Brian Friel’s Translations: The Abbey’s Ukrainian production has an urgent, dangerous energy

Translations

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

★★★★☆

Brian Friel’s play Translations was first staged at the Guildhall in Derry in 1980, in a dramatic repurposing of a political space at the height of the Troubles. The choice of site, a symbol of British authority in the city, was a gesture that echoed the themes of Friel’s play and the whole enterprise of Field Day Theatre Company: to find a “fifth province” – an imaginary space of cultural healing beyond the political and religious divisions defining Northern Ireland at the time.

Friel’s play revolves around a colonial cartography project and the fallout for a small Irish-speaking community when they resist it. Some contemporary criticism argued that Translations was nationalist in its sympathies rather than the politically neutral artwork it claimed to be. It is actually an incredible feat of nuance and intellect. Reading it across the distance of time, it even demands that we don’t let our reading of the play become static: “It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us,” the schoolmaster Hugh cautions in the play’s final moments, “but images of the past embodied in language ... We must never cease renewing those images, because once we do, we fossilise.”

[ Brian Friel’s Translations, in Ukrainian: ‘This is about everything that is happening in our country’ ]

This production of Translations by Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre, performed in Ukrainian with English surtitles on the main stage of the Abbey Theatre, is a reminder of the emotional and dramatic rigour of Friel’s play, as well as of the way that theatre reinforces Hugh’s philosophy. A theatre production unfolds in real time, in the present day, and the conversation it opens up is immediately shaped by what is going on offstage. In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is therefore an urgent, dangerous energy to Kyrylo Kashlikov’s studied staging, as the original fatalistic drive of the forthcoming Famine is replaced by tomorrow’s headlines of destruction and war crimes.

Much of this context is achieved through the use of music and digital projection. On Olena Drobna’s set, collapsing wooden stakes are supported by each other to provide a stark makeshift shelter for the schoolroom setting, while an animated backdrop brings the wider community of Ballybeg to life: the primitive village, a bucolic dance, and rain over the countryside that is eventually a torrent of blood. Vlad Tenenbaum’s sound design underscores key dramatic moments with persuasively effective music. Ihor Holovachov’s lights provide a held-breath emotional focus, too. Without the gravity of contemporary circumstances, these directorial signatures might seem heavy handed. But, for Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre, more is at stake than language, culture and intellectual argument.

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The fine ensemble is rounded out by a chorus of dancers, who take to the stage at the start of act two, as well as, more significantly, at the curtain call, with a routine set to the sea shanty The Wellerman, whose popularity has been co-opted for propaganda purposes by pro-Russian factions in widely shared videos online. With its rousing chorus and anticipation for the future, the lyrics take on a different and powerful meaning for the Lesya Ukrainka troupe, becoming a call for resistance and fortitude.

Translations runs at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin 1, until Saturday, June 24th