Between Fact and Fiction: On Writing Songs for a Burning City

At a symposium in Maynooth shortly after Brian Friel’s Translations had premiered in 1980, the dramatist was criticised for historical inaccuracy. Friel freely admitted to distorting the personality and purposes of scholars like John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry and to taking a free hand with some military details, but he insisted that while the historian may lay claim to one kind of authority, as a writer of plays he himself had to lay claim to what he called ‘the authority of fiction’.