“Talking amongst ourselves”: Language, politics, and sophocles on the field day stage

Abstract

The Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland, has made the politics of translation central to its theatrical mission since its inception in 1980. In The Riot Act by Tom Paulin, and The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney, the company has staged two contemporary adaptations of Sophoclean tragedy. Both of these are truly original works, not merely literal translations; both are explicitly anachronistic in places. Despite the political nature of the Field Day enterprise, however, neither Paulin nor Heaney overtly addresses political subject matter through their content. In both plays, however, language serves both to delineate and to demarcate characters by class, power, and at least explicit connection with nationality. Paulin's Creon undergoes a personal transformation expressed in his language, and the play is as much about Creon's finding an appropriate voice as it is about Antigone's tragedy. Heaney, too, uses language as subject as well as means of discourse: switches from verse to prose, and especially relative degrees of dialect, serve to map the psychic and philosophical landscape of his characters.