Revisiting Brian Friel’s Translations through the lens of stage director Caitríona McLaughlin

Abstract

ABSTRACT Brian Friel’s play Translations (1980), set in a 19th-century hedge school on the west coast of Ireland, chronicles the beginning of the decline of the Irish language. Since its premiere in Derry with the Field Day Company, it has become a classic of Irish theatre, one of the most performed plays on Irish stages, and one of Friel’s most popular plays abroad. Surprisingly, however, it had never been performed in Belfast’s best-loved playhouse, the Lyric Theatre, and had never been staged by a female director in Friel’s own country. This play by the Lyric Theatre Belfast and the Abbey Theatre Dublin is pioneering as the first co-production between these two major companies, the first time a woman, Caitriona McLaughlin, Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre, has directed Translations in Ireland, and the first time a woman has held this position at the Abbey in the last 30 years. Through observations of the play premiered at the Lyric in April 2022 and of criticism in the media, and drawing on ideas that McLaughlin developed in an interview granted to me in September 2022, I will analyse the ways in which her proposal subverts received interpretations of this modern classic.