Translations
Brian Friel
Director: Allan Hart
Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington
Star rating: 3.5
Translations (1980) is probably Brian Friel’s best known play partly because it has long been a curriculum favourite which means that many people have studied it at A Level. Its fame is also due to its universal, timeless message which it speaks at so many levels. Language and culture lie at the heart of identity and any attempt to dent them is profoundly, dangerously disruptive. Think of the Taliban, the Russian war with Ukraine or even “woke” vocabulary manipulation in the UK.
Translations takes us to Ireland in the 1830s when the colonising British are constructing an ordnance survey map, Anglicising (“standardising”) place names and setting up National Schools where attendance will be compulsory and everything will be taught in English. Friel is clearly linking the annexing of his country by the British with later “Troubles” which were rife when the play was written. The setting is a “hedge school” run by an elderly man and his son, at which adults can learn Latin, Greek, mathematics and more.
This production delivers the message as movingly as any professional take on Translations I’ve seen in the past – staged on Max Batty’s all encompassing set with a homely room complete with manger and stairs at the back. Grassy steps at stage left suggest the outer entrance. It’s an imaginative use of the Tower Theatre’s triangular playing space. The incidental Irish folk music (Colin Guthrie) is suitably atmospheric too.
The cast of ten are generally good with an outstanding performance from Oscar Gill as Owen. He is the worldly son who has come home from England to his father and brother. Pally with the army, he has a foot in either camp, acts as a translator and Gill gives him real depth. There is also impressive work from Varvara Barmpouni as Sarah, an elective mute, gradually learning to speak again. Her role is predominantly active listening and she makes it work powerfully. I liked Allan Maddrell’s work as the gentle, kind, troubled Manus too.
I was less convinced by Robert Pennant Jones as the elderly Hugh. Everyone else in the cast speaks with an Irish accent (some better than others) which is why the voices of the two British officers (Charlie Patterson and Peter Molloy – both strong) come as such an intrusive shock. But Pennant Jones sounds like a rather mannered, slow-of-speech Etonian and it grates. This is a play about language. Friel’s skilled script allows us to believe that most of the cast are speaking Gaelic most of the time although the play is written in English. Hugh, although very well educated and erudite, needs to be as Irish as everyone else. Pennant Jones also makes him seem very hesitant, doddery almost, and it is stretch much too far to think that the British would even consider this man to run a National School.
Overall, though, this is a pretty pleasing, thought-provoking take on a play which has acquired near classic status in the 46 years since it premiered.
