Christopher Gray is thrilled by this adaptation of Brian Friel’s masterpiece

Tragedy bubbles just beneath the surface in Brian Friel’s masterly play Translations, not least — indeed, especially — that arising from the calamitous clashes it portends between the native Irish population and their rulers from across the water.

Though the events we see occur in 1833, they provide a foretaste of much agony to come. The setting is a Donegal ‘hedge school’, a unique Irish institution of the 18th and 19th centuries in which a local man of learning passed on his knowledge to his neighbours. The Greek and Latin classics are the passion of the master of this outdoor academy, the amazing Hugh, who is played by Niall Buggy with a more than passing resemblance — being a top-hatted toper, lavish in speech — to W.C. Fields as Mr Micawber.

He has stirred his pupils’ enthusiasm to such a degree that one of them, the tolerated local fruitcake Jimmy Jack (John Conroy), is now seriously contemplating marriage to the goddess Pallas Athena.

Hugh’s teaching duties are shared with his good-sort son, the lame Manus (Ciarán O’Brien), whom we first encounter encouraging a clearly traumatised young woman (Roxanna Nic Liam) to give voice to her name. Sarah is a character later fatally to speak. We soon see, too, Manus’s tendresse for the lovely Máire (Beth Cooke) whose yearning for another life — not to mention the Chekhovian tone to the whole play — reminds us that Friel was simultaneously working in 1980 on his acclaimed translation — that word again — of Three Sisters.

The plot begins in earnest with the return from Dublin of Hugh’s younger son, the dapper Owen (Cian Barry), bringing with him two army officers who are there to map the area — this clearly betokening, as some recognise, a dangerous new ‘interest’ by the British. No-nonsense Captain Lancey (Paul Cawley) is the cartographer; the dreamy, romantic Yolland (James Northcote) is translator of the place names. Owen is his translator — indeed, almost everyone’s, since the soldiers speak no Gaelic and the locals speak no English (though they do to the audience’s ears).

This failure in communication is a major theme of the play, which is presented as perfectly as it could be, surely, by English Touring Theatre under the director James Grieve. It hardly needs saying, of course, that it serves, too, as a powerful metaphor for Ireland’s dangerous political divisions.

Translations
Oxford Playhouse
Until Saturday
Box office: 01865 305305 or oxfordplayhouse.com