cd on translations

134 FDA: G/ACNI/13.
135 SP, 445.
136 ‘History Boys on the
Rampage’, BBC2 Arena
documentary on Field
Day and Friel’s Making
History, 1988.
form from the drama created by Yeats
and his collaborators.
So when we pay homage to theatre we
are not merely acknowledging a purely
cultural resource. We are recognising
one of the founding elements of our
State. And this is an element which has
not said its last word about where our
State goes and how it develops. Theatre
still has things to tell us, as it told the
Abbey audiences in the early years.
Theatre in Ireland when it is good —
perhaps indeed good theatre everywhere
— is intrinsically political. That is, it is
engaged with the same conflicts which
it is the task of politics to contain and
resolve. The abstractions of the politician
are given life in the traffic of the stage.
Very often, indeed, they are embodied in
the drama before they have entered the
politician’s field of vision. The theatre can
tell us what is happening in our society,
and where change may occur next,
before we have realised these things for
ourselves. This can be as true — perhaps
even truer — of an old classic revived
or adapted as of a new play reflecting
yesterday’s headlines. And because
theatre is an intensely communal form —
and because also our community here is
still intimate and relatively homogenous
— the impact of powerful theatre is felt
quickly throughout our society.
I know it is not done to mention
individual productions at this stage,
and thus to anticipate the judgment of
critics and audiences. There may even
be superstition about this kind of thing.
But I hope it will be understood if I say a
word in praise of the Company which has
been established in Derry for two years
now, and which brings us one of the two
keenly-awaited adaptations of Chekhov
to be seen at this festival.
... I hope they [Derry people] will allow
the rest of us to mingle some amazement
ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL EXPERIMENT
with the delight we feel that a city so
troubled for so long should have had the
resources to produce Field Day, and to let
us borrow it for a while. 134
Whether Fitzgerald was directly influenced
by the play or not is ultimately for him to
say. Field Day would have considered a
political solution such as the Thatcher–
Fitzgerald Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 to
be pointless without some form of cultural
fusion first taking place. As Pilkington has
pointed out, British–Irish politics in the early
1980s (and since) have sought to resolve
conflict by encouraging nationalist Ireland’s
acceptance of the political status quo in
return for recognition of its historical cultural
trauma. Despite the rhetoric of reconciliation,
this approach does not dismantle stereotypes,
nor does it imagine how cultural synthesis
can occur. Translations suggests that political
formulations of identity are fundamentally
inadequate because they are always a betrayal
of the essential complexity of individual
experience. Political formulations encourage
fixity of identity; Translations advocated that
cultural identity be considered as fluid, as an
ongoing process, as Hugh puts it at the end of
the play, ‘it is not the literal past, the “facts”
of history, that shape us, but images of the
past embodied in language ... we must never
cease renewing those images’. 135
In the 1988 BBC2 Arena documentary
on Field Day and Friel’s Making History,
Friel was asked what future generations
might make of Field Day. He responded:
‘History will accommodate Field Day
into whatever narrative is appropriate for
future people.’ 136 Translations was read
by its Dublin audience in the 1980s as
guarantor of a new bourgeois nationalism,
albeit an Irish nationalism with a more
complex architecture. Having exposed the
limitations of ethnic identification, the play
was embraced by establishment liberals as
a cultural expression of a new inclusive,
‘civic’ nationalism. This interpretation of the
play is insufficient, but it is facilitated by the
45