Theatre review: Translations, by Brian Friel, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin
Marty Rea and Zara Devlin in Translations, at the Abbey. Picture: Ros Kavanagh.
★★★★☆
The unravelling of certainty, a dawning realisation of fragility, doubts about both the future and the past. Such, so often, is the lot of Brian Friel’s characters, and in Translations, it becomes the lot of an entire culture.
It’s 1833, and Gaelic Ireland, so often at its most eloquent heralding its own demise, seems finally on the cusp of a terminal disaster. The “sweet smell” that harbingers potato blight is already being feared, and Daniel O’Connell’s advocacy of learning English is gaining ground. “The old language is a barrier to modern progress,” as Maire, an adult student of the Baile Beag hedge school, approvingly quotes the Liberator.
Yet these are no monoglot peasants, horizons curbed by a ditch. No. They talk of Greek and Latin, of Homer and Virgil. Those languages are like the Irish they speak, as Hugh the schoolmaster puts it: “Full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception … It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes.” The dispossessed have their languages, then. What will they be left with without them?
The English are here to help them find out: a redcoat team of Ordnance Survey men measuring every square inch of the countryside the better to extract rents, but also renaming every hill and hamlet, river and field.
“Where there is ambiguity it will be anglicised,” they say. It’s a mordantly funny line given how certain ambiguities relating to the north of this country are being “anglicised” right now, but such are the delights of Friel’s play about language and place, myth and memory. It’s full of subtle, ironic lines like this, paradoxes and incisive apercus.
But they are carried lightly by the play: fitted in via the boozy verbosity of Hugh (an excellent Brian Doherty), or from Zara Devlin’s clear-eyed Maire, or the conviction of Marty Rea’s lame scholar Manus.
Friel’s mastery of his craft can be seen as the play progresses in scenes that are melodramatic, or operatic, or indeed Beckettian in their tone, all before a final act in which a threatened climax dissolves into a drunken reverie, an extended recitation from the Aeneid.
Caitriona McLaughlin doesn’t accentuate any particular aspect in her steady direction. She gives space to the superb cast to really live in their roles, with nothing hurried as the long first act slowly sets the scene. The comedy of misunderstandings between the natives and the English is achieved with poise, and the love scene between Maire and the doomed Lieutenant Yolland is beautifully played.
Joanna Parker’s sloping set roots even the play’s loftier words and ideas in a muddy reality, while Paul Keogan’s bewitching lighting seems to gather the audience into this not-quite-historical, not-quite-mythical world to absorbing effect.
- Until August 13
