playwright noted for his portrayals of social and political life in both Ireland and Northern Ireland.

Educated at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (B.A., 1948), and St. Joseph's Training College, Belfast (1949–50), he taught school in Londonderry (Derry) for 10 years. After The New Yorker began regular publication of his stories, he turned to writing full time in 1960, issuing short stories and radio and stage plays. After a six-month tutelage at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minn., U.S., in 1963, he wrote his first dramatic success, Philadelphia, Here I Come!, produced first by the Dublin Theatre Festival (1964) and subsequently appearing in New York City and London to critical and popular acclaim. The play told of a young Irishman's mood changes in contemplating emigrating from Ireland to America. Soon, Friel himself was settled in County Donegal, Ireland.

After writing The Loves of Cass McGuire (1966), Lovers (1967), Crystal and Fox (1968), and The Mundy Scheme (1969), he turned more to political themes, relating the dilemmas of Irish life and the Troubles in Northern Ireland in such plays as The Freedom of the City (1973), Volunteers (1975), Living Quarters (1977), and Making History (1988). Many of his plays—notably Aristocrats (1979), Translations (1980), and the Tony award-winning Dancing at Lughnasa (1990; film adaptation, 1998)—deal with family ties, communication and mythmaking as human needs, and the tangled relationships between narrative, history, and nationality. In Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994) Friel constructed plays consisting entirely of monologues.

Beginning in the late 1990s he wrote a number of adaptations of the work of Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton), including Uncle Vanya (1998), The Yalta Game (2001, based on Chekhov's story “The Lady with a Lapdog”), and The Bear (2002). Friel explored the tensions implicit in English stewardship over Irish land during the burgeoning years of the Irish Home Rule movement of the late 19th century in The Home Place (2005), and in 2008 he presented an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen (Ibsen, Henrik)'s Hedda Gabler.

In 1980 Friel founded the Field Day Theatre Company in Londonderry, N.Ire., with the actor Stephen Rea, and in 1983 the company began publishing pamphlets, and later anthologies, aimed at the academic community on a wide variety of historical, cultural, and artistic topics.