Tyrone Guthrie (1900-1971) was an English theatre director, a colossos of English drama and opera who was a central figure in the establishment of the Stratford Festival of Canada and the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota.   

Encouraged especially by his sister, Peggy Butler, he bequeathed his ancestral home at Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan to the Irish nation as an artists’ retreat.

Dear Mr Friel

In 1962, after happening on one of his short stories in The New Yorker, Tyrone Guthrie wrote a fan letter to Brian Friel. This led to a series of meetings, a long friendship and, famously, an invitation to the fledgling playwright to Minneapolis to be an ‘observer’ at the newly opened Guthrie Theatre. Within months of his return Brian Friel had written Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Constantly encouraging and supportive, this correspondence reveals some surprising lapses of judgement. In one long letter Tyrone Guthrie expresses his reservations about whether two actors playing Gar Private and Gar Public would work on stage.

The playwright’s instinctive genius prevailed. Nonetheless this privately held cache of letters and postcards demonstrates the influence of an eminent and senior figure in the English-speaking world of theatre on Ireland’s leading playwright.