes written in copybooks and typed on foolscap pages. For some of the plays, final typescript drafts, marked up and edited with Friel’s pen, are also included.

A new digitised collection of Brian Friel's working drafts from five key plays. Drawing from the vast collection held at the National Library of Ireland, the Brian Friel Digital Archive features the working drafts of a selection of Friel's best-known plays, a cross-section of his output from 1964-1990.

To mark the launch of the Brian Friel Digital Archive in December 2022, the Friel Reimagined project commissioned a series of critical essays to illuminate the creation of Friel's most acclaimed plays and provide unique insights into the life and work of this most accomplished dramatist.

The analyses focus on the following plays and are interspersed with unique images from the Brian Friel Digital Archive: Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), The Freedom of the City (1973), Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990).