“But remember that words are signals, counters. They are
not immortal. And it can happen – to use an image you’ll understand – it can
happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no
longer matches the landscape of... fact.”
Brian Friel has said that Translations is a play essentially about language, and I think he’s
right to say that, but only if we accept that it is language which we primarily
use to facilitate relationships — both those that we desire and those that we
fear.
For those who have seen the play on stage, which I did last
weekend at Northern Stage in Newcastle, you will be aware that by ‘language’, I
am not simply talking about the words we speak to each other: I am thinking
about the whole physical process and significance of language, and, crucially,
what can happen in its absence. The character of Sarah, who might be said to
embody the genius loci of the play,
is seen in the opening scene being taught to say her own name by Manus, the
lame scholar who fills in for his father, Hugh, head of the hedge school in
fictional Baile Beag in rural North West Ireland where an intriguing mix of
arithmetic and Classics is taught to an eclectic group of students.
“My… my na… my name. My name is… Sarah” we hear her exclaim
to a clearly-delighted Manus, whose life is about to be shattered by words: their
often simultaneous meanings and confused implications.
Captain Lancey and Lieutenant Yolland have arrived from
England along with a “trained army” to conduct the first Ordnance Survey of the
country, mapping six inches to the mile, for the benefit of the people of
Ireland, the Empire and fair taxation. Or so tells Roland – actually Owen,
Manus’s entrepreneurial brother, returning from Dublin after 6 years away – to
the assembled class, where he acts as translator between his own people, fluent
only in Gaelic and broken Greek and Latin, and not the King’s English being
dictated to them by the arrival of the mapmakers.
If for Friel this is a play about language, for me it is a
play about doubling, duality. The elephant in the room, of course, is our
acceptance that we, an English audience, are watching and clearly listening to
English-speaking actors pretending to speak Irish, and/or speaking an
exaggerated version of King’s English, themselves failing to understand each
other, even though every word in the play is intelligible. But that’s the core
thematic doubling, one which is so obvious we quickly forget it. Others are
more subtle. Owen – Roland – is the embodiment of how these reflections slowly
manifest: a character who, when he first strides on to stage in a plush cream
suit, so vivid, so clean and full of colour compared to the tatty garments the
others wear, is instantly seen as a man of the ‘new’ Ireland: that of
cosmopolitanism and commerce – not potatoes and pigs. And frolicking, drunk on
poteen, with Yolland, casually coining new names for the places he has left
behind, we might be forgiven for thinking that is all he is: someone who has
‘made it’, found a new life and wealth for himself. But, no: Owen, acting under
the jurisdiction of Colonial Rule, becomes a man divided; a man who can conjure
new names with the swipe of a pen, but is unable to forget the folktales and
legends that are connected to the old ones. A man, therefore, quite literally
caught between his past and his present – and, by association, his future.
He is, in many ways, the brother Máire – equally caught in
a state of transition, or desired transition – should have been with: savvy,
worldly, some might go as far as to say a ‘sell-out’, Owen has the spirit of
adventure that Manus lacks. But is it Manus’s conservatism, or Máire’s
ambition, that leads to their inevitable downfall? Complicatedly, it is both and neither: Máire’s desire to learn
English, to begin a new life in America, where she won’t need worry about
potato blights, is both a reaction to Manus’s stubborn desire to ape his
father, and a consequence of a changing society more broadly – one which is
literally and spiritually losing its connections to the land.
Readers familiar with my past theatre reviews will know
that I am not trained in dramaturgy and such other technicalities, so my
reactions to performance and the craft of staging and acting are based more on
instinct that experience. One of the most intrinsically beautiful scenes in Translations occurs when Yolland and
Máire flit off after the dance and attempt to show their lust to each other. And
it is lust, not love: Yolland yearning for a rural quiet that his work seeks to
undermine; Máire foolishly believing Yolland could whisk her away, hiccup-free,
to a brave new world. In a symbolic moment of linguistic beauty, and another
obvious example of doubling, they try to decode their language barriers, Máire inferring:
“The grass must be wet, my feet are soaking”, to which Yolland unironically
retorts: “Your feet must be wet, the grass is soaking.” This rhetorical device
builds towards its conclusion, with Máire and Yolland speaking to understand,
not to be heard. “Always”, they both say in their respective mother tongues,
the word loaded with irony and foreshadowing.
There are many other examples throughout the play, most of
them stemming from the double meanings to be found in abundance within Friel’s
allusion-heavy text. Jimmy, a character who I’ve not mentioned, but who plays a
key role and might be seen to represent the antithesis to the dumb Sarah, is a
figure almost transcendent of the very specific time and space in which the
play is set. Fluent in many languages, but more comfortable drunk on nostalgia
than lucid in the present, he asks of Hugh, really of us, when contemplating his imagined wedding to the Goddess, Athene:
“Is Athene sufficiently mortal or am I sufficiently Godlike for the marriage to
be acceptable to her people and to my people?” It is a question which is
comical in intent and execution, but one which, we must remember, he raises
immediately after the far more authorial, didactic warning: “Do you know the Greek word endogamein? It means to marry within the tribe. And
the word exogamein means
to marry outside the tribe. And you don’t cross those borders casually – both
sides get very angry.”
No doubt you’ve guessed that Translations is rich in word-play and double-entendre: a text which
could be the focus of many a PhD. I first read it at A-level, and first saw it
performed at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal in about 2005, at a time in my
life when I was definitely more amused by Hugh’s bumbling alcoholism than by
the play’s many undertones and reverberations.
Which is why I can imagine some people may have left
feeling slightly cold, particularly
by the ending. I came in to the play on the back of close analysis of the
dialogue and allusions, and having seen it performed once before. I think, if I
could level one flaw at Translations,
it would be that it doesn’t wear those allusions lightly: the ambiances they
create can be lost on a first watch. That is not to discredit the cast and
production team: English Touring Theatre have really produced one of the most
pitch-perfect pieces of theatre I have ever seen. I find it interesting – and
heartening, clearly – that a play which I once merely admired has been brought
headlong back into my consciousness to the point where I would recommend it to
absolutely everyone and consider it a modern masterpiece.
To say the ending is oblique – much like the argument of
most of this review – is not to say it is ineffective. Far from it. Personally,
I love the the ambiguity of the ending, with a collapsed Hugh failing to recall
another of his much-loved classical passages (in this case, Virgil’s Aeneid, which I confess, even now, I did
have to Google) as the lights fade to black. I’ve noted a few reviewers who
have been confused by this, and I say this not to massage my ego, but how? Yes: it isn’t the tying up of loose
ends that we might expect from other narratives, especially those that centre
around a love-triangle, but it is the ending Friel wrote, and it is the ending
that this production has made the smart decision to keep. As the lights go
down, the characters are literally and figuratively transported into a space of
liminality, in which we – from a privileged place further along in this
country’s complex history – know the likely outcome, we just don’t know
how individual choices will shape the exact circumstances of it. It is
a clear and swift move, which takes the focus off stage, back on to us, the
spectators. At a time when countries continue to exhort military might on their
neighbours and annexe much-argued-over regions, and at a time when – for reasons
trivial and serious – our language continues to (d)evolve, artworks such as
this can only hold mirrors to our faces and ask us what we might have to do
with it all.
No comments:
Post a Comment