Scott Boltwood adds fresh insight to the growing scholarship about the Irish playwright Brian Friel (b. 1929) through an examination of Friel's newspaper essays, interviews, and plays. A volume in the Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre series, this book analyzes Friel's complex attitude toward the Irish republic, “his paradoxical combination of alienation from and enthusiasm for Irish nationalism in the 1960s, … his skeptical interrogation of the state in the 1970s and 1980s, [and] his ultimate disillusionment with Ireland in the largest sense in the 1990s and early 2000s” (4). Boltwood devotes one chapter to Friel's essays written for the Irish Press and the remaining four chapters to a decade-by-decade chronological look at the plays.

The first chapter may be the most interesting and thought-provoking for Friel scholars. Boltwood points out that Friel's essays for the Irish Press (1962–63) have been overlooked by many critics for various reasons; even Friel himself did not include them in his gift of writings to the National Library of Ireland in 2000. However, Boltwood argues that these fifty-nine essays show Friel “[negotiating] the multiple and mutually reenforcing psychological traumas of citizenship” in Northern Ireland, a place where “he feels at once both native and alien” (17). Therefore, according to Boltwood, these writings help us understand Friel's ambivalence toward nationalism and “aspirations for freedom with the paralysis of the hopelessly dominated” (19). Some examples show defiance of and frustration with the status quo: Friel places his dead dog behind Queen Victoria's statue near the Lord Mayor's Office. In another essay, Friel tells the story of being declared dead by the Ministry of Health and his difficulty in convincing them otherwise. Boltwood adds that this anecdote reflects “the political nonexistence of the minority population in Northern Ireland” (20). At the same time, Boltwood highlights passages that include Friel's critique of nationalism. Friel describes being a political volunteer and his cynical take on the political process. Boltwood's objective, then, is to show in these newspaper writings a gradual “rejection of nationalist Irishness,” a theme that appears later in Friel's dramatic work. Also, part of this argument locates Friel and his work in the north as “a cultural bridge” between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland (141).

In the rest of the book, Boltwood uses this argument to reframe the critical conversation about several plays. For example, in chapter 2's discussion of The Enemy Within, Boltwood tries to avoid “the nationalist interpretive mode” (50) by focusing on the play's “inability to convert Columba's power and influence into a coherent fable of past Irish hegemony” (52). Or to put it another way, the play cannot praise Ireland's past without also acknowledging “its ultimate failure: Ireland's subsequent domination by England” (52). Therefore, like Shaun Richards, Boltwood resists a “nostalgic” or “sentimental” reading of Friel's dramas (45).

The next chapter explores the “Gordian knot of oedipal conflict within the family and the state” (87) in dramas of the 1970s, including The Mundy Scheme, Volunteers, and Freedom of the City. Boltwood finds “an undecided polarity of despair and guarded optimism” in Faith Healer and Aristocrats (138). These two plays, written at the same time, reveal Friel's hope for a strong Irish culture and a concern for its possible “cultural sterility” (138).

The fourth chapter focuses on “the Northern thing,” or the significance of Northern difference found in Friel's work in the 1980s (130–40). One of the most critically examined plays, Translations, tells the story of the British Ordnance Survey when British soldiers anglicized Irish place-names. After a discussion of Friel's fictionalizing of history and his movement to the domestic in other narratives such as Dancing at Lughnasa, Boltwood concludes the chapter by commenting on Wonderful Tennessee and how Friel “portrays a people lacking such an essential Irishness, a people without a specifically Irish history with which to define themselves” (183).

The final chapter examines 1994–2005 and begins by discussing a play that currently lacks much scholarship. In Molly Sweeney, a forty-one-year-old woman regains her sight after being mostly blind since she was ten months old. The two male characters, Frank Sweeney and Paddy Rice, show two ways of dealing with the effects of globalization. Rice represents an “assertive Irishness,” while Frank Sweeney favors internationalism. Boltwood argues that in Molly's story, like other Friel plays, the “authentic and indigenous” have been substituted by “an ersatz Irishness” (189). The chapter continues with Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Friel's last play written about Ballybeg (Friel's fictitious setting for many of his dramas) and his last work to date about Ireland. Since this play, Friel has focused on translations of Russian plays and one-act works set in Eastern Europe.

Brian Friel, Ireland, and the North is a useful addition to the conversation about Brian Friel's writings and politics. In this wide-ranging study, Boltwood convincingly and carefully traces Friel's evolution of political ideas and sense of identity through his newspaper writings, his decades of plays about Ireland, and his more recent translations of Chekhov.