The Engine

 Translations by Brian Friel at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 4th of May 2022  Translations by Brian Friel at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 4 th of May 2022   The first performance of Brian Friel’s revived play Translations at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast was in 1980 in Derry starring now world-famous actors Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea.   The location of the first performance was deliberately chosen, an attempt to foreground a city often left at the margins of theatre by bigger centres like Dublin and Belfast.   Translations was the first play produced by Field Day, a cultural initiative by Friel, Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Stephen Rea, and others, designed to address issues of nationalism, culture, language and identity at the height of the period of instability and political violence in Northern Ireland known as ‘the troubles.’   The play has a history just as it reflects on the history of a locality in relation to larger, complicated changes such as British Imperialism an