FOUND IN TRANSLATIONS

“There are, it may be hinted, several sides to The Playboy.” So wrote playwright J. M. Synge in 1907 regarding The Playboy of the Western World, for my money the greatest (whatever that means!) of all Irish plays. “On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy,” Synge wrote in his Preface to the play—perhaps not the formula that every play should follow . . . but it certainly worked for him in his richly ambiguous “extravaganza” (as he described it).

And in its own way (though the “joy” is a bit muted) it worked for Brian Friel in Translations, his 1980 masterpiece that, in my humble opinion, ranks a close second to Playboy in the many-splendored catalogue of Irish drama. I was reminded of that last night when I attended a production of Translations staged by the Boston College Theatre Department. Employing only two equity actors, it was nonetheless an altogether compelling production, thanks in no small part to the guidance of director Carmel O’Reilly, who really drew out the talents of the student actors. The founder (with her husband Peter) of Boston’s now dormant Súgán Theatre Company, Carmel has directed literally countless plays, both at Súgán and for other Boston companies, and has received much recognition and many honors in the process. She is this year’s Monan Professor of Theatre Arts at Boston College.

Before last night, I had seen Translations performed two times: a disastrous mainstage production back in 1995 that starred TV actor Brian Dennehy (it had a short test run in Boston and then rightly got run off Broadway in less than two weeks), and a much more modest but still very satisfying production by the Devanaughn Theatre Company in 2004 in the intimate 50-seat Piano Factory Theatre in Boston’s South End. Last night’s production, in the Bonn Studio Theatre of BC’s Robsham Theater Arts Center, was still “intimate,” but the space also allowed the audience to experience the play’s full “spectacle.”

No less than Synge’s Playboy, Translations has “several sides” to it, as Friel himself recognized and identified in the “Sporadic Diary” that he kept while writing the play in 1979:

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.

Indeed I don’t want to write a play about naming places.

And yet portions of all of these are relevant. Each is part of the atmosphere in which the real play lurks.

As crafted by Friel, the play never lands definitively on a single one of those topics or themes. Rather, as implied in the author’s program note to the first Field Day Theatre Company production of Translations in 1980—“The only merit in looking back is to understand how you are and where you are at this moment”—it engages with the complex and protean issue of “Irish identity” . . . though not in 1833, when the action of the play is set, but in 1980.

When first produced in Dublin in 1907 and then when first toured in America by the Abbey Theatre players in 1912, The Playboy of the Western World provoked protests both in the theatres and in the streets by audiences upset by what one reviewer described as “this unmitigated, protracted libel upon Irish men and, worse still, upon Irish girlhood.” More than a century later, audiences mostly wonder what the fuss was all about! Perhaps not quite so with Friel’s Translations: with all of the political, social, economic, and demographic changes in Ireland over the past thirty years, the coordinates of “Irish identity” may be different, but the issue is certainly no less relevant today than it was three decades ago.