From Conor McPherson’s The Brightening Air at the Gate to Garry Hynes’s revival of The Shaughraun at Galway’s Town Hall Theatre, late-summer invariably brings rich cultural pickings for Irish audiences.

Spare a thought, however, for the many promising productions that didn’t bear fruit this season, including a suite of plays by FrielDays, which was forced to pause its five-year celebration of the late Brian Friel’s work after failing to secure funding. Friel himself would surely have sympathised with the project’s predicament. Despite his success, the playwright understood just how fickle the worlds of theatre and arts funding can be.

Born in Tyrone in 1929, Friel went to school in Derry and made his home in Donegal. Befitting a life spent on either side of the Border, his work dealt with questions of language, identity and belonging. A progressive nationalist who took part in the civil rights march on Bloody Sunday, Friel was also acutely sensitive to those who didn’t share his beliefs, be it Northern Irish unionists or Catholic conservatives in the Republic. His work, though varied in its subject matter and style, mined these differences rather than constructing a singular vision of Irishness.

Friel’s breakthrough, as anyone who took the Leaving Cert in recent decades knows, was Philadelphia, Here I Come! The play’s success was neither sudden nor straightforward, as the scholar Kelly Matthews recounts. Friel endured months of rewrites in an attempt to win backing from literary agents, who remained sceptical about the........

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