Writers Theatre’s “Translations,” with cast/Photo: Michael Brosilow
RECOMMENDED
This production of Brian Friel’s celebrated, poignant and cerebral play brings forth all the magic that a great playwright, a smart director—Writers Theatre artistic director Braden Abraham—and a masterful cast can wring out of a stationary set, a few props and a whirlpool of ideas that grows ever deeper with each line of dialogue. It’s a stunning production that should be seen at least once, though I, for one, wish I could see it a dozen times or more.
Scenic designer Andrew Boyce’s rustic, dirt-floored set, by the way, is one of the play’s strongest characters. It’s the site of an ad hoc, illegal Irish classroom in Friel’s often-used fictional village of Baile Beag, County Donegal, in 1833. There, pupils pay their “master” directly each week and avoid the schools of Ireland’s English colonizers. Friel’s script prescribes the set poetically and in detail:
The hedge-school is held in a disused barn or hay-shed or byre… Around the room are broken and forgotten implements: a cart-wheel, some lobster pots, bench seats the pupils use, and a table and chair for the master. At the door, a pail of water and a soiled towel. The room is comfortless and dusty… there is no trace of a woman’s hand.
Like the Irish characters and culture in the play, the space is proud, poor and threatened—subordinated by English force, English language and English cultural domination. Though most of the characters are depicted as speaking Irish nearly all the time, Friel’s drama has them conversing in English as though they were dubbed. The English characters speak English to both each other and the Irish, and three of the seven Irish characters are fluent enough in English to answer in kind. The others cannot. The playwright is clever enough that it is nearly always clear in the world of the play when the 1833 characters would be speaking Irish, if audiences in our time didn’t need the convenience of English.
Friel, who died in 2015, said his play was mostly about language, and that the action in it was secondary. Nevertheless, the plot and subplots are propulsive. The story unfolds as the English step up efforts to Anglicize Ireland. The King’s army has been deployed en masse to survey and map the land, and to replace Irish place names with English ones.
The play opens before a class begins, with the lame, penniless, but erudite Manus holding the hand of teenage Sarah, looking intently into her eyes, trying to teach her to say her name in Irish. Sarah, the school’s youngest student, can barely utter a word in any language. Julia Rowley as Sarah emotes powerfully, even in silence—communicating her joys and considerable frustrations subtly and tragically. When an English military officer marches into the school to demand she yield her name, Sarah’s inescapable silence is the quiet version of what befalls the talkative Irish deprived of their language. Manus leads classes when his overbearing father, Hugh—the school’s pompous master—is absent. Andrew Mueller’s performance as Manus embodies the cost of Ireland’s colonization and self-inflicted wounds. He limps because his father, played with chest-out gusto by Kevin Gudahl, injured him as a child. Yet, unable to step out on his own, he still yields in all things to the older man, whose interests are only his own.
Two Englishmen enter the classroom to introduce themselves and their mapping project. One is the young, sensitive Lieutenant Yolland, whose failed career at home pushed him into the military’s cartographic corps. He gets to choose all the new names that will replace the Irish ones. He’d like to keep many of the original names, the sounds of which he finds lyrical, but is compelled to approve names he thinks are coarser. Erik Hellman offers a brilliant, devastating portrayal of the naïve Yolland, whose good and open heart leads him to fall in love with his Irish surroundings, the locals and Maire, the spirited milkmaid who is Manus’ reluctant fiancée. When Yolland and Maire fall for each other, neither can speak the other’s language. Their love language becomes the Irish names of places Yolland hesitantly renamed.
Writers Theatre’s “Translations,” with Julia Rowley and Andrew Mueller/Photo: Michael Brosilow
As with every utterance in the play, the lovers’ flirting reveals what is enshrined in language and what is made ugly by linguistic subordination. Yolland’s local fixer and translator is Owen, Manus’ charismatic younger brother, who has made a success of himself by assimilating to the English overlords. He even assents, without complaint, to the English calling him Rowland, the name they thought they heard when first introduced, because he knows they would be too bothered if asked to properly reproduce the Irish pronunciation of his name. Casey Hoekstra plays the opportunist with enough Irish charm and sycophantic smarm to make him endearing, despite his role in the ethnic cleansing. Owen’s work bridging the linguistic and cultural gap helps set in motion the cruel and deadly events that follow—though the real danger stems from how the English conflate the Irish people’s inability to speak English with barbarism, giving the conquerors cover for their own barbarity.
There is intellectual drama, too. Friel laces the dialogue and action with contradiction. One student, Jimmy Jack, is an impossibly erudite, loopy dreamer in rags. An older man, he’s fluent in Classical Greek and Latin, quotes widely from the ancient canon, and believes himself to be the friend of ancients living among us—and the lover of Athena. Jonathan Weir plays Jimmy as warm and wholly unpretentious, a man who seems lighthearted until he confesses his abiding and punishing loneliness. His wild imaginings, like the imagining of an oppressed people, grow out of his pain. At one point, Jimmy announces in all seriousness that he will soon host his own wedding…to Athena.
Several in the school are well-versed in Greek and Latin, showing that the Irish—whom the English view as thick and shallow—are, in their own Catholic way, book-smart and deep. Friel shows this intellectual richness, but doesn’t wholly celebrate it. Hugh, the blowhard master, equally steeped in the ancients, wonders aloud whether his people’s love for the Classics and their own language—both “embedded with mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception”—have held them back. Yet he also wonders whether the bleakness of the Irish situation gave rise to the Irish language’s extraordinary power to express bleakness.
“Translations” is a provocative and brilliant play that stands alone as drama. But Friel takes on bigger issues in language and culture. How language influences—and is influenced by—culture has long been a central question in academic linguistics. The cultural impacts, especially the destructive results, of colonialism, assimilation and cultural appropriation have been keen subjects of study across the humanities and social sciences.
Today, in a political moment when powerful forces work to obliterate public discussion of the pain inflicted by cultural and economic domination, “Translations” reminds us that the mainstream white culture now being reasserted—often violently—is made up of cohorts that were once roundly oppressed. Anyone who doubts the role of language in shaping power and cultural identity might consider how both the political left and right battle over which words belong in public discourse—and which must be excised.
The play underscores how fraught the issues of language and cultural identity are, and likely always will be. Certainly, there are many thousands or even millions within today’s dominant groups who nevertheless identify with the trodden Irish in Friel’s play. Yet many of those, or should I say “us,” are now exultant that they can wield power to force compliance and assimilation on their own terms.
“Translations” runs through May 4 at Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe. Wednesdays, 3pm (April 30 only) and 7:30pm; Thursdays, 7:30pm; Fridays, 7:30pm; Saturdays, 3pm and 7:30pm; and Sundays, 2pm and 6pm (April 27 only). Tickets start at $35, available at writerstheatre.org.
