cd on translations

FIELD DAY REVIEW
hope. And that’s one of the good things
about theatre, it is an open space in this
city. ... It doesn’t harangue the audience,
it suggests things, and they complete
them. ... At a psychic level, at a privacy
level, it was a tough time for everybody
in Northern Ireland ... who wanted to
live fully, freely and decently. ... I think
there was gratitude that the play wasn’t
a j’accuse ... that it was more a sense of
distress, this is what we are left with —
how do we negotiate? 68
If there is a parallel to be drawn in the
distinction between the stage and the
auditorium — the distinction between fiction
and reality — the trend in modern drama
is to diminish the difference, to include the
audience in the fictional framework. At the
Guildhall, the geographical proximity of the
fictional events added to this, but so too did
the history of the venue and of the disputed
territory outside. Rea made this point when
recalling the night twenty-five years later:
It was rough theatre in a very grand
building, a rather pompous building. So
we took it over and tried to subvert it
with a little bit of theatrical immediacy.
... It was a very interesting way to do a
play in a way, in a building that wasn’t
meant to house theatre, but it had a lot of
connotations of a previous time in Derry.
... To do a play in Derry is very difficult.
There was no infrastructure — there was
no costume design, no set builders, there
was nothing like that. We had to bring all
that with us. 69
In a society in which violent conflict is the
norm, the difference between drama and
reality is all the more blurred. Deane argued
this point in the specific context of television
coverage of violent events in Northern
Ireland:
28
The violent play is being staged under
TV floodlights in front of an audience
moved, not only by what they see, but
also by the anguish which comes from
not knowing the outcome. The death
of an individual alters if he died on the
side of the heroes, not of the villains.
Yet the playwright is the audience. It is
imagining what it sees in terms of the
outcome which it desires. 70
Deane’s insight here is important. It helps
to explain why, even allowing for the
aforementioned reasons, a stage play such as
Translations, lacking in special effects and
thrills, should have such an impact in an
era when drama is so ubiquitous. Raymond
Williams observes that in the current era in
the Western world, for the first time,
a majority of the population has regular
and constant access to drama, beyond
occasion and season. ... [D]rama ...
is built into the rhythms of everyday
life. ... [T]he substantial majority of
the population [now sees] up to three
hours of drama a day, every day. ...
What we now have is drama as habitual
experience: more in a week, in many
cases, than most human beings would
have previously seen in a lifetime. 71
Williams contends that the attraction of
drama in contemporary society is that it
performs the same purpose as statistics and
summaries: it attempts to break down and
understand the increasingly complex ways
in which we live. That is to say, everyday
drama is an expression of the postmodern
spirit of questioning, uncertainty, and
exploration. Williams goes on to argue that
we now live in what he calls a ‘dramatized
society’, in which drama is
a special kind of use of quite general
processes of presentation, representation,
signification. The raised place of power
— the eminence of the royal platform —
was built historically before the raised
place of the stage. ... Drama is a precise
separation of certain common modes for
new and specific ends. It is neither ritual
68 Interview with Heaney,
Arts Extra, BBC Radio
Ulster, 23 September
2005, 25th anniversary
of Translations.
69 Interview with Rea,
Arts Extra, BBC Radio
Ulster, 23 September
2005, 25th anniversary
of Translations. Another
thing that was lacking in
Derry was professional
box-office staff. Staff
from both the Guildhall
and the Orchard
Gallery in Derry worked
voluntarily at the box
office and at the doors
on the night. As a result,
the final returns remain
unclear, but they can
be estimated with some
precision. The FDA
records that there were
246 seats sold, 300
complimentary seats,
and 26 unsold. The
total attendance for the
whole Derry run, 23–27
September inclusive, was
estimated at 3,145, or
92 per cent of capacity.
Though extremely high,
these attendance figures
do not match the 100
per cent attendance
achieved at other
venues: Galway, Tralee,
Dublin, Carrickmore,
Enniskillen and
Armagh.
70 Deane, ‘Introduction/
The Longing for
Modernity’, Threshold,
32 (Winter 1982), 3.
71 Raymond Williams,
Writing in Society
(London, 1983), 12.