Bringing love and history to life in Ireland

WE MAY have to wait a while for a production to top Ian Rickson’s fine new revival at the Olivier of Brian Friel’s drama about England’s occupation of Ireland before the Great Famine.

Rickson’s nuanced rendition, starring Colin Morgan, has the measure of Friel’s enigmatic vision — which sees the colonisation of Ireland as a tragedy that diminished everyone.

Morgan plays a young man returning from Dublin to act as a Gaelic interpreter for British Army cartographers mapping his native Donegal. He breezily captures the naivety of a collaborator who thinks he can be on the side of economic progress imposed by England without compromising his culture.

Adetomiwa Edun, in a finely poised performance, plays the shy yet spirited soldier who finds himself falling in love with Judith Roddy, the girl who dreams of escaping her servitude.

Seamus O’Hara, as the teacher hoping to marry her, is desperate to impress by finding a lucrative job. All that stands in his way is his growling father (Ciaran Hinds).

Everything comes to a head when the English seek revenge for a missing soldier, and perhaps Rickson overplays his hand by showing modern British troops patrolling the stage.

Until that point, designer Rae Smith keeps the huge space wreathed in a vast cloud, drawing curtains of rain across a small cottage hewn from the peat bogs.

The message is history can be personal, or impersonal, but always painful.