Translations

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A short time later, a vague awareness that Brian Friel was a playwright I should know more about led me back to the Bedlam to see Connal Morrison’s production of Friel’s “Translations “. This was one of the first E.U.T.C. productions I saw, and I was tremendously impressed by the craft and commitment of the Company, so evident from what one saw on stage.

“Translations “, for those unfamiliar with the text, is largely concerned with the replacement of Gaelic Irish place names, and thereby the Irish language, with English. Set in the 1840’s, when the first Ordnance Survey of Ireland takes place, the substitution becomes a metaphor for imperialism in other lands and contexts. As the survey replaces familiar names, so a new National School system replaces the Gaelic teaching of the classics by the Hedge Schools, idealistically represented by Hugh and his son Manus, caught in familial strife between the classical traditions of the past and the uniform utilitarianism of the present. David Campton breathed a remarkable liveliness into the stodgy Manus, while Lisa Gornick, the Hedge - Schoolmaster’s favourite pupil, in love with an English officer, tore at the heart of the piece as she struggled to imitate the language of the occupying power. The then but recently appointed tutor of the University Settlement, Nick Flevin, gave full force to Friel’s extract from the Aeneid with which the play ends, commenting powerfully on the fates of smaller nations caught up in the ambitions of more powerful ones. Delivered by an Irishman in a Scottish city, at a time when the hopes of small nations everywhere seemed to have reason to be very small indeed, the speech and its delivery became inexpressably poignant.

Edinburgh’s Bedlam Theatre p.19-20