Theatre review: Translations at Rose Theatre Kingston

Translations by Brian Friel
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.

Translations at the Rose Theatre, Kingston

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