In 1990, Friel struck gold with his play about five unmarried sisters adapting to change and loss in Donegal, Dancing at Lughnasa. We enter their world through the memory of Michael, the love child of the youngest sister, as he watches the last days of this world shimmer and disintegrate. The ritual of dance gives way to the ritual of music in Friel's next play, Wonderful Tennessee in which a group of disillusioned adults yearn for the healing powers of Oileán Draoichta (‘Island of Otherness’) but learn instead to face their own failures and each other's shortcomings. In 1994, Friel returned to the daring and difficult form of Faith Healer for another monologue play of three characters – the blind Molly Sweeney, her husband Frank and the ‘healer’, Dr Rice. Indeed, the London Times critic, Benedict Nightingale said of Molly Sweeney, ‘I am tempted to call it the definitive Irish play, a wise and humane meditation on themes that have preoccupied the island's playwrights from O'Casey to Friel himself: deprivation, insularity, exile, loss, the lure of illusion, and the pull of fantasy’. Friel's 1997 play, Give Me Your Answer, Do! examines the notion of literary celebrity against a backdrop of marital breakdown, illness and, again, the inarticulate love between father and child. In teasing out the difference between worth and value, Friel offers no definitive answers, merely recognition of what he calls ‘the Necessary Uncertainty’.

The plays of the 1990s, often seen as attempts to go beyond language through gesture, dance and music, are in fact grounded in the imperatives of storytelling. We will concentrate here on the interplay between memory and experience or what we might call the fiction of Friel's reality. Friel asks whether the world of illusion or reality is more threatening or indeed whether reality is an illusion constructed by language. Many of the characters attempt to find a space in which they can exist honestly and yet these spaces are only fragments of time that flicker and may not be real.

DANCING AT LUGHNASA (1990)

Friel's best known play, Dancing at Lughnasa, won international acclaim and was awarded ‘Best Play’ accolades in Dublin, London and New York, much to Friel's own surprise.