Interview: Brian Friel - Keeper of the faith

AS BRIAN Friel sees it, every playwright works with just three tools: words, action and silence. Of those, he says, it is words that engage him the most.

Indeed, the man regarded as Ireland's greatest living dramatist has a distinctively literary style. Look at the sonorous monologues that form Molly Sweeney, an award-winning hit for the Citizens' Theatre in 2005, and Faith Healer, the centrepiece of a residency by Dublin's Gate Theatre in this year's Edinburgh International Festival, and there can be little doubt that language is paramount in Friel's work.

But, as the playwright has pointed out, theatrical language is not the same as the language of the literary writer. The words of a play are designed to come to life in public through the medium of an actor standing before an audience, not in the privacy of the study. "They are used as the storyteller uses them, to hold an audience in his embrace and within that vocal sound," he writes. "So unlike the words of the novelist or poet, the playwright's words are scored for a very different context. And for that reason they are scored in altogether different keys and in altogether different tempi."

It is Friel's understanding of this that makes his plays so compelling. Faith Healer, which was first seen at the Longacre Theatre in New York exactly 30 years ago, consists of four monologues and has none of the interaction we would normally expect of a play. It tells the story of Frank – aka the Fantastic Francis Hardy – a man with a gift for miracle cures that turns out to be fatally inconsistent. With his wife and manager, he tours the small towns of Scotland and Wales, putting on a show for credulous audiences. Returning to his native Ireland, he attempts one cure too many and gets his comeuppance.

Frank, an inveterate storyteller with a shaky grasp of the line between fact and fiction, speaks the first and last monologues; his wife and manager deliver the other two. Each person's perspective shifts our understanding of the narrative, rendering the words untrustworthy and building dramatic tension by unconventional means. "When it was written in the early 80s it was rejected as 'not a play'," says Patrick Mason, whose productions of Friel's work include the 1990 premiere of Dancing At Lughnasa, which played in Dublin, London and New York, where it won three Tony Awards. "Fast-forward to now and we're coming down with monologues."

At 80 years old, Friel is being celebrated by the Gate with three productions that have already played to acclaim in Australia and now call into Edinburgh en route to Ireland. As well as Faith Healer, the company is presenting two Chekhov-inspired pieces, The Yalta Game and Afterplay. The former reworks a theme from the Russian master's short story The Lady With The Lapdog, about a womaniser whose holiday romance lasts longer than planned. Meanwhile, Afterplay brings together those two lost souls, Sonya, the niece of Uncle Vanya, and Andrey, brother of the three sisters, in middle age.

Together, the three plays were described by the critic of The Age newspaper as "a peerless tribute to the work of Brian Friel". Mason, who directs The Yalta Game, believes that Friel's 50-year theatrical career puts him at the forefront of a formidable generation of Irish playwrights. The three plays brought together here give a flavour of the author whose major works include Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Translations.

"The Yalta Game is absolutely a joy to do," says Mason. "It begins with an interesting little trick when the central character, Dmitry Gurov, who's a very unreliable narrator of his own story, says to us, 'Believe me.' It's the innocence and simplicity of Friel. It makes you think, 'Do I believe this man?' And, of course, you do because that is the nature of the theatre, and no sooner have you done that than Friel turns the whole thing on its head again. It's the essence of play. He's playing with the theatre and our propensity to believe what we're told. It's the definition of drama: you can't quite see where this thing is going to go, but you can't leave it because it's taking you with it every moment."

Faith Healer, 15-18 August and 1-5 September; The Yalta Game, 29, 31 August and September 2-5; Afterplay, 31 August, 1, 3 and 5 September, all King's Theatre, Edinburgh, www.edinburgh-festivals.com