cd on translations

FIELD DAY REVIEW
impressed themselves on Friel’s writing in
which the same blend of disappointment
and unyielding pressure is found time and
time again to characterize the experience
of the protagonists. ... Politics is an
ever-present force, but Friel, conscious
of the recurrent failures of the political
imagination in Ireland, is concerned
to discover some consolatory or
counterbalancing agency which will offer
an alternative. The discovery is never
made. But the search for an alternative to
and the reasons for failure brings Friel,
finally, to the recognition of the peculiar
role and function of art, especially the
theatrical art, in a broken society ...
Paradoxically, although his theme is
failure, linguistic and political, the
fact that the play has been written is
itself an indication of the success of the
imagination in dealing with everything
that seems opposed to its survival. 26
In this context, we can better understand
the significance for Friel of George Steiner’s
declaration in After Babel that ‘[l]anguage
is the main instrument of man’s refusal
to accept the world as it is’. 27 It is an
idea that resurfaces in Translations when
Hugh explains to Yolland the richness
of the language of an impoverished and
isolated community such as Ballybeg by
observing that ‘certain cultures expend on
their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive
energies and ostentations entirely lacking
in their material lives ... a syntax opulent
with tomorrows. It is our response to mud
cabins and a diet of potatoes.’ 28 As the
conflict between British and Irish cultures
develops in the play, language is shown
to be both the problem and the solution:
Whether it is Ballybeg 1833 or Derry
1980, it is the limitations of language that
create intercultural conflict, and yet it is
the creative potential of language that also
provides the means for cultural synthesis.
With ‘opulent’ syntax, Field Day sought to
undermine the existing political reality and
16
to create a new negotiable space.
In his 3 October 1978 letter to Deane, it is
again striking how seriously Friel considers
the critical response, and in his subsequent
musings he raises for the first time the
later oft-repeated notion of the northern
Catholic being an ‘exile’, a stateless citizen
who remains loyal only to a state of mind.
We read here many of Field Day’s concerns
— the need for self-definition, the need to
pitch the voice to an audience other than
an English one, and ideas of statelessness,
exile, disloyalty, and Derry as a kind of ‘outkingdom’
— but this letter was written fully
six months before Rea approached Friel with
the Field Day idea.
What emerges from these letters, then,
is that the inaugural Field Day play
Translations represents the first public
expression of diverse thoughts teased out
over a number of years between Friel and
others who were invited to join the Field
Day board after the success of the play.
This is not to take credit for the play from
Friel and disperse it among his Field Day
colleagues. Quite the opposite, it is to
confirm the play’s excellence — the manner
in which it, above all else, gave powerful
and coherent expression to new forms of
critical thinking as they applied to Ireland in
the mid to late 1970s. Friel looked to Synge
as the only Irish playwright to have dealt
successfully with the problem of language.
He felt that the Abbey Theatre had become a
dead theatrical space since Synge’s time and
that what was needed was a physical and
theatrical breakaway. Friel’s early training
with Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis gave
him an appreciation of the creative potential
in bringing professional quality theatre away
from the metropolitan centre. 29 In all of this
he found a natural ally in Stephen Rea.
Stephen Rea’s Proposal
Proposal by Stephen Rea Regarding the
Setting Up of a Theatre Company
26 Deane, ‘Introduction’,
SP, 11–12, 22.
27 George Steiner, After
Babel (Oxford, 1975),
217–18.
28 SP, 418.