The Freedom of the City, first produced in 1973, is Brian Friel's most overtly political play.

Set in Derry in 1970, in the aftermath of a Civil Rights meeting, it conjures the events of Bloody Sunday two years later.

Three unarmed marchers find themselves in the mayor's parlour in the Guildhall. Reports and rumours exaggerate their 'occupation' and they are shot by British soldiers as they leave. The play documents the victims' final hours and a subsequent tribunal of the inquiry into their deaths.

As Frank Marcus wrote in The Sunday Telegraph, 'Friel fleshes the awful, numbing casualty statistics and gives them breath and life.' While Richard Watts, in the New York Post, considered this happy co-incidence of imaginative creation and historical actuality 'a genuine masterpiece'.