Brian Friel’s parable about the linguistic colonisation of Ireland, set in 1833 and first staged in 1980, is easy to admire but hard to love. For a story pregnant with romance and tragedy, it’s curiously uninvolving.
I felt this way when Ian Rickson’s handsome revival opened at the National last year and I feel the same about this partially recast version. It’s an intricate, thoughtful play served by high-calibre actors including Ciarán Hinds and Judith Roddy. But the sparks it strikes in the head never reach the heart.
The scene is an informal “hedge school” in Friel’s fictional Ballybeg, where drunken master Hugh (Hinds) teaches maths, geography, Latin and Greek to a ragbag of agricultural locals.
Over these eccentric arrangements roll the redcoats, who are mapping the region and anglicising place names to facilitate taxation. Hugh’s son Owen (Fra Fee) is translating for them.
The deft scenes where characters blunder around the language barrier are the strongest, including the one where spirited Maire (Roddy) falls in love with the enemy, in the shape of twittish English soldier Yolland.
This triggers a cataclysmic chain of events, which might be more deeply felt if the emotional dice weren’t so loaded already.
Owen’s brother Manus (Seamus O’Hara) is lame, maimed in the cradle by inebriated Hugh. Potato blight hovers like the angel of death.
Subsequent spoofs and pastiches have rather spoiled such depictions of noble, doomed, peat-spattered Irish life. Even at its best Translations threatens to tip into parody.
It remains an enjoyable evening, though. There are fine performances, some laughs and an urgent, underlying sense of where this whole situation would end up. That said, the closing tableau, bringing us crassly bang up to date, is unforgivable.
Until Dec 18 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk)
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