cd on translations

144 Interview with Whelan,
Rattlebag, RTÉ, 23
September 2005, ‘Field
Day Theatre Company
Special’, marking
25th anniversary of
Translations (interviews
with Stephen Rea and
Kevin Whelan).
145 Interview with O’Toole,
Arts Extra, BBC Radio
Ulster, 23 September
2005, 25th anniversary
of Translations.
146 Máiréad Nic Craith,
Culture and Identity
Politics in Northern
Ireland (London,
2003), 11–12.
147 SP, 445.
Translations. ... [a] wider more capacious
sense of Irishness. Rethinking the
categories by which we defined ourselves
offers the potential of creating a new
political space. ... In one sense the Field
Day process was the beginning of the
Peace Process — a way of thinking
ourselves out of the cul-de-sac into which
we had backed ourselves. 144
Fintan O’Toole made a similar claim:
Translations undoubtedly remains a
political play, but you could say that it
is a Peace Process play. ... I think what
the play ultimately says is to be found
in Hugh’s statement that ‘Confusion is
not an ignoble condition.’ That’s a line
that is not just an expression of his own
befuddlement, but that’s a line that is
actually endorsed in the play. It’s a line
that says that the pursuit of clarity can be
murderous. 145
Translations suggested to its audience that
it should experiment with new modes of
self-definition, and to question how existing
forms of self-definition had created the
situation that existed in 1980: economic and
cultural stagnation in the South; complete
societal breakdown in the North. It set
out to demolish the restrictive terms of the
existing political and intellectual debate
and to develop a discourse not governed by
binary oppositions, but rather a discourse
that confronts these and, by doing so, at
least weakens them and, at best, leaves
them in ruin and disrepute. Since then the
oppositions have weakened, but they are
clearly not in disrepute. Wider ways of
imagining what it means to be British and
Irish were imagined by the Good Friday
Agreement of 1998, which was designed
to some extent by the political audience
Field Day created for itself. However, the
link between the two events is indirect, and
the political state promised by the Good
Friday Agreement falls far short of the one
Field Day had imagined. The Agreement
ORIGINS OF A CULTURAL EXPERIMENT
is an effort to replace the legacy of British
imperialism’s ‘difference-as-inferiority’
model with a ‘difference-in-equality’
model, but it is hindered by the identity
model of difference, which emphasizes
boundaries rather than similarities and
loses the potential of the Derridean
perception of difference as being ‘not an
essence or attribute of an object but a
position or perspective of signification’. 146
Moreover, the parity of esteem sought by the
Agreement implies the undisputed existence
of two separate traditions, which in turn
pressurizes individuals to conform to a
particular group culture.
Hugh warned at the end of the
Translations that we must reimagine
ourselves, we ‘must never cease renewing
those images; because once we do, we
fossilize’. 147 The lesson Translations has
for its audience today is that the current
clamour for parity of esteem can only
result in the fossilization of conflicting
identities.
Translations itinerary, 1980
Derry, Guildhall, 23–27 September
Belfast Opera House, 29 September–4
October
Dublin, Gate Theatre, 6–14 October
Newry, County Down, 20 October
Dungannon, County Tyrone, 21 October
Magherafelt, County Derry, 22 October
Carrickmore, County Tyrone, 23 October
Armagh, 24 October
Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, 25 October
Sligo, 27 October
Ballyshannon, County Donegal, 28 October
Coleraine, County Derry, 30 October–1
November
Galway, 3–5 November
Tralee, County Kerry, 6–8 November
Cork Opera House, 10–15 November
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