https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7623-9873
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ABSTRACT
Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980), set in a 19th-century hedge school on the west coast of Ireland, chronicles the beginning of the decline of the Irish language. Since its premiere in Derry with the Field Day Company, it has become a classic of Irish theatre, one of the most performed plays on Irish stages, and one of Friel’s most popular plays abroad. Surprisingly, however, it had never been performed in Belfast’s best-loved playhouse, the Lyric Theatre, and had never been staged by a female director in Friel’s own country. This play by the Lyric Theatre Belfast and the Abbey Theatre Dublin is pioneering as the first co-production between these two major companies, the first time a woman, Caitriona McLaughlin, Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, has directed Translations in Ireland, and the first time a woman has held this position at the Abbey in the last 30 years. Through observations of the play premiered at the Lyric in April 2022 and of criticism in the media, and drawing on ideas that McLaughlin developed in an interview granted to me in September 2022, I will analyse the ways in which her proposal subverts received interpretations of this modern classic.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Meban, “Translations – Friel’s Unorthodox Script.”
2. Hardy, “Review: Brian Friel’s Translations.” It is no coincidence that the play was scheduled for 2022 and premiered in the North, given that 2021 marked the 100th anniversary of the partition of the island.
3. Garry Hynes, co-founder and director of the Galway-based Druid Theatre Company, had already directed Translations in the United States, at the Manhattan Theater Club in New Jersey in 2007.
4. Daniels, Women Stage Directors Speak; Manfull, In Other Words. See also Fliotsos and Vierow, International Women Stage Directors.
5. Stacey Gregg, a playwright and feature film and theatre director, in an interview on August 24, 2022, dismissed these alleged gender differences when describing McLaughlin’s work directing her play Josephine K and the Algorithms for the Abbey Theatre in 2017.
6. Fichandler et al., “Gender, Creativity & Power,” 80–81.
7. Daniels, Women Stage Directors Speak, 146.
8. Headrick, “Through a Woman’s Eye,” 172–3.
9. Cited in Headrick, “Through a Woman’s Eye,” 174.
10. Daniels, Women Stage Directors Speak, 142.
11. Ibid., 145.
12. The name “hedge school” comes from the illegal status of this kind of Irish schools, which pushed them to any unofficial place that was available.
13. Welch, “Isn’t This Your Job?” 145.
14. Hardy, “Review: Brian Friel’s Translations.”
15. Garden, “Why Translations Finds New Resonance.”
16. See note 1 above.
17. Rickson, notes on the preparation of Translations.
18. Programme of Translations, 4.
19. McLaughlin, “Interview with Gaviña-Costero.”
20. Programme of Translations, 4.
21. See note 19 above.
22. Meany, “Translations Review.”
23. See note 19 above.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Headrick, “Through a Woman’s Eye,” 174.
27. Meban, “Translations – Friel’s Unorthodox Script,” underscores that “some of the most fascinating characters in Translations are the women.”
28. The description in the original text states that she “could be any age from seventeen to thirty-five.” In Friel, Selected Plays 1, 383.
29. See note 1 above.
30. The line in the play alluded to by McLaughlin is “Do you Understand those Sums?” when Manus asks Sarah, and she nods in affirmation in Friel, Selected Plays 1, 393.
31. See note 19 above.
32. Ibid.
33. Friel, Selected Plays 1, 400. References to this text will be given in parentheses.
34. This land of the mind was the first onstage representation of what Richard Kearney and Mark Hederman coined as the “Fifth Province,” a metaphor dear to Friel and the rest of the Field Day company’s board because it represented the possibility of peace through art and tolerance, far removed from the bigotry and entrenched positions that fuelled the conflict in Northern Ireland: “a province of mind through which we hope to devise another way of looking at Ireland, or another possible Ireland […] a place for dissenters, traitors to the prevailing mythologies in the other four provinces.” In Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel, 165.
35. See note 1 above.
36. See note 19 above.
37. Ibid.
38. Gaviña-Costero, “Brial Friel: The Shaman.”
39. Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors, 28.
40. See note 19 above.
41. Ibid.
42. When Hugh makes his first appearance, the stage directions state: “He has, as always, a large quantity of drink taken, but he is by no means drunk” (397), yet at the end of the act they say, “HUGH is now drunk. He holds on to the edge of the table” (407). Then, when he appears in the second act, before drinking from Owen and Yolland’s poteen, he is described as follows: “as the scene progresses, one has the sense that he is deliberately parodying himself” (416–417), precisely in the scene in which most of his speeches are taken from After Babel. In the last act, when the soldiers have begun to retaliate for Yolland’s disappearance, Bridget explains that Hugh is not fit to teach (435). By the time he and Jimmy Jack enter the scene they are described thus: “Both wet and drunk. JIMMY is very unsteady […] HUGH is equally drunk but more experienced in drunkenness: there is a portion of his mind which retains its clarity” (442).
43. See note 22 above.
44. Planella’s, Ben Barnes’, Ferran Utzet’s or Ian Rickson’s, for example.
45. See note 15 above.
46. She believes she is somewhat isolated from both the Six Counties and the Republic due to the position of the Inishowen peninsula where she grew up (the same place where Friel lived), but at the same time, she has an interest and sympathy for all that is happening in Northern Ireland.
47. Murray, Brian Friel. Essays, 6.
48. Ibid., 107.
49. See note 19 above.