Meryl Streep on Brian Friel: ‘Tender dramatist, lovely man’

Meryl Streep has paid tribute to the playwright Brian Friel describing him as a "tender dramatist, an insightful humanist and a lovely man".

Streep starred as Kate Mundy, the schoolteacher and one of five sisters in the 1998 film version of Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel's Tony award-winning play.

She said Friel’s work had universal appeal.

"I am so sad to hear the world has lost the great Brian Friel; When a poet dies, we lose not just his, but the voices of all the people who passed through his life and imagination," the actor said.

"Friel introduced the people of Donegal to us as if we were all members of his family and community," she said.

“We couldn’t help but recognise the people we loved in our own towns and lives, the people who make us laugh and make us furious.”

“We’ve lost a tender dramatist, an insightful humanist, and a lovely man.”

Actor Liam Neeson, who began his career in Friel's plays, described him as "Ireland's Chekhov" and a "master craftsman".

He lamented the passing of both Seamus Heaney and Friel within a few years of each other and he hoped they would be having a "wee one together now and sharing a giggle".

The actor John Hurt tweeted: "Ireland has lost a great playwright, an acerbic and brilliant wit and a great humanitarian. Vive Brian Friel! With my love."

The actress Bríd Brennan who played Agnes in the original stage production of Dancing at Lughnasa described Friel as an "enormously generous man with great wit. His exquisite writing will be with us forever."

Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan described Friel as a "hard man to get to know, but an easy one to get to like".

He added: “Like Beckett, he was extraordinary in his ordinariness. He was at times shy, always modest, with impeccable manners and an intelligence which - as my predecessor Hilton Edwards described - could frighten you.

“We have been close friends for almost 35 years, and yet he was easily the most elusive man I have ever met. Friendship is based on knowledge, and whereas I knew we were great friends, I’m still not sure that I knew him.

“Throughout our long professional and personal relationship he never stopped surprising me. With a word or a sentence, a suggestion for casting, or even an act of kindness, he could always wrongfoot me”.

Abbey Theatre director Fiach MacConghail said Friel was one of Ireland's "greatest nation builders".

“Brian Friel understood the power and ambiguity of memory in developing a sense of who we are as a people,” he said.

Sheila Pratschke, chair of the Arts Council, said Friel was an inspiration to Irish playwrights, actors, directors and theatre makers.

“The Irish theatre and arts world generally is devastated by this sad, sad loss,” she said.

“His legacy is a truly remarkable canon of work - work which has already achieved classic status in his lifetime, and which will go on to be produced for many years to come.”

Theatre director Joe Dowling, former artistic director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, paid warm tribute to Friel, describing him as "the greatest Irish playwright of the 20th century".

The writer had created in Ballybeg - the fictionised town in many of Friel’s works - a world that “reflected an Ireland back to itself that from the earliest plays was constantly questioning, constantly demanding more of the social, cultural and political worlds,” said Dowling, speaking from New York.

“There is no parallel,” he said. “There is no other writer that had the same depth that Brian had in terms of analysis of Irish society, in terms of the way in which he created those amazing plays that got deeper and deeper as his career went on.”

Druid artistic director Garry Hynes said in a statement that to have lived and worked in the theature when Frield was writing his plays was a "privilege".

“He is gone from us now but the gift of his imagination will live on forever on the stages of the world. Rest in peace Brian,” she said.

Aosdána, an Irish association of artists, said Friel probed the great national, political and cultural dilemmas of our time with “intense passion” and tenderness.

“His colleagues in Aosdána recognised his stature as a giant of Irish literature by electing him to be a Saoi in 2006, an honour limited to only seven artists in the country,” it said.

“Music was important to Brian personally, his art aspired to the condition of music. Now that he has died we can begin to see his work as one huge but intimate symphony. As an artist he is irreplaceable.”