It is quite evident from Brian Friel's plays that he has a deep investment in dramatizing the integrity of Irish culture and Irish individuals. While Philadelphia, Here I Come! presents us with a protagonist who is fed up with Ireland, and perceives its culture as stagnating, economically stalled, overly sentimental, and without promise for a brighter future, it also stages his conflict about his decision to leave. Throughout the course of the play, Gar must grapple with his deep ambivalence about his country. On the one hand, he feels tremendous love and affection for it, but on the other, he feels he must leave. The play seems to reflect playwright Brian Friel's own complicated relationship to Ireland, his desire to see it thrive mixed with his fear that it will not.
Indeed, politically, Friel was committed to amplifying the integrity of Ireland, even if he only belonged to the Nationalist Party for three or four years, quitting because of the hopelessness it made him feel. In an article in The Irish Times about Friel's life and work, Adrienne Leavy writes, "Nationalism and Catholicism were the formative influences on Friel’s life, and his status as a Northern Irish Catholic nationalist is often cited as the dominant factor underpinning the sense of exile and disenfranchisement that permeates his work." Friel's plays are subtle and complex, and do not reflect a particular political bias, but his exploration of the complexities of Irish identity and the Irish character certainly reflect his belief in his country and his desire to show this Irish identity to the world.
Underneath Friel's stories is a desire to connect with his distinctly Irish heritage, as it exists in exclusion to the English identity. In an interview with Fintan O'Toole in 1982, Friel says, "It’s back to the political problem: it’s our proximity to England; it’s how we have been pigmented in our theatre with the English experience, with the English language, the use of the English language, the understanding of words; the whole cultural burden that every word in the English language carries is slightly different to our burden. Joyce talks in the Portrait of his resentment of the [English] Jesuit priest because his language, 'so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech', and so on."
