Tired of having productions at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin and London-based theatres seen as evidence of their “success,” playwright Brian Friel and actor/director Stephen Rea—both of whom had roots in Northern Ireland and professional success in Dublin and London—hatched a theatre company to showcase the range and significance of work by Northern Irish artists. They co-founded the Field Day Theatre Company in the midst of Northern Ireland’s profound political and cultural unrest during the 1970s and 1980s.
Located in Northern Ireland and touring the island, Field Day aimed to dismantle stereotypes by examining the language, political context, and historical narratives behind those tropes. Through its productions and eventual literary magazine, the company, which remains active today, provided a platform from which Northern Irish artists could expand the political and cultural conversations about Irish identities and who could claim them.
Field Day was one part of a larger movement to examine and reclaim a distinctly Northern Irish culture; throughout the 1970s, poets and critics published literary magazines interested in locating Irish culture within a larger literary and cultural context. (By the early 1980s, Field Day would count some of the co-founding writers of these journals among their Board of Directors.) One journal in particular gave Field Day the parameters for its cultural project: The Crane Bag, first published in 1977, had the stated goal of creating a so-called “fifth Irish province.” Unlike the four geographic provinces of Northern Ireland, this was a province of the mind, a way to talk about politics and identity; “from such a place,” the editors wrote, “a new understanding and unity might emerge.” This cultural conceit is also linguistic, as the Irish word for province also means “fifth.”
Seeking a way into this fifth province, and a play to launch the Field Day experiment, Friel turned to history. In 1824, Major Thomas Colby and the Royal Engineers of the British Army were sent to Ireland to make a map of the country. Their mission was not only to chart the land, but also to standardize and Anglicize the names of Irish towns and locations. As scholar, poet, and Field Day co-director Seamus Deane wrote of the perennial interest of Field Day’s work in language, the “naming or renaming of a place… [was] like all acts of primordial nomination, an act of possession.” Irish culture was swept away with its language in the renaming process.
Set in 1833, when the Ordnance Survey comes to Baile Beag, Translations tells the story of this fictional Irish community in rural Donegal. The town’s location is central to the play, straddling as it does the line between the province of Ulster, in the independent Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland, part of the British-controlled United Kingdom. Just as the town sits between the border of two countries, so too was Ireland in the 1970s caught between modes of political thought and governance.
Translations premiered on September 23, 1980 in the border city of Derry, a location significant to Field Day and its audiences. During the Troubles, the city’s Catholic minority protested what they characterized as disenfranchisement and brutal institutional discrimination and were met by a militarized police force. Derry was the place of the Bloody Sunday Massacre in 1972, where the British Army opened fire on protesters, killing 12 (Friel had been at the protest, but he did not see the incident).
Translations’ opening night was received as a civic event. Derry’s unionist-controlled city council donated significant funds to produce the piece. Critic Paul Wilkins wrote in his review, “A play dealing with two disparate cultures could perhaps find no surer test of its impact than with a Derry audience.”
The Irish Times observed in their editorial on the event, “It was in every sense a unique occasion, with loyalists and nationalists, Unionists and SDLP, Northerners and Southerners laying aside their differences to join together in applauding a play by a fellow Derryman and one, moreover, with a theme that is uniquely Irish.” The production toured to larger theatres in Belfast and Dublin as well as a dozen smaller cities and towns in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, fulfilling Field Day’s desire to “make every effort...to reach the widest possible audiences,” as Friel said.
Despite the starkly political terms of the plot of Translations, the work’s ability to engage with the discourse of colonialism while remaining rooted in the highly personal negotiations of identity and family resonated across the political spectrum. The characters in Translations struggle to communicate with each other through their linguistic limitations—there is a love scene between two characters whose only common language refers to now-defunct place names; scenes that spin out in Greek and Latin; and scenes with actors speaking an English we understand to be the Irish language, which will wither in the province within a generation of the play’s action.
The mapmaking British army is the crisis that catalyzes the play’s conflict, but Friel’s interests lie in finding a way forward. In one of its final moments, the schoolmaster Hugh—fluent in Irish, English, Greek, and Latin—makes an effort to learn the Anglicized town names, as if he has decided to accept the English influence and hope for the best. “To remember everything is a form of madness,” he says, suggesting a way from Baile Beag to Ballybeg that can absorb a shifting sense of country, history, and self.
—Amanda Maze