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Translations
Brian Friel

    First performed in 1980 in the Guildhall Theatre in Derry, Brian Friel’s Translations was one of the flagships of the Field Day Group. This was a gathering of writers and artists including actor Stephen Rea, poets Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin, academic Seamus Deane, and playwright Friel. Their project was to reinvigorate the political consciousness of Irish literary arts with a respect for traditions of nation, self, and language which extended past the republican rhetoric of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
    Translations has since assumed the mantle of a classic of modern Irish theatre. In only twenty years it has already found its way into the education system. The current Abbey Theatre production is being accompanied by a series of educational workshops aimed at using it to discuss questions of "the potency of language as a way of communicating meaning, accommodating experience, and expressing cultural identity and values." Not only has the political atmosphere changed in the years since its first production (when its concern with nationality was easily read in the context of contemporary Northern Irish politics), but the play itself, it seems, has already found itself mired in context which threatens to overwhelm its value as a dramatic text.
    It is still a powerful work of theatre. Translations is a gripping and challenging drama which both uses and explores the richness of language and history to achieve its ends. Set in Donegal in 1833, the play tells the story of a small community on the brink of irrevocable change. Most of the action takes place in the home of learned but doddery Hedge School master Hugh O’Donnell (Garrett Keogh), where, in accordance with British law, Catholic pupils are taught classics and mathematics.
    Hedge Schools were underground throughout the eighteenth century. Their name came from the fact that that literally was where most of the classes took place at that time. In 1782 the Crown allowed a measure of legal status to the operation of these schools, but they were still based in barns and sod houses. As the play begins, O’Donnell’s school has already lost at least two of its pupils to brewing political unrest as British troops and engineers have begun to conduct an ordinance survey intended to map the landscape for military intelligence and standardise the Gaelic placenames in the King’s English.
    O’Donnell’s two sons, Manus (Andrew Bennett) and Owen (Frank McCusker), both scholars in their own right, seem to be bound for opposing destinies. Manus, lame since childhood, lives at home and dreams of marrying the wild and uncouth Maire (Fiona McGeown), a student at the school. Owen has left home and is a successful businessman, but he returns in the opening scenes working as a translator for two British officers involved in co-ordinating the ordinance survey.
    Of the officers, one, Lieutenant Yolland (Damien Matthews), is entranced with the romance of the land he has come to alter with language and law. The other is a more pragmatic captain here simply to do his job to the letter (Chris McHallem). Personal and political conflicts are intertwined at the deepest levels as the action begins to unfold. Characters are faced with questions about themselves in which the very words they speak are central to understanding from where they have come and to where they are going. Tales from Ovid and Homer recited in class blend with Irish history, and the translation of placenames is explicitly related to a transformation of the landscape itself. This trauma will affect these people on more levels than one, and though by the close of the action the story has not been resolved, the audience is made painfully aware of the threads of change which have begun to unravel the lines of communication between peoples, countries, and language.
    The play’s most important scene takes place immediately after the interval. Yolland and Maire share an intimate moment having fled laughing from a dance. They express their love for one another without understanding the words either is speaking. It is a brilliantly written bit of literary theatre which blends theme and characterisation perfectly. It is also the clearest illustration of the clever gambit of having the entire play performed through English while expressing linguistic and cognitive distance between characters who are supposed to be speaking Irish (and Latin and Greek), and those who speak only the language linked by verbal association to the Imperial centre (the King’s English).
    The scene also expresses a longing for understanding on more than just the obvious level. Throughout the first half we have seen tentative relationships develop despite the distances between characters. Following this scene, the play becomes darker, reflecting the historical reality of the events which followed (and of which the play was speaking metaphorically in the present) in which resolution becomes impossible. This moment is the pivot on which the drama turns, and it is beautifully constructed.
    The current Abbey production is technically spot-on. Ben Barnes has long been one of the National Theatre’s most professional in-house directors; he took up the position of its Artistic Director in January 2000. The resources of the Abbey have been employed to stage a thoroughly accomplished rendering of the play. The performances are uniformly excellent. Each of the actors meets the challenge of the dialogue well, working believable characterisations through a demanding and complex text. Garret Keogh is particularly memorable as the elderly schoolmaster. He carries himself with modest dignity and a sense of the weight of age which only becomes apparent in the final scenes when the character recalls his own small part in the rebellion of 1798. Damien Matthews is appropriately wide-eyed as the Hibernophile Lieutenant (balanced by Chris McHallem’s harder-edged but far from cliched captain) and both Andrew Bennett and Frank McCusker are strong presences as the master’s sons. Smaller roles are well filled by Pauline Hutton, Catherine Walsh, and Don Wycherley, and Brendan Conroy is very effective as Jimmy Jack, the elderly student immersed in Greek and Roman learning who dreams of marrying Athene.

    Dublin, November 8, 2000                                                                                  - Harvey O'Brien