Checkov was a master of composing life's largest problems into beautiful language and ordinary situations which the entire world could understand. Granted he wrote them a long time ago but the underlying situation exists everywhere today. Here are three sisters completely unable to move on with their lives. They are unhappy, they are desperate for a change of scene, they are forced to give up anyone they love to someone else but yet they remain glued to the exact place where all of this occurs. Olga has passed her prime, Masha loves someone other than her husband, and Irina has no idea what could possibly make her happy and all they do is talk about change, but never do anything active. And in the end it all comes full circle and we as an audience, a reader, need to decide how to not fall into such a life rut, to learn by their actions as we do from Aesop's fables. This play is just written a great deal better, with a little more comedy and tugging at the heartstrings.

ko'jkopm,jojm+++löl,+ii9u0mioßjiojijijhh

Brian Friel is undoubtedly the most acclaimed living Irish playwright. His work has an ambition, an appeal and a historical imagination which neither his peers nor the younger generation have yet rivalled. He has continued to reinvent himself over the forty-odd years of his career, trying out different forms and different identities, always aiming to articulate as clearly as possible whatever was on his mind at the time. It's becoming clearer and clearer that, as he enters his seventies, his muse is drying up; he hasn't had a major commercial _and_ critical success since Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), but the way playwrights eventually lose the plot is intimately linked to changing fashions in (and approaches to) theatre itself. Friel's verbal talent is undiminished; his sense of theatricality is what seems increasingly redundant.

It has to be said that this collection of interviews, articles and diary entries does the man no favours at all. Christopher Murray's research and dedication to his subject are exemplary, but starry-eyed ain't the word for it. The ostensible narrative here is that of a great writer sailing majestically from modest youthfulness to a secure berth in the cultural pantheon, but the real story, at least for those of us who've followed Friel's career over the last ten years, is about a writer increasingly out of touch with both the theatre and his own place in it.

Murray shows his hand right at the start. Friel likes to cite the ideas of TS Eliot as a model of his own sense of his role as a writer, and this helps us to see that Friel's stance is distinctly old-fashioned. Friel conceives theatre as a kind of agora (the place where Athenians would debate issues of the day), a neutral space accepted by the polis as a zone for reasoned debate. He seems never to have dealt with the extent to which his own work is recuperable as a sentimental dream of a potentially organic Ireland. He practically never writes about urban experience (for the very good reason that, as he says himself, he doesn't know much about it) - but this is a serious threat to any attempt to define him as central to contemporary Irish experience. Murray's commentary doesn't even try to treat this as a deficiency in Friel's work. The majority of the population of Ireland live in large towns. (A good third live in the greater Dublin area.) Friel's status is less to do with his daring as a writer and more to do with the prestige conferred upon him by foreign acclaim. (Although his real daring is exemplified by his own work, even when he discounts it; for example, after writing the monumental "Translations" about the British effort to recast Irish geography in its own image, he then thoroughly sent up the issues of the earlier play in his rollicking farce "The Communication Cord".) Theatre has by now become such a commodity, attendance to it such a badge of prestige for the consumer of culture, that only work that departs radically from the Frielian scriptural economy has a chance of making the kind of intervention that Friel values - and of course, the kind of intervention that gets made is not the kind that Friel admires. (He's getting a bit cantankerous in his old age.)

More recently, Friel has publicly dismissed the role of the director in theatre. With characteristic assurance, he's even tried directing his own work, albeit with less than happy results. Friel's work is more or less over; if his appreciation is deserved, which it surely is, it's happening much too late. Irish theatre has moved on, and the ultimate effect of Murray's book is to show just how far behind Friel has found himself.

A useful resource for scholars. A less than helpful guide to whatever in the world might happen to be the cutting edge of Irish theatre, right now.