It's the opening night
party following a new production of Brian Friel's 1980 play,
Translations, at the Millennium Forum in Derry/Londonderry, and the
room is packed. The production forms a major part of the programme
for Derry's year as UK City of Culture, and it's largely young cast
are all dressed up following a couple of hours in suitably dowdy
nineteenth century attire in a play that looks at how the British
Army were tasked to translate place names from ancient Irish Gaelic
to the King's English.
In the far corner of
the room, the play's eighty-four year old author is sat on a sofa
next to its director, quietly holding court. Most enthusiastic of all
is a small gaggle of sparkly-frocked actresses who line up to take
each other's photographs on their phone cameras while sitting next to
Friel, as if he were a pop star. Which, in terms of Irish theatre, he
is.
During the interval,
the play's director had been standing in the corridor next to the
auditorium, equally unmolested. The fact that he was standing
opposite a portrait of iconic Derry-born tenor, Josef Locke, was all
too fitting. It was Locke, of course, who provided the narrative
drive for Hear My Song, the 1991 film about a shabby nightclub
owner's quest to find Locke. The nightclub owner was played by Adrian
Dunbar, who also scripted the film as he embarked on a film and
television career which has taken him from stints on Cracker and
Ashes to Ashes to the recently released film about Belfast's punk
scene, Good Vibrations. Dunbar also happens to be the director of
this new production of Translations, which arrives in Edinburgh next
week. The morning after what ended up being a very late Derry first
night, and, breakfasting in the secluded cottage where he's staying
on the outskirts of Northern Ireland's second city, Dunbar may be
weary, but he remains enthusiastic about what is clearly a labour of
love.
“The pressure was
on,” he admits, “because Derry owns the play, and you can feel
from the audience that they're very possessive of it.”
As they have every
tight to be about a play which is of huge significance to Derry. When
the play first appeared there, at the Derry Guild Hall a stone's
throw away from the Millennium Forum, the Irish Troubles were at
their bloody height, so any play that looked at cultural colonialism
was a brave move. The production also announced the arrival of Field
Day, a crucial collective of Irish writers and thinkers that began as
a collaboration between Friel and actor Stephen Rea to put
Translations onstage. As well as Rea, also appearing in that
production were Liam Neeson and Ray McAnally.
By that time, Field Day
had broadened its activity, with poets Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin,
and writer Seamus Deane involved in what had become a Northern Irish
super-group, with the aim of providing a dissident artistic voice in
a divided country. It was Translations that put the company on the
map.
“When it was first
performed at the Guild Hall all those years ago, it came during a
very dark, bleak time in Northern Ireland's history. I was reminded
last night that when Field Day did it, they were all living at the
end of some corridor in McGee College, with a couple of gas rings
that they were cooking off, and that there was only one Chinese
restaurant in Derry. It was that period when there wasn't a lot going
on, and into the middle of that came this incredibly uplifting
masterpiece of a play that really woke everybody up, and brought some
light and joy and fun as well as everything else into people's lives.
So I think it's a really healing piece in that respect. It's that
kind of a play, and we were just hoping to celebrate that.
“There's a line in
the play that says if we stop reinventing images of ourselves, we
fossilise. It's not the literal past, Brian says, that defines us,
but images in words of the past. So that's why words are so
important. I'm always brought back to that idea of the Bible
beginning with the line, in the beginning was the word. That's very
clever, because it's how we fashion the myths about ourselves, like
in Greece and Rome, it's not the facts of history that shape a
people. It's the myths that they build up about ourselves.”
Dunbar sees this notion
as being particularly pertinent for Scottish audiences at this time.
“Like all
masterpieces, the play's not defined by the moment it was written,”
he says. “A huge amount has been written about the play's politics,
because of how it was contextualised at the time, but it's politics
are very small. It's more about language, and how people reinvent
themselves, and how you have to keep doing that.
“I think the Scots
will understand that, because that's what's happened to them. The
Victorians decided to reinvent them as a nation, and put this layer
of invention across the top of this race of people that doesn't
actually belong to them at all. I think if the Scots are moving
towards independence, they're going to need people to reinvent them
again, and to break them out of this tartanised shortbread box image
which has nothing to do with themselves, but is to do with the
Victorians wanting to put everything into a box. They were very
clever about putting spin on things, but the final act of the
clearances was to actually reinvent what Scottish culture was about.
“At this particular
stopping off point where the Scots are at, I think Translations will
have a huge resonance for those people who choose to look for it.
That's not about politics. It's about something else, a bigger debate
that's to do with reimagining who you are again, so you can face the
next bit of your future. So I'm very hopeful that the play will
provoke a debate that's about Scottish culture. Westminster still
seems to be trapped in this 1833 Ordinance Survey idea of what
Scotland is, and Westminster's reaction to anything happening in
Scotland still has this ring of Victoriana about it, and that's why
they're not aware of a consciousness in Scotland that's shifting, and
has been shifting for some time. And by the way,” Dunbar says, “I
think English people living in Scotland are crucial to what happens
next, and they might do everyone a favour and vote for Scottish
independence.”
Translation, Kings
Theatre, Edinburgh, April 15th-20th
The Herald, April 9th 2013
ends
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