Translations, 1.5.14

Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the linguistic confrontation between English and Gaelic in Nineteenth Century Ulster was poignant and moving.  The setting was County Donegal in 1833 as the Ordnance Survey moved in to compile the first reliable maps of this remote corner of the Empire.  Two army officers of dramatically different temperaments (Lancey and Yolland) arrive to map a rural backwater but are unable to communicate with the Irish-speaking villagers.  

Beth Cooke as Maire and John Conroy as Jimmy Jack

The play memorably gave voice to a Gaelic-speaking generation soon to be decimated by the Potato Famine (“Sweet God, did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag?”).  Friel dramatized that hinge moment in Irish history when Gaelic (still the language of c50% of the Irish in 1830) was displaced by English (the language of c75% of the Irish by 1850).  Ironically, the Irish-speaking peasants could only be represented on stage by characters speaking English. 

Niall Buggy bouncing along as the
hedge school master Hugh

The central character of Hugh Mor O’Donnell was a gift to any actor (in this case to the impressively stentorian Niall Buggy), an “aul drunken schoolmaster” who communicated floridly in richly orotund Latinisms (“Silentium!”).  Through Hugh, Friel asserted an authority for Gaelic by claiming an affinity between it and the classics (“our own culture and the classical tongues made a happier conjugation / English ... couldn’t really express us”). 

Friel used the character of Hugh's oddball buddy Jimmy Jack (John Conroy) to underline that being non-Anglophone didn't mean being uneducated.  Self-taught Jimmy was so deeply ensconced in the classics that he addressed the Gods of the Greek myths, who were as real to him as his neighbours, in Greek.  There was more than a hint that languages may have functional specialisations:  English for commerce, but Gaelic, Latin or Greek for learning.

Not all the villagers were keen to keep up their Gaelic though and the chief facilitator of English linguistic colonialism was Hugh's shopkeeper son Owen (played by the chirpy bearded Cian Barry).  The strongest scene of the play was when Owen watered down the more egregious elements of the official proclamations from the ramrod Captain Lancey (Paul Cawley), systematically mistranslating his English to make it less offensive to the Irish. 

James Northcote as Ltnt Yolland

In contrast, the other, far more idealistic, Englishman, Lieutenant Yolland (a slimly winning James Northcote), primarily responsible for translating (or mistranslating?) all the Gaelic place-names into English for the new maps, was seduced by the countryside, the "poteen" and by local girl Maire (Beth Cooke).  This latter entanglement put him in competition with Hugh's younger son Manus (Ciaran O’Brien).  In this 'linguistic war' it was Yolland, the character who strove hardest to bridge cultural differences, that had to pay the highest price. 
‘Translations’ was far being from a Nationalist tract.  In many ways, the characters like Yolland, Maire and Owen who tried to find a middle ground between colonisers and colonised were the most attractive. The serious political points were also lightened through the inclusion of much classic Beckettian-style blarney, particularly from the vaudevillian pairing of Hugh and Jimmy. 




Brian Friel

The under-rated Friel has a strong claim to be considered our greatest living playwright (though Stoppard runs him close).  As "The Times" put it:  "Nobody can write as wrenchingly as Friel about the ache of the soul and its yearning for ecstasy". 

Friel's greatest skill is his ability to capture twilight moments, the melancholia of the marginal and the displaced, and to give them voice through language of limpid beauty and precision (see also "Faith Healer", "Dancing at Lughnasa" and "Molly Sweeney"). 

In "Translations", Friel's message, through Hugh, was that:  
“It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language”. 

Hugh boasted Friel’s best lines and most acute insights, such as: 
“Remember that words are signals, counters.  They are not immortal.  And it can happen... that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of ... fact”.  

Or again:  “You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. It (Gaelic) is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows.  It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only hope of replying to ... inevitabilities.”

Sheffield Crucible’s impressive touring production (directed by James Grieve on a suitably rustic set by Lucy Osborne) gathered strength from its faithfulness to Friel’s powerful text.  And Kingston's smartly suburban Rose Theatre made an ironic contrast to the tumbledown setting of the play.  This was a show guaranteed to make a ‘Hibernophile’ of anyone!