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Brian Friel, London, 1988. Photo: © Field Day 1 Brecht, quoted in J. Willett, Brecht in Context: Comparative Approaches (London, 1984), 197. Brian Friel’s Translations: The Origins of a Cultural Experiment Ciarán Deane [To salute Brian Friel on his 80th birthday and to acknowledge the 30th anniversary of his play Translations, we are publishing two essays on the play, of which this is the first. The second, by Kevin Whelan, will appear in Field Day Review 6]. ‘One must not build on the good old things, but on the bad new ones.’ Bertolt Brecht 1 The original staging of Brian Friel’s play Translations marked a transitional moment in twentiethcentury Irish cultural life, though the nature, extent and value of that transition have been hotly debated. The text of the play deals with concepts of cross-cultural communication, cultural origins and cultural shifts, but it was the first performance — at the Guildhall, Derry, 23 September 1980 — that gave particular intensity to the play’s governing concepts and declared the specific public role of art. FIELD DAY REVIEW 5 2009 7
FIELD DAY REVIEW The Field Day Archive, which was donated to the National Library of Ireland in 2008, is both extensive and rich in new information. Some of the earliest documents in the archive are concerned with the creation of the Field Day Theatre Company and with its foundational play Translations. They include previously unpublished correspondence between Brian Friel and Stephen Rea (specifically from Friel to Rea), dating to the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which the idea of Field Day is first mooted and then developed. They also include the minutes of the meetings of the board of directors. The archive collates both unexamined documents and other valuable sources of information that are available elsewhere, but in a dispersed fashion, such as press cuttings on individual plays and publications, or the programme notes for each theatrical production. Rea has few written records in this archive, or indeed in the Friel Papers already held in the National Library of Ireland; he chooses instead to express himself largely through interview. However, his opinions are also alluded to through the Friel correspondence. These new sources, and additional correspondence between Friel and Seamus Deane 2 (some of which is not in the archive), one of Field Day’s founding directors, whom Friel and Rea invited in 1981 to expand the activities of the company, shed new light on the context out of which Translations and the Field Day Theatre Company arose. Antecedents 8 Translations is set in a hedge-school in Ballybeg, County Donegal. The year is 1833. The British army is engaged in mapping the whole of Ireland, a process which involves the renaming of every place name in the country. It is a time of great upheaval for the people of Ballybeg; their hedge-school is to be replaced by one of the new national schools; there is a recurring potato blight; they have acquired a new language (English); and because their townland is being renamed, everything that was familiar is becoming strange. 3 Translations is set at a moment of transition, when the Irish-speaking society of Ballybeg is about to be mapped into a different culture. It continues Friel’s long preoccupation with the idea of language as a medium that actively shapes rather than passively records human experience; with how the power of language to shape things is rooted in the process of naming, and how naming is an intrinsic part of private and public self-definition. The implications of this also preoccupied Field Day after it expanded its activities into publishing and criticism. Translations was not merely the chronological starting point of Field Day’s quest for cultural redefinition in Ireland; it also contained within it the core message of all of the group’s subsequent creative endeavours, a message derived from a postcolonial interpretation of Irish history. As Deane declared: Field Day’s analysis of the [northern] situation derives from the conviction that it is, above all, a colonial one ... [A preoccupation with naming is evident] in the first three pamphlets by Tom Paulin, Seamus Heaney, and myself and evident too in the plays by Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, and Tom Paulin ... The naming or renaming of a place, the naming or renaming of a race, a region, a person, is, like all acts of primordial nomination, an act of possession. The Field Day Anthology is also an exercise in renaming, the resituation of many texts, well known and scarcely known, in a renovated landscape or context. 4 Perhaps the first ever self-definition of Field Day to a person outside the organization was delivered by Friel in a letter to Paddy Kilroy, entrepreneur and brother of playwright and later Field Day director Tom Kilroy. In this previously unpublished 2 In the Field Day Archive (hereafter FDA), it is Friel’s correspondence with Deane and Rea that is the most revealing. Correspondence with other directors is thinner in quantity and has less to impart. 3 Brian Friel, ‘Extracts from a Sporadic Diary’, in Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews: 1964–1999, ed. Christopher Murray (London, 1999), 73. 4 Seamus Deane, ‘Introduction’, in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis, 1990), 6, 17–18.
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