St Patrick’s Day celebrations normally consist of multiple trips to the pub, a vast amount of Guinness, and the kind of hangover that only a greasy fry-up can cure. But the Tower Theatre is taking a deeper, more reflective approach by mounting a production of Brian Friel’s classic Irish drama Translations.
Sitting in the Tower’s bar with the cast, I feel almost as if I am in an Irish pub, surrounded by strong accents and a humble yet rambunctious energy, and with no-one allowed to arrive without a friendly greeting.
Opening tonight in the Stoke Newington theatre, the play was first performed at the Guildhall, Derry, in September 1980, at the height of the Troubles.
Director Allan Hart, 76, has described the play as “a masterpiece”, and speaking with him and some members of the cast in Tower’s bar, their passion is palpable.
Set in rural Donegal in the nineteenth century, Translations portrays a neighbourhood inundated with British soldiers who are fixated upon changing local Gaelic placenames to English. As the playwright himself describes it, it is “a play about language and only language”.
It is a judgement with which Hart himself seems to concur. “If you suppress the language, everyone has to speak the colonist language, and the culture is pushed to the fringes,” he says.
“there have been productions of this staged in apartheid South Africa”
Peter Molloy, 31, plays a British soldier, Yolland, and remarks that the production has relevance not only where it is set, but in other places, too.
“It’s definitely applicable to other territories dealing with their identity, and that being taken away from them by way of first language,” he adds.
“There have been productions of this staged in apartheid South Africa, and most recently in Dakar, where they’re dealing with the relationship of French and reclaiming the Senegalese language.”
Molloy and Laura Fleming, 30, play the star-crossed lovers, a British soldier and a local Irish girl. A “dangerous risky thing”, as Hart describes it, both for the setting and time it was performed.
Alan Maddrell, 49, playing Manus, a teacher, describes “a lovely scene” between the young lovers. “Their characters are forming a connection with each other, but they don’t speak the same language… so they’re trying to communicate, but they’re just missing the mark.”
Language is so central to this production that the cast has an Irish language coach, Tower Theatre member and Irish speaker, Jill Reynolds.
Fleming says it was a complicated job, however, as “there is no correct sound of the place names; there are so many different types”.
“It is a play that forces you to listen carefully”
Both she and Molloy are from Ireland but say even they struggled and had to be coached. It is clear how much they had worked together. It is “a real ensemble piece”, Fleming adds.
“There’s a real respect amongst everyone,” says Molloy. “There is this safety to say, ‘here’s a word that needs pronouncing differently’.”
Director Hart said, “it is a play that forces you to listen carefully, which is what the essence of theatre is”, and, perhaps, even translation itself.
You can see Translations from this evening at the Tower Theatre, Stoke Newington, until 28 March. Tickets are available to buy from £9.
Charlotte Galea is currently a MA Newspaper Journalism Student at City University. She hails from Kent and is proud of her working-class roots, using journalism as a way to speak for communities who need to be heard.
She received a first-class honours undergraduate degree in History from King's College London. She has written about nearly everything, from a love-letter to her home town in the wake of a disappointing Reform majority, a review of Bridgerton's Season 3 and an investigation into how social media is making young women more conservative, amongst many other topics.