Performances is the bitter sweet story of a young woman’s need to know that love and romance were at the core of “Intimate letters”, Czech composer Leoš Janácek's beautiful and final Master work for string quartet. Friel, the master of convention, uses this wonderful caprice to gather up the past for scrutiny with the help of the dead Janacek and a string quartet. Once again Friel, with great agility and lightness of script, shows us that Art is simply seeing the connection between things. Performances also suggests Friel's personal concerns, since the composer Janácek is portrayed as being at Friel's age at the time of the play's composition, and the playwright expresses his anxiety over perhaps not being up to the challenges of scaling for a final time "the mountain" of creating a full-scale work. Performances is a musical box where Friel winds the key