Field Day. BBC NI documentary 'The Story of Field Day' (2006).

Field Day: Theatre, Politics and Irish Identity

Founded in 1980 by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea, Field Day emerged amid the violence and political deadlock of the Troubles. Its founders wanted to make theatre a place to examine Irish history and identity from fresh angles, rather than prescribe a political answer. Over the next 18 years, the company staged a remarkable run of plays and published influential writing, while becoming the focus of disputes about its politics and whose voices it represented.

Early Productions

Field Day’s first production, Friel’s Translations, premiered at Derry’s Guildhall. Set in 1833, as British surveyors map Ireland and replace local place-names with English ones, the play considers how language and naming can reshape a culture.

The opening night brought an extraordinary standing ovation, led by Derry’s mayor. The company then toured the play around Ireland. In Carrickmore, audiences arrived after work, sometimes by tractor, and the hall reportedly filled far beyond what its organizers thought prudent. The play’s tender romance between an English officer and a local woman offered a glimpse of connection across the divide, though one ultimately overwhelmed by political reality.

Field Day continued to use older stories to illuminate contemporary conflict. Tom Paulin’s The Riot Act, a version of Antigone, explored the clash between loyalty to family and obedience to the state—a particularly charged question during the hunger strikes. The production invited debate rather than simplifying either side. Even Creon, the king, was presented as someone trying to compromise. The documentary describes the play as helping articulate a period of change already under way.

Expanding the Debate

Field Day extended its reach beyond the stage with provocative pamphlets about Irish history, culture and division. The publications sharpened arguments over whether the company had an ideological agenda and whether it focused too narrowly on the Catholic–Protestant divide. Some critics saw a nationalist bias and argued that Protestant perspectives were not genuinely challenged; Field Day’s defenders pointed to work by writers from both traditions.

Several productions explored people divided within themselves. Tom Kilroy’s Double Cross paired Brendan Bracken, a senior British politician, with William Joyce, the Nazi broadcaster known as “Lord Haw-Haw.” Both men were of Irish origins and remade themselves as Englishmen, but ended up on opposing sides of the war. Rea’s transformation from Bracken into Joyce—ripping off a red wig to reveal a starkly different, fascistic appearance—made for a striking theatrical moment. The play also examined the self-rejection that can come with trying to imitate the colonizer.

Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar, about Oscar Wilde, brought another outsider’s story to a parish hall in west Belfast, where the audience watched intently rather than simply laughing at the comedy.

Imagining Reconciliation

Other works aimed to imagine a way beyond entrenched hostility. Stuart Parker’s Pentecost follows Catholics and Protestants thrown together during the 1974 Ulster Workers’ Council strike. One character argues that people must learn to accept one another before they can find redemption in religion.

Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy adapted a Greek story about the costly work of reconciliation. Its famous hope that “hope and history rhyme” was written against a grim political backdrop, but the documentary links its optimism to wider signs of change in 1990.

Tensions and Legacy

Field Day’s success did not prevent internal strain. Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa went to Dublin’s Abbey Theatre rather than Field Day, and Rea recalls feeling that the company had lost a surge of energy. The company’s Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing also came under sharp attack for excluding Irish women’s lives and writing. In response, Field Day published two further volumes devoted to women’s writing.

Disagreements about the company’s purpose compounded these tensions. Some wanted Field Day to speak more directly against sectarianism; others saw it as a broad, exploratory process rather than a political movement with a fixed goal. Friel resigned in 1994, followed by other board members, and the company became dormant for several years. Rea revived it in 1998 with a production of Parker’s Northern Star, about the United Irishmen and the political ideas that inspired them.

Looking back in 2006, contributors describe Field Day as an attempt to open space for new ways of thinking about Ireland. Its legacy remains contested, but the documentary presents the company’s plays, publications and arguments as part of a larger effort to imagine possibilities beyond political entrenchment.

Personalities Featured or Discussed

Brian Friel, Stephen Rea, Seamus Deane, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Tom Kilroy, David Hammond, Stuart Parker, Terry Eagleton, Liam Neeson, Helen Mirren, Alan McKee, Tim Loane, Mary McAleese, Brendan Bracken, William Joyce and Oscar Wilde.