Translations by Brian
Friel
Dir. James Grieve
Until Sat 3 May
Dir. James Grieve
Until Sat 3 May
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Erosion – of language, of a culture, of the hearts of a generation
– is central to Brian Friel’s great play Translations (1980). In a superlative co-production from the Rose
Theatre Kingston, English Touring Theatre and Sheffield Theatres, the
audience’s heart too is eroded by the intense emotional contours of this quietly angry account of the English colonisation of Ireland in the 1830s.
Set in Baile Baeg, Friel’s fictional town (literally meaning
a universal ‘small town’ in anglicised Irish), we witness a close community
disintegrating as the English military set about mapping Ireland, and in the
process renaming every parish, hillock and stream. Friel makes it clear that
centuries of identity and meaning are eradicated in the process; by placing the
action in a backwater hedge school with an irascible old master still bent on
teaching spoken Latin, Greek and Irish, we perceive both the futility of
keeping dead languages alive and the conflict of imposing a coloniser’s
language on a people who must choose either to fight against it or embrace it
as progress and revitalisation.
Director James Grieve’s consummate production allows Friel’s
play to breathe, staying faithful to the text and instilling it with a vibrancy
that echoes through the centuries. His two blundering Englishmen, Lancey and
Yolland, are at first hilarious (the audience was howling with laughter at Lancey’s
bungled attempts to explain their project through ludicrous sign language and over-enunciated
Queen’s English). But this is poignantly offset as a star-crossed love blooms
between Yolland and Máire, a women determined to better her position by
learning English. They dance around each other in a
theatrically taut expression of love that both understand implicitly despite
not knowing a word of the other’s speech. Friel’s great experimental triumph is
to have both characters speaking English on stage – understanding and misunderstanding
are in a constant, agonising dialogue in which the audience plays an integral part.
The acting is superb, from Roxanna Nic Liam as the dumb shrinking violet Sarah to Niall Buggy as Hugh, drunken master of the hedge school who pulls off inebriation faultlessly and brings to Friel’s great lines a gravitas that echoes through the whole play. Paul Cawley is pitch-perfect as Lancey, transforming from bumbling sapper to deadly soldier seamlessly. The whole cast are exceptional, Grieve’s direction is highly intelligent and Lucy Osborne’s set provides an evocative backdrop to the play’s subtle tragedy.
Now, nearly 200 years on from the play’s setting, it is
clear that Friel’s themes of colonisation, identity and linguistic mutability
are just as vital and relevant to our world. As Russia imposes its might on
Ukraine, as the West deliberates its actions toward Syria, we are relentlessly
faced with the moral, political and social problems of imposing one set of
values, culture and language on another. All too often, humans are insensible
to or blatantly disregard the consequences.
This production allows Friel’s individual
tale to appeal to the heart while making the audience draw its own conclusions
about the rippling resonance of Translations
today. This play is theatrically, linguistically and emotionally perfect. So
good, I had to go twice. See it, now.
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