Theatrical Props: Brian Friel's Translations

Brian Friel's Translations was the first play performed by the Field Day Theatre Company in the Guildhall of Derry on 23 September 1980. Nervous police officers patrolled the roads around the theatre, while an army helicopter hovered over Derry throughout the performance. Why did the opening of this play cause such consternation? Why did the army target later performances? Field Day was established by Stephen Rea, Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney and others. They imagined a fifth province in Ireland – a province beyond the four counties of Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster – a province that opened the past to new scrutiny. The play is a subtle, but savage, deconstruction of the politics of British rule in Ireland. It takes place at a hedge school, in Baile Beag, Donegal, in August of 1833. The inhabitants of the village are Gaelic speakers but the lead characters also converse in Latin and Greek. A detachment of the British Royal Engineers camps nearby. Its task is to complete the first ordnance survey map of Ireland. Their relations with the local community are cordial – but for two characters only ever whispered about – the Donnelly twins engaged in acts of violent resistance. The ordnance survey entailed the mapping of the land using chains of 66 feet long, made up of 100 links, which when squared measured an acre. The chain measure was used across the Empire in the imperial project to map, value, name, register and ‘propertise’ all land. It was central to the ongoing imperial project to establish equivalent measures of monetary value and productivity. Ireland was remade as acreage. The survey renamed every village and landmark with an English name. English was deemed more precise than the Gaelic names that the British Army associates with disorder, finding it difficult to pinpoint exact locations that corresponded to the words. The survey aimed to secure words and things, to render them proper, adequate to each other. It tried to wipe Gaelic uncertainty from the map.

In contrast, the Gaelic speakers characterise English as a barbaric language more suited to accounting than to life. The English language supports the demarcation of land as property, a measurable, valued space subject to proprietary control.