Review: Friel's TRANSLATIONS Shines at Villanova Theatre

What is language? How do we communicate? Both of those questions are paramount importance in Brian Friel's TRANSLATIONS. The late Irish playwright's proclaimed masterpiece has been on display in a fresh and timely production at Villanova Theatre, directed by Valerie Joyce. Villanova's theatre department head, David Cregan, is a scholar in modern Irish theatre, and the University has taken on the commitment of a new Center for Irish Studies, so that it's being produced there is no surprise; what is surprising is how amazingly relevant a play set in 1833 dealing with a series of dead languages as part of its story and its theme can be not only to modern Ireland but to our own lives.

In 1833, Gaelic is still a living language in Ireland. But so are Greek and Latin, at least in the hedge school of the town of Baille Baeg, where the schoolmaster (Kevin Esmond) and his students, of a variety of ages, are studying Homer and Virgil, and soaking them up as if they were the words of their own contemporaries, rife with possibilities. These people, men and women alike, Catholics prohibited from establishing formal schools, in a tiny hamlet next to nowhere, conversing in Latin as if it were their mother tongue, are more erudite, it seems, than the English soldiers, led by Captain Lancey (Dan Cullen) who speak only English, have learned no classics, and have been sent to map out Ireland.

That mapping includes turning Gaelic names into words comprehensible to, and pronounceable by, English soldiers of insufficient education to use Latin or Greek as common communication with the better-schooled rural Irish folk who speak little or no English. The mapping includes other things as well, things less apparent on the surface - an uninvited military presence, clusters of officers and rabble-rousing men under their command with a sense of arrogance and superiority to those who don't speak their language, when they themselves have only one tongue among them, and the ability of future generations of English military and the English politicians who direct them to control the land in which these rural folk live.

In the midst of all this, love blossoms, both requited and unrequited. Student Sarah (Rebecca Jane Cureton) cannot speak; the schoolmaster's son, Manus (Stephen Tornetta) is attempting to help her with rudimentary speech therapy. She loves him, but he has eyes only for Maire (Amanda Coffin), who is falling in love with the English Lieutenant Yolland (Sean Connolly). Yolland and Maire develop feelings for each other, but neither speaks the other's language; how can they communicate sufficiently to begin a courtship?

And dare they, when the presence of the English is so resented? Owen (Chris Monaco), the schoolmaster's English-speaking son, doesn't understand why his brother thinks he's a traitor in translating for the English and helping them develop place-names, and becomes close to Yolland himself. He and Yolland are idealists, both seeing the mapping as a wonder and a benefit to all, unconscious of the effects of handing over the country to England, just as the schoolmaster sees the mapping as a kind of progress, and becomes determined to learn the English names for his country.

But when Yolland disappears, possibly killed by local roughnecks in anger at his courting Maire, and when Manus runs off, possibly because Sarah, with her few words, told him that Yolland and Maire had been together, the urgent importance of inability to communicate becomes overwhelming. Even as local elder student Jimmy Jack (Barry Brait) converses of Homer, threats come to destroy the town if the lieutenant is not found.

It's a beautiful production, sparsely and gorgeously set (scenic designer Jerold Forsyth is greatly to be praised), evoking the feel of a schoolroom built out of an outbuilding by the fields, with farms around it. Light and shadow mark day, night, storm, and discord around the schoolroom, as well as the moments in the lives of the students whose village is being turned upside down by the intrusion of the English. The story itself is powerful, though audiences tuned to look for romantic storylines may find themselves distracted by the tale of Yolland and Maire, which is less central to the overarching timeline of impending colonial fate than it seems at first.

In Joyce's hands, one small measure of an Irish village has been transplanted to the stage of Vasey Theatre, where its students and teachers find themselves pulled out of their study of the past and thrust into a highly, and horribly, uncertain future. The wars of Imperial Rome are replaced by battles for English empire, in a language and with ideas that they have never before known.

It's not enough to translate words. Shades of meaning must also be determined. Joyce makes clear that this doomed village and its students, particularly Owen, have failed to read the shades of meaning of the English language, and the English soldiers, surrounding them. That Yolland is lost, presumed dead, is tragic. That Baille Baeg is about to be missing, also presumed dead, is Shakespearian in its depths of tragedy, and all for want of that which is lost in translation.

At Villanova University's Vasey Theatre through April 24. Check VIllanovaTheatre.org.

Photo credit: Paola Nogueres

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