Photo by Ros Kavanagh.
“Why do you want to learn English?”, I ask each new batch of students I receive. Their answers, which usually go along the lines of “so I can get a better job” or “so that I can travel the world”, are the same reasons that Máire (played by Zara Devlin) wants to learn English. Only Máire isn’t a fourteen year old Spanish kid on her summer holidays who’s being taught by a nineteen year old college student. She is (like so many before her) an overworked, witty and romantic young woman who hopes to leave Baile Beag for America – where, god help her, “there’s no hay to be saved”.
Translations tells the story of an Irish speaking community in Donegal in 1833. It is primarily set within a hedge school, fizzling with passion for ancient Greek, Latin, mathematics and poetry – but, of course, not for the English language. Characters that some might call peasants are essentially portrayed as downtrodden geniuses, savant farmers and eejit poets. However, the hedge school is forever changed when the English army sends over a convoy to rename the places of Ireland, in order to make the country easier for them to occupy. They arrive, ready to regulate language and destroy history… but I’ll say no more.
The play is about many things, namely the beauty of the Irish language. In Baile Beag, everybody speaks Gaeilge, and I find myself jealous of these fictitious, poverty-stricken townspeople. For they have an opportunity that I was never afforded: the Irish language feels at home in their mouths. I didn’t grow up speaking Irish and it was spoon-fed to me in forty-minute increments during the five days a week I was in school, so it’s a wonder I have any love left for it. But I do. And watching the beginning of the end for this beautiful language in Translations is like watching your favourite character in a movie die, which is to say, heartbreaking, unfair, confusing, visceral, and always, always impossible to look away from.
The play is suitably Irish in that it is filled with poitín, music, and sarcasm. There is a moment in which Lancy (played by Howard Teale) speaks to the Irish people with painful ignorance, yet despite this uncomfortably accurate display of anti-Irish racism, the audience find themselves laughing not with him but at him. There were small pockets of giggles from the audience throughout the performance. Old Jimmy Jack (played by Ronan Leahy) telling us that he’s going to marry Athena, if only Zeus gives his blessing, or George saying “sorry” every five minutes. This is important. To make us laugh, to make us care about a love story where colonialism and imperialism dominate the main love interest. To highlight the frivolous is to show us that language is relevant not only to the ways in which we communicate with one another, but also affects how we think for ourselves. George is the most romantic character in the play, yet ironically displays the most surface-level love for the language as he actively works to erase its legitimacy. In contrast, the native speakers in the play do not need to express their love for the language: it is, as it were, unspoken.
The lighting is incredible. It takes the work of a genius (the geniuses, in this case, being Paul Keoghan and Caitríona McLaughlin) to make every scene in the play look like a painting. Rich, warm tones connote comfort and home. Dirty feet, bowls of tea, dusty books and milk from a metal can. Beautiful little touches. The characters belong on the stage and they haunt your imagination for days afterwards.
If nothing else, Translations has made me more determined than ever to use the original Gaeilge names for places in Ireland. I ask my students why they want to learn English so that I can convince myself I’m lucky to be a native English speaker. But who am I kidding? In the words of the play’s hedge-master Hugh, “English succeeds in making it sound…plebeian”.
