This first volume of Brian Friel’s collected plays gathers six works written between the 1960s and early 1980s.

It includes Philadelphia, Here I Come!, The Freedom of the City, Living Quarters, Aristocrats, Faith Healer and Translations, and together they show the territory Friel kept worrying at from different angles.

Friel loves the way people become divided against themselves. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! the protagonist is literally split into a public and private self; Faith Healer builds itself from incompatible accounts of the same life; Translations turns language itself into a struggle over memory, place and power. The volume is introduced by Seamus Deane, placing the plays within modern Irish literary and political history. It makes for a good single-volume entry point into Friel because the six plays span both the intimate and overtly political ends of his work.

Faber and Faber, London, 1996. Contemporary Classics edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear, faint creasing and minor handling marks to covers; corners lightly bumped. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition. This 1996 Faber edition is ISBN 9780571177677.