Translations by Brian Friel at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast on the 4th of May 2022 coming soon.....
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 4th 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 and
Ireland’s colonial status.
Joanna Parker’s mise en scene
consists of a sloping, irregularly shaped mound meant to resemble part of a
field, completed with an artificial grass verge. In the second half of the performance heather
appears at the edges of this mound signifying some sort of growth although the
play indicates that hardly any time has passed.
There is a table, chair, books, and more books. There is also a red and white striped
ordnance survey pole. A nib hangs suspended
over the stage and only at the end does it descend, meaning that the play has
been written. Maps also appear at a
later part of the play because the play is about cartography and the mapping of
Ireland in the early 19th century, in August 1833. The first map of Ireland was completed by
Claudius Ptolemy in 140 A.D., and it is considered very accurate for its time. Ptolemy was a Greek citizen living in
Alexandria, Egypt, then a Roman colony, and the map is produced in his work Prima
Europe Tabula. Ptolemy identifies
rivers such as Buvinda (Boyne), places such as Eblana (Dublin)
and peoples such as the Magnatai of County Sligo. Cartography, clearly an extension of Roman
power, naming places in Latin, names that also told a story about how the place
came to be settled, by whom, and when, displacing older names and narratives.
Translations has a
well-conceived and plausible conceptual basis.
Instead of Roman imperialists, a British military mapping expedition
consisting of royal engineers and sappers has arrived to study this section of
Ireland which is some villages like Baile Beag (the anglicisation is Ballybeg
meaning ‘little town’ in Irish), a fictional village in Donegal, complete with
some Irish peasants all intent on improving themselves through attendance at a
hedge school. Hedge schools were common
in Ireland in the 19th century and consisted of an educated or more
likely half-educated person who provided basic lessons in literacy and numeracy
for local peasants who realised that education was a way out of poverty and
backwardness. Hugh, played by the
redoubtable Brian Doherty, is the hedge-master of the hedge-school, a scholar
well read in the Greek and Latin classics, and his son Manus, played by Marty
Rea, who happens to be lame, speaks English but never uses it in front of the
British soldiers.
The sound design was minimal, there was
the background drone of constant rain falling and some songs are sung in Irish
at the end of scenes but there is no other use of Irish in the play. Instead, we are meant to know that the Irish
characters speak Irish which is English for purposes of general intelligibility
and that one of these Irish characters called Owen played by Leonard Buckley
(although the British sappers call him ‘Roland’ because they have presumably
mis-heard his name or it is a sarcasm) and played by Stephen Rea in the
original version (who also happens to be the play’s dedicatee) can speak
English and translates between the two languages. The accuracy and veracity of these
translations is challenged by characters in the play for their political bias
and Owen is generally depicted as a go-between or a Quisling. Hugh, for instance, understands other, older
languages, such as Greek and Latin and their associated literatures (they have
presumably gained a knowledge of these through a priest, for Latin is still
used in the Catholic church to this day).
Earlier Imperialist narratives, for instance The Aeneid by
Virgil, a book conceived during the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus,
and meant to explain the historical and mythological origins of Rome, are
indicated in the play. Lieutenant
Yolland and Maire are clearly intended to remind us of Dido and Aeneas, Romeo
and Juliet or any other pair of star-crossed lovers.
The Irish peasants are a romantic vision
of Irish peasantry, stereotypes who glide between child-like innocence,
drunkenness, erudition, intensity, and pronouncing flamboyantly gratuitous
inanities. Like Jimmy Jack Cassie,
played intriguingly by Ronan Leahy (referred to as the ‘infant prodigy’ in the
play) a man in his sixties who never washes or cleans his clothes but who
quotes Homer and Virgil. Other
characters like Manus who is always depicted with dirty feet, lacking shoes and
socks. By contrast, the British officers
and sappers like Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland are disciplined,
methodical, practical, uniformed, and ruthlessly efficient. Stereotypes are reductive but they also
communicate to us especially within the confines of a two- hour period which is
necessarily limiting. Catherine Fay’s costume
design underlines some of the key contrasts in the play.
The play is of its time and reflects on
the political situation in the early 1980s in the north of Ireland, at the very
height of ‘the troubles’. The title
itself indicates the lecture hall. Here
we are gathered to listen to Professor Friel’s lecture on translation. Indeed, Friel used academic Professor George
Steiner’s work After Babel as the basis for the views on translation
portrayed in the play, indeed some of Professor Steiner’s own lines are
paraphrased in Hugh’s speeches. Steiner
argues that all speech acts within a language are translations (or
mistranslations), but it is also clear that soft power in the form of the
English language is seen by the Imperialists as a more enduring form of control
than truncheons. The female lead, Maire,
played adeptly by Zara Devlin who in many ways carries the play, talks of ways
in which the extension of soft power is beginning to be seen as an
indispensable bridge between the two cultures:
Maire: I’m talking about the Liberator,
Master, as you well know. And what he
said was this: ‘The old language is a barrier to modern progress.’ He said that last month. And he’s right. I don’t want Greek. I don’t want Latin. I want English.
I want to be able to speak English because
I’m going to America as soon as the harvest’s all saved.
For Maire, learning English is not about
reconciliation with the Imperialists but as a means of escape to a new life
across the Atlantic. This is also
indicated by Maire’s speech about the Liberator, meaning Daniel O’Connell who
believed that violent resistance to British rule would not succeed, had been
tried in 1798 and failed, and instead instigated monster rallies. These became so frightening to the British
that they were violently supressed, but it is also clear that O’Connell caved
into threats and intimidation by the British.
O’Connell’s political strategy would be used as a model of non-violent
political opposition by Gandhi and others.
Maire acknowledges the reality that English is a world language that has
absorbed different cultures and found a new articulation of hope, prosperity,
and discovery in America.
It is also clear that the play is not
faithful to the historical record. There
were British ordnance survey expeditions in Ireland at this time, but they did
not have the power that Captain Lancey claims, to shoot all livestock and
ravage the parish if Lieutenant Yolland is not returned. These brutalities belong to an earlier,
Cromwellian age, or to a later one, the period after the Rising, of the Black
‘n Tans, British auxiliaries sent to Ireland as a paramilitary force that
refused to obey the law and the rules of war.
Of course, a play is not a thesis but an entertainment. The ambiguity lies in the play’s title that
indicates the seriousness and possible academic veracity of the work. For this reason, the play has been heavily
criticised by academics, and criticised for replicating the things that it
claims to attack. The salient example is
the natives who speak English not Irish, an acknowledgement that 1916, the
declaration of independence and the creation of the Republic, were a
failure. Padraic Pearse was clear that
the Irish language was the prime vehicle of independence for Ireland, but Friel
indicates that the Irish language is redundant in terms of commercial theatre.
Lieutenant Yolland is an orthographer,
responsible for transliterating Irish place names into English names while
retaining the overall meaning of the original but making it comprehensible to
non-Irish speakers. The point of the
play is the usage of soft power and, when and if soft power fails, the bleak
realities of hatred, death, destruction, enslavement, and polarisation. Of course, literature and drama particularly,
is also a form of soft power and the playwright is part of this extension of
soft power by writing the play in English, neglecting to allow the native Irish
to speak their tongue in the interests, presumably, of crowd pleasing. If the point of the play is translation,
there seems to be little translation taking place except in the audience’s
imagination.
This is an interesting production of a
play that seemed to exist on a conceptual level like a lecture, but which
became animated through the various situations depicted. The playwright missed out on an emotional climax
by not uniting the lovers at the end even in a Liebestod. The play failed to establish its emotional
crux. The fact that two young people
from opposite sides of the divide understood each other was never developed and
this may have been the case because the author did not want to consider the
possibility closely. It was just a mere
plot device. However, the production was
still enjoyable and thought provoking.
The best things about the play may be the effects provided by the
Lyric's production.
Paul Murphy, the Lyric Theatre, Belfast,
May 2022
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