SOURCE: Bonaccorso, Richard. “Personal Devices: Two Representative Stories by Brian Friel.” Colby Quarterly 22, no. 2 (June 1996): 93-9.

In the following essay, Bonaccorso explores the dynamics between society and the individual in “The Flower of Kiltymore” and “The Saucer of Larks.”

Between 1964 and 1967, with the productions of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in Dublin, London, and New York, Brian Friel began to commit his talents fully to drama. This was about ten years into his public career as a writer of short stories and radio plays and following a half-year of study at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. In 1967, in an essay entitled “The Theatre of Hope and Despair,” Friel makes a distinction between the strategies of the playwright and those of the storywriter, between engaging a collective audience and a solitary reader. In doing so he reveals a determination to maintain an artistic faith with himself that he had...