Thirty-three years later, Friel’s work stands the test of time

Brian Friel’s Translations was first produced in Derry in 1980 with a cast that included Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson and Mick Lally.

The play documents the collapse of the Irish language under the strain of colonial British rule

One of the most significant Irish plays of the last century, Brian Friel’s Translations was first produced in the Guildhall, Derry on Sept 23, 1980. It was the first play produced by Field Day, the influential company founded by Friel and actor Stephen Rea. Field Day aimed to advance a fresh artistic reckoning with the postcolonial politics that marked the island on both sides of the border.

The original production was directed by Art Ó Briain and the cast featured Rea alongside Ray MacAnally, Liam Neeson, Nuala Hayes, and Mick Lally.

Set in a small Donegal village (Baile Beag) in 1833, the play documents the collapse of the Irish language under the strain of colonial British rule. This strain is dramatised in the interactions between the Irish-speaking villagers and the British army officers who have been sent there to conduct the Ordnance Survey, the objective of which is to translate the local Irish place-names into English equivalents. At the play’s centre is a concern with language, identity, and place, and how these are all inextricably entwined.

But a daring theatrical conceit also lies at the centre of the piece. As the narrative has it, the Irish villagers are Irish speakers and therefore unable to understand the British soldiers who, in turn, cannot understand them. Yet, in reality, the entire cast speaks in English. Thus, it is left to the audience to make the imaginative leap that the speech of Irish characters is actually in Gaelic and not in English. This is a very powerful device in that it viscerally exposes precisely what is at stake in the play — the loss of the Irish language. The terrible irony it highlights is that a contemporary Irish audience member would most likely not be able to understand the Irish characters were they actually to speak in Irish. This very vividly dramatises that loss.

Throughout its production history in the 1980s, Translations was frequently misunderstood as veering towards a nostalgic nationalism — a charge that deeply missed the nuances that Friel brings to bear on the issue of identity itself as it wavers amid the tumult of linguistic change. Friel is no romanticist. In Translations, language is slippery and unstable. Identity is no less so. There are expressions of ambiguity that cannot be made coalesce with a nationalist argument for some pure Irishness. Elsewhere there are expressions of hope — even if it is tragically curtailed — in the communications of love that the village girl Máire and the Survey officer Yolland are able to find.

Friel admitted in his diary that, while the play was concerned solely with language, it couldn’t avoid being political. Yet while there is unquestionably some sentiment about the destitution of the Irish language, the play contains within itself — through references to ancient cultures like Greece and Rome — the observation that culture is always in transition and that empires are fated to collapse. What Translations, in effect, hopes for is that in the spaces that remain in the wake of all these cultural shifts and clashes, they may yet provide a home for human virtues such as love and dignity.

Translations remains one of the pillars of Brian Friel’s work and, fittingly, has gone on to be translated into numerous languages and continues to be staged worldwide.