WRITER Seamus Deane said his friend Brian Friel helped bring theatre to a wider audience.
Deane is a director of the Derry based Field Day Theatre Company, which was founded by Friel and Belfast-born actor Stephen Rea in 1980.
“The theatre toured and travelled to every part of Ireland, not only to theatres but to school halls and community halls," Deane said.
"In many cases people came and saw professional theatre for the first time and were enthused by it.
“Brian and Stephen both felt that they were doing what theatre was supposed to do, which was engage with, stimulate and be stimulated by an audience.”
Deane said that the theatre company and his writing enabled Friel to observe and analyse “the deforming effects of authority both on the authority itself and those upon whom it was exercised”.
Field Day’s first production was of Friel’s play Translations. Performed in Derry’s Guildhall on September 23 1980, the cast included Liam Neeson, Mick Lally and Rea.
Deane said that the Guildhall was deliberately chosen as the venue for the "symbolic power of the building".
“It was the centre from which the gerrymandering system had been run and it was the centre of exclusion and of unionist power," he said.
“It was deliberately chosen as a repudiation of that and a replacement of it.”
Deane visited his friend at his Donegal home recently said that although Friel had been “fading fast” due to illness, he preferred to remain at home rather than undergo lengthy treatment in hospital.
“He felt much better and more peaceful at home and as far as we could tell he wasn’t, thank heavens, in frequent pain,” he said.
Rea last night said Friel was "irreplaceable".
He said although writers including Seamus Heaney, Tom Kilroy, David Hammond and Tom Paulin were involved in Field Day, Friel was the "central driving force".
"His power and persistence, his intelligence and humour, his enormously generous hospitality and friendship informed all of our activities," he told The Irish Times.
"And I always valued, and will miss, his tough, shrewd judgment."
