cd on translations

FIELD DAY REVIEW
particularly with the touring productions
of Brian Friel’s plays. Field Day unlocked
that scene for other writers. 131
Another impact of Translations was that
it made the northern crisis part of the
southern critical agenda. It might be said
that Translations presented a discursive
template for discussing the northern
crisis, and its southern ramifications, for a
southern intelligentsia that had been struck
dumb by it (in many cases quite literally so,
via Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act). As
we have already seen, Derry had become
the cultural focal point of the island for
the opening night. By harnessing the gift
and fame of people like Friel, Rea, and
Heaney, Field Day was guaranteed an
attentive audience in the Irish media. The
play was previewed and reviewed extensively
at a national level; the Irish Times even
dedicated a preview editorial to it, describing
the ‘manner of its presentation across time
and territory’ as a welcome development. 132
Pilkington has also contended that
Translations expressed, and perhaps
initiated, a new period of Anglo-Irish
relations. 133 One document in the Field Day
Archive, written by Garret Fitzgerald, one
of the most determined advocates of Anglo-
Irish détente, gives extra weight to this
idea. Speaking as taoiseach at the opening
of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Mansion
House, Dublin, on 28 September 1981,
Fitzgerald made great claims for the power
of theatre. In hindsight, and without too
much stretching of the imagination, it is now
possible to read the entire content of this
speech as a comment on what Translations
had to say the previous year. Fitzgerald
identifies the importance of the legacy of
the Irish Literary Theatre; the intrinsically
political nature of theatre; how theatre
directly affects its audiences; how theatre
can express the people’s aspirations in
ways that a political state cannot; and how
a theatre of ideas can survive in the most
difficult of environments (Derry in 1980).
For this reason, it is worth reproducing here
44
in its near-entirety:
[T]he State, in providing this financial
help, is merely paying back a little of
what it — and the people it serves — owe
to the theatre in Ireland. The full debt
is immense, and — unlike some other
debts we are looking at in Government —
unserviceable.
For there was a theatre in this city to
mirror the experience and the hopes
of the people before any state existed
capable of doing these things. Indeed,
when the State was founded here, it owed
more than a little of its very existence to
theatre and theatre people.
Yeats and Lady Gregory ... established
their theatre in a city where no play was
to be seen apart from those performed
by provincial English touring companies.
That cultural impoverishment was a
precise reflection of Ireland’s political
circumstances at the time. Those
circumstances began to be changed —
and not coincidentally — when Yeats
— who first inspired my own father’s
commitment to the national movement —
gave vivid public expression to what he
later called ‘all that stir of thought’ which
prepared for that movement.
The patriotic ardour evoked by ‘Cathleen
Ni Houlihan’, and that most classic
expression of the tragedy inherent in
all violent conflict — Juno’s cry: ‘Take
away our hearts of stone and give us
hearts of flesh’ — were both alike part
of the growing pains of a new national
consciousness. Those plays and others
were shaping revolutionary ideas. Years
later Yeats would wonder did some words
of his send out ‘certain men the English
shot’? Perhaps they did. What is in any
case beyond question is that the national
movement which swept much of Ireland
and changed it in the early part of this
century took a good deal of its shape and
131 Dukes, ‘Interview with
Thomas Kilroy’, in
Chambers, Fitzgibbon
and Jordan, eds.,
Theatre Talk, 248.
132 Irish Times, 22 August
1980.
133 Pilkington, Theatre and
the State in Twentieth-
Century Ireland, 210–
21.