Distorting the past, true to the present

LATE in 1979, after he had written Translations and decided that it would be the first venture for his new theatre company Field Day, Brian Friel knew he was "in deep trouble". Here was a play set in a remote corner of Ireland in 1833, involving activities - a hedge school teaching Latin and Greek, the making of maps - that could only seem obscure to most audiences. He was braced for a baptism of bemusement, and for the possibility of a big financial loss. Instead, the opening night in Derry's Guildhall in 1980 was received with rapture, and the play has since been in almost constant production, not just in Ireland but around the world.

The emotions roused by the depiction of the British army invading the life of an Irish speaking community in County Donegal were so strong that they threatened to drown the ambiguities of the play itself. No Irish play since the 1920s has been granted so quickly the status of a national classic. Translations was hailed, not just as a terrifically skilful piece of theatre but as a definitive statement about the nature and meaning of colonialism.

So suffocating was the reverence, indeed, that Friel himself, ever his own most acerbic critic, thought that his play was "treated much too respectfully" and that there was too much "pious rubbish" written about it. He felt compelled, indeed, to follow it with a farce, The Communication Cord, that satirised precisely the metropolitan nostalgia for lost rural idylls that Translations had evoked.

This response was very much in line with what Friel had written in his diary at an early stage of the play's composition: "I don't want to write a play about Irish peasants being suppressed by English sappers. I don't want to write a threnody on the death of the Irish language. I don't want to write a play about land surveying. In deed, I don't want to write a play about naming places." Yet the response to the completed play suggested that he had written a play about all of those things.

One of the fascinations of a new production of the play is that it raises the unusual question of whether the author wrote the play he intended to write or the one its first audiences thought they saw. Can a play find its way back to its original impulses, or is it doomed forever to fit the mould created for it by its original reception? If Translations can do so, it may be because its status as a work of fiction rather than a dramatisation of history has become much clearer.

AFTER the initial euphoria of the play's premiere, dissenting voices began to be raised. The historian Sean Connolly described it as a distortion of the real nature and causes of cultural change in 19th century Ireland so extreme as to go beyond mere factual error." The geographer J.H. Andrews, whose book on the Ordnance Survey, A Paper Landscape, helped to inspire the play, made a formidable case in The Irish Review that the events it describes could not have happened.

Three quarters of the survey's employees, he pointed out, were not British sappers of the kind depicted in Translations but Irish civilians. The research on Gaelic place names was entrusted, not to callow and ignorant Englishmen like the play's Lieutenant Yolland, but to distinguished Irish scholars like John O'Donovan, Eugene O'Curry and James Clarence Mangan.

The survey was carried out not as what Manus in the play calls a "bloody military operation", but primarily for the purposes of land valuation. Only rarely did the survey invent new place names or translate names from Gaelic into English most of them were already anglicised. And in no case did the survey have any military powers. Captain Lancey's burnings, evictions, and levellings, the dramatic high point of the action, are pure invention.

These historical objections are more than mere pedantry. For one thing, the programme for the original Field Day production, and to some extent interviews that Brian Friel gave at the time, encouraged the impression that the play was a dramatisation of something that had actually happened, and this impression is reinforced by the Abbey's current radio ads for the new production. For another, all of the poetic licence is exercised to the same political effect: to exaggerate the role of the Ordnance Survey as a brutal act of cultural and military imperialism and to simplify a much more complex reality.

Translations, in fact, is not really a history play at all. It is a myth about the past invented for contemporary political purposes. Brian Friel later admitted indeed that his transformation of the Gaelic scholar John O'Donovan, who actually did the translations for the Ordnance Survey, into the cynical "interpreter" Owen was a direct response to the politics of contemporary Northern Ireland: "I read into O'Donovan's exemplary career as a scholar and orthographer the actions and perfidy of a quisling. The only excuse l can offer for this short lived delusion is that the political situation in the North was particularly tense at the time."

IF THE atmosphere of the times influenced the way Translations was written, the rather different atmosphere of 1996 should undoubtedly change the way it is seen by audiences. Seen for what it is - a self conscious historical myth - the play is remarkable not for the kind of emotive propaganda that such myths tend to generate, but for its underlying feeling for the tragedy of people who get caught in myths and mindsets that cannot adapt to change.

However badly it distorts the past, the play remains all too accurate about the present. Pulled as it is between the desire for a clear, unchanging cultural identity and the knowledge that identity is never either simple or stable, it reflects the deepest ambiguities of contemporary Ireland. That it does so with delicacy and an extraordinary feel for theatrical form lends weight to the words of the schoolmaster Hugh near the end of the play, when he says that "confusion is not an ignoble condition."