cd on translations

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They include previously unpublished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.