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by Brian Friel, directed by Ben Barnes

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Premiere Dance Theatre, Toronto

July 16-August 14, 2004

How do you obliterate a culture?  One way is to send soldiers into a non-English-speaking country to map it and change all the place names to English ones.  Another is to provide free schooling for the impoverished but only for Protestants and only in English.  This is what the British were doing in 1832 in Ireland when the story of Brian Friel’s Translations is set, a play that chillingly reveals linguistic oppression as a form of imperialism. 

The story focusses on an habitually drunk village schoolmaster (Diego Matamoros) and his two sons, Manus (Gordon Rand), who longs to have his own school, and Owen (David Storch), who serves as translator for the British cartographers.  Manus loves Maire (Patricia Fagan), but she pursues the Hibernophile British soldier Yolland (Philip Riccio) in hopes of escaping Ireland.  When Yolland goes missing, his commander vows to destroy the village.  Rand and Storch finely trace the nuances of their characters’ dilemmas, jealousy for Manus, betrayal for Owen.  Others of the cast create rich, memorable portraits, especially Michael Simpson as an old man drunk on poteen and classical poetry who hopes to marry the goddess Athena.  It’s a pity Fagan’s accent and acting don’t measure up to the rest.

Director Ben Barnes, head of Dublin’s famed Abbey Theatre, employs unusually relaxed pacing that captures the slowness of village life but generates little tension.  He  frames the play as an elegy so when the final lights fade we feel pangs of sorrow for a rich, vital world now lost.         

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2004-07-22.

Photo: Liisa Repo-Martell and Gordon Rand. ©2004 Soulpepper.