Well-judged staging of a deeply moving masterpiece
Theatre Translations National Theatre
Translations, Brian Friel’s 1980 work about the inhabitants of a rural hedge school in 1830s Donegal, is a masterpiece. And like most masterpieces, it is easy to adapt its historical specifics to the here and now. As the question of border control threatens to divide Northern Ireland from the Republic; as abortion laws highlight moral differences; as the debate surrounding teaching Irish in schools turns into a political fist-fight between unionists and nationalists, Friel’s play about the power of language and its ability to divide us (and help us fall in love) makes powerful new resonances come to the surface.
However, director Ian Rickson has made the admirable decision to avoid signposting such issues. This terrific, unfussy new production allows the audience to unpeel its own meaning, and the result is a simple but effective rendering of Friel’s lyrical, deeply moving work, focusing on the spoken word and the psychological realism of its characters.
We are instantly drawn into the hermetic world of Baile Beag, where the alcoholic schoolmaster, Hugh, has fostered a small community steeped in the works of Aeschylus and Homer, but who know very little of the outside world. The return of Hugh’s youngest son, Owen, after six years in Dublin signals that change is afoot. Owen is working as a translator for two English sappers whose mission is to complete the six-inch-to-the-mile map of Ireland for the Ordnance Survey. Place names are to be changed into English and the Irish language, which depicts “mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception”, comes under threat.
The necessary intimacy of the play could have been threatened by the expansive Olivier stage, but Rickson covers much of it with marshy contours and reduces the action to a smaller surface area. Fog looms metaphorically as a sign of threatening change, while Stephen Warbeck’s spare and plaintive score hints at the unsettled moods of the characters.
Ciarán Hinds, fresh from theatrical success in Girl from the North Country, is captivating as Hugh, showing a man simultaneously aware of his own consequence as a big fish in a small pond, and critically aware that this is all about to change. Equally strong is Dermot Crowley as Jimmy, a sort of Fool to Hinds’ Lear, who has been turned from “scholar to barbarian” by the arrival of the British, and notices with grim humour that he will soon be fluent in three dead languages.
Of the younger cast, Colin Morgan brings a subtlety to his portrayal of Owen the translator, always hinting that he is in a precarious position – a disposable aid to the British Army and a betrayer of his homeland. As the lovers flirting across cultural boundaries, Judith Roddy and Adetomiwa Edun are fresh and vigorous, speaking every word with a slow precision as each tries to understand the other’s native tongue.
Translations is an important play – humorous and sad – which opens up the beautiful possibilities of language and, ultimately and tragically, its terrible limitations.