Brian Friel's "The Freedom of the City" Is Sincere but Distancing

The work of Brian Friel, Ireland’s most prolific and successful contemporary playwright, is not often overtly political. But his “The Freedom of the City,” first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1973, is a polemic detailing misdeeds and a strangled cry against injustice. Set in Derry in Northern Ireland, it interprets events that followed a 1972 Roman Catholic civil rights protest against …

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