ARTS OVER BORDERS IRELAND PRESENTS
FrielDays – A Homecoming 2025-2029
YEAR 1 – August 1 – 31 2025
Five plays by Brian Friel in performed-readings at site-specific locations in North-West Ireland: Dancing at Lughnasa – Faith Healer – Translations – The Home Place – Volunteers
FrielDays – A Homecoming is a five-year centenary celebration of Brian Friel. The
festival explores the rich literary and theatrical legacy of Friel through
performances in locations that inspired his work.
Donegal ~ Tyrone ~ Derry, Here We Come!
FrielDays – A Homecoming 2025-2029
Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel
7.30pm August 1 & 2 2025 (Previews)
7.30pm August 6-10, 12-17,
2.30pm August 2, 3, 9, 16
St. Columba’s Comprehensive School, Glenties, Co. Donegal
Faith Healer by Brian Friel
August 8–10 & 15-17 2025 (6 presentations).
4.30pm Bus meeting point The Market Hall, Glenties, Co. Donegal
West Donegal venues: Edeninfagh – Portnoo – Ardara – Glenties
Finish c.10pm
The Home Place by Brian Friel
2.30pm August 23-25 2025
3 presentations in the afternoons
Sion Stables Heritage Education Centre, 120a Melmount Road, Sion Mills, BT82 9ET, Co.
Tyrone, Northern Ireland.
Finish c.5.45pm
Translations by Brian Friel
7.30pm August 22-25 2025
2.30pm August 23,25 2025 SOLD OUT
Gweedore, Co. Donegal (NB venue tbc by May 1 2025)
Volunteers by Brian Friel
August 29-31 2025
7.30pm August 29 2025
8.30am (Act 1) & 4.30pm (Act 2) August 30 2025
8.30am (Act 1) & 4.30pm (Act 2) August 31 2025
The Keep, Ebrington, Derry~Londonderry
North by Seamus Heaney
August 30-31 2025
11am & 2pm ~ 30-31 August 2025
4 Venues, Derry~Londonderry
Sat 30th 11am: NORTH Part 1 Reading – First Presbyterian Church
Sat 30th 2pm: NORTH Part 1 (contd) Reading – Gasyard, Bogside4 Venues Sun 31st 11am: NORTH Part 2 Reading – The Court House Sun 31st 2pm: NORTH Part 2 (contd) Reading – Lumen Christi
The Guardian, UK, Jan 1, 13:00GMT
Brian Friel’s plays to be brought home to cross-border Irish terroir that inspired them
Five-year project will show acclaimed dramatist’s plays in location, season or even month in which they were set, to mark centenary of his birth in 1929
LIMITED NUMBER OF EXTREMELY EARLY BIRD TICKETS
for
KRAPP’S LAST TAPE
at the
2036 and 2038 ARTS OVER BORDERS’ BECKETT BIENNALES
Please note that tickets are available for purchase for 6 days only, from Samuel Beckett’s birthday, April 13, 2025, to…Samuel Beckett’s 120th birthday on Good Friday, April 18, 2025.
Tickets are on sale at:
or
ULYSSES European Odyssey (UEO) is an epic project from 2022-2024 across 18 cities in 16 countries, producing artistic responses in public spaces to social and cultural themes identified in the 18 episodes of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
At the same time, a cycle of 18 public symposia will be held in each city to produce 309 questions (Ulysses, Episode 17) towards creating a new arts and society charter for Europe. The project also has 30 artist residencies which will contribute to a new book, Europe-Ulysses (working title), alongside 18 new writing commissions, one writer from each city.
The original model for the artistic vision of ULYSSES European Odyssey 2020-2024 was first seeded and nourished in Enniskillen through AOB’s bio-festival work viscerally interweaving aspects of the works of literary giants Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde (and Brian Friel in Donegal, Ireland) with the physical and metaphorical landscape of their childhood connections with place. In 2019, AOB Ireland was founded in preparation for a new J M Synge bio-festival on the Aran Islands for Galway European Capital of Culture 2020.
In December 2020, Dublin (with the Museum of Literature Ireland, MOLI) joined as the first city followed by Trieste, Budapest, Vilnius, Marseille, Berlin, San Sebastian (now replaced with the Galician city Lugo), Copenhagen, Istanbul, Cluj, Leeuwarden, Eleusis, Oulu, Lisbon and Derry/Donegal.
In 2021, it was decided that the cities where the book was written – Trieste, Zurich, Paris – along with Dublin would provide four milestone meeting points across the 2 year project for the 18 partner consortium to gather and review the project’s progress. In early 2022, the European Commission’s Creative Europe Fund awarded the project €1.72m.
ARTS OVER BORDERS is the Lead Artistic Partner for ULYSSES European Odyssey.
ARTS OVER BORDERS is the City partner for episode XVIII of ULYSSES European Odyssey.
In Derry the greeting on the street for Hello from one person to another is the word ‘Yes.’ The last seven words of Ulysses end with repeating this affirmative (‘…yes I said yes I will Yes.’) and so to end in Derry is an affirmative gesture, whilst we also bring Derry’s natural hinterland of north Donegal into the YES Festival. The final chapter of Ulysses and thqxe Odyssey are focused on female characters, Penelope and Molly. Derry is a city historically centred around a female workforce, it was once the centre of shirt manufacture; at the time of the publication of Ulysses, around 40 shirt factories operated in Derry and the vast majority of the workforce (and the breadwinners in most homes) were women. A surprise closing location for a surprise closing episode. Joyce writes of ‘Yes’ as ‘the end of all resistance’. Joyce wrote this episode in mid-1921, the time of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
