'Of all contemporary writers, there is no one I admire more highly than Brian Friel.'
                                     — Peter Brook

By reflecting on the composer's intoxication with a married woman nearly forty years his junior, to whom he wrote over seven hundred letters, Friel considers the interaction between that passion and Janacek's final surge of creative energy; the relationship between the private life and the public work; and the artist's insistence -- delusion? -- that he chose, in Yeats's phrase, the perfection of the work. Performances is a further marvel by one of the finest playwrights at work today.