A packed festival celebrating the life and works of talented Irish dramatist Brian Friel will begin in County Donegal today (Thursday).

Created by Festival Director Sean Doran, who has brought the Happy Days Samuel Beckett festival to Fermanagh for the past four years, the Lughnasa International Friel Festival will feature theatre, music, open air dancing, kite flying, talks, readings and food.

Incorporating Donegal and Belfast, this will be Ireland’s first annual cross border arts festival and will feature a new production of Dancing at Lughnasa, produced by the Lyric Theatre, Belfast and directed by Annabelle Comyn.

Fresh from his fourth successful Happy Days festival and his first Wilde Weekend festival celebrating Oscar Wilde back in May, Mr. Doran says he is “honoured” to be curating a festival devoted to Brian Friel.

“This is the third of our bio-festivals this year following Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde. Brian Friel is undoubtedly one of Ireland’s greatest writers, his plays having a profound influence on how we view ourselves and our place in history in Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland,” Mr. Doran states.

“Friel’s work asks difficult questions, is highly innovative and provocative, yet it is lyrical with an almost unparalleled understanding of the power of memory in our lives.” Friel has welcomed the festival, telling The Guardian newspaper: “If you want a festival that is tame and conventional and mildly entertaining don’t ask Séan Doran to organise it. Witness his Beckett festival in Enniskillen, it is wild and imaginative and creative and riveting. I have total confidence he’ll do the same with the Friel festival.” The festival is being supported by former US president and Friel fan, Bill Clinton, who commented: “Friel’s work is an Irish treasure for the entire world.

“Although many of his plays are set in his small home town of Ballybeg, the themes and issues explored in them – identity, family and conflict – have a universal appeal. It is his extraordinary understanding of people, their motivations and their dreams, and their sense of themselves and others, that keeps pulling us back to Friel again and again.” Irish President Michael D. Higgins has welcomed the festival, saying: “It is entirely fitting that this festival is taking place on a cross-border basis, given Friel’s experience of living north and south of the border. In a certain sense, Ballybeg is a metonym for the island of Ireland, if not the wider world – a literary device through which universal questions are addressed by examining the individual and the local.” Highlights include rehearsed readings of some of Friel’s most famous plays such as Lovers, The Enemy Within, The Gentle Island (which will be performed on Arranmore island) and The Faith Healer.

In Belfast, there will be a programme of all-women talks called Amongst Women, featuring speakers including Shami Chakrabati, director of Liberty, novelist Kamila Shamsie, and writer and presenter Sandi Toksvig.

Queen’s University, Belfast will hold a four day summer school in Donegal dedicated to Friel’s work during the festival and five free outdoor dance sites will be held at some of Belfast’s iconic sites: the Titanic slipways, Lagan Weir footbridge, the Peace Wall, Giants Ring and City Hall.

Friel, aged 86, was born in Omagh and educated at St. Columb’s College, Londonderry, the same school that Seamus Heaney and John Hume attended. He studied for the priesthood at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, before going into teaching, working at schools in and around Derry in the 1950s. In 1967, he moved to Donegal where he lives to this day.