Ireland's Field Day

Abstract

Towards the end of Brian Friel's play Translations we are asked to consider the idea that 'it is not the literal past, the facts of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language'.' The speaker of these lines is Hugh Mor O'Donnell, a hedge-school* master whose embattled commitment to Gaelic culture reminds us that the play is set in Ireland in the 1830s, shortly after the introduction of a national education system founded on the English language. In a related act of cultural imperialism, a group of Royal Engineers from the British Army is busily engaged in creating the first Ordnance Survey Map of Ireland, translating Irish place names into English. Earlier in the play Hugh tells Lieutenant Yolland: 'it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . .. fact'.2 The title of the play, then, is replete with irony, for it becomes clear in the course of events that far from being a matter of linguistic innocence this particular 'translation' is a determined act of cultural and political domination, conveniently 'replacing' one version of history with another. It was to launch Translations in 1980 that Field Day Theatre Company was founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. According to the Irish Press, the premiere of Translations in Derry's Guildhall on 23 September 1980 was, 'in every sense, a unique occasion, with loyalists and nationalists, Unionists and SDLP, Northerners and Southerners laying aside their differences to join in applauding a play by a fellow Derryman and one, moreover, with a