`Can we have a decision. Is it `cruc' or `cnuc' "? (phonetic spellings of the word "cnoc", the Irish for "hill"). "Cruc!" "I've spoken to two Donegal people and they've said `cnuc' ". "It's cruc!" "Let's go with `cnuc'."

The director, Frank Laverty, has spoken. Maire, or Morna Regan, goes down with a parting shot. "I don't know what the nuns were teaching us in Derry then. Or else you guys sold out before us."

It's an echo of the discussions which name Druim Dubh in the British Ordnance Survey of 1833 in Brian Friel's Translations - it's pronounced "Drimdoo" in Donegal, but it's named "Dromduff" in the new map because "every Dubh we've come across we've changed to Duff," as Owen, a translator with the Royal Engineers who has indeed "sold out", suggests.

But at least the dispute in the top floor of a community hall in Drumcondra last week was caused by lack of knowledge, rather than the occlusion, or devaluation of knowledge. The members of Fada Theatre Company, Donegal's only professional company, who are opening the theatre programme of Letterkenny's magnificent new venue, An Grianan, with Friel's play, are thirsty for the real sounds of the Irish words.

The emotional core of Friel's play, which was Field Day's debut production in 1980, is that the landscape of the Irish mind was forcibly remapped in a foreign language by colonisation. It is set in a small Donegal community during its re-mapping by a department of the Royal Engineers, backed by military force. Owen accomplishes the bastardisation of the Irish place names, with their meaning and history, so that they become meaningless English names, because he hates his roots - or because the pain of their loss is so great that destruction is a relief. So "Bun na hAbhann" - "the mouth of the river" - becomes "Burnfoot", for instance.

Some feel that the loss of the language has deeply affected us as a people. "It can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact," quotes Tim Ruddy, who plays Lieutenant Yolland, from the words given to Hugh, the hedge-school teacher. "There's an idea that we'll perhaps never be able to express ourselves properly again because we've lost our original language," he explains. "We're still speaking in broken English. We're still speaking in synonyms."

"I would say that we've made English our own language," counters Frank Laverty. "Irish has hugely influenced it. It's nearly richer now than it was in England."

"Isn't it richer because we go around the place to say something rather than saying it properly?" suggests Ruddy.

"What's properly?" asks Laverty.

Morna Regan adds: "Tom Paulin has always said we should have a dictionary of Ulster English. There's Scots words, there's French Huguenot, Viking. When I was in America I used the words `thran' and `thole' and a Swedish director recognised them."

A sense of the uniqueness of the Northern - and specifically, Donegal - experience informs everything that Fada Theatre Company is about. Frank Laverty, who is from Stranorlar, Co Donegal, trained at the Gaiety School of Acting and has acted for the Abbey, Druid and other companies. He was moved to found a Donegal theatre company because he wanted to "give something back". His partners in the venture are Kieran Quinn and Tracey Ferguson, and their base is the Balor Theatre in Ballybofey. In two years as a company, their most ambitious project was a tour of the cattle marts of the county with Ken Bourke's Wild Harvest.

What is it about Donegal that it has lagged so far behind most of the country in cultural infrastructure, despite the value of its cultural exports - Friel himself, McGuinness, much of the impetus of the Irish folk revival (Altan, Clannad, most of The Bothy Band), - not to mention Daniel O'Donnell himself?

The county is cut off from the rest of the country by the North, and by poor transport (the trains were discontinued in the 1960s), explains Laverty. "It affects the frame of mind. People do feel really cut off - it's like they're going around with a map of the country to tell people where they're from."

Has there been an inferiority complex in the county? "That's a really hard thing to comment on." "That's why I'm asking."

"I think there is," says Laverty carefully, "but I don't know where it comes from. Then he corrects himself. "It's not so much an inferiority complex as a feeling that you've been neglected and a slight defensiveness about that."

He himself finds it hard to understand that he knows of no other professional Donegal-based theatre company. Theatre has always toured there and to this day there is a strong amateur tradition: "I found out that MacLiammoir and Edwards used to stay with my grandmother when they came to Donegal," says Laverty. "And that my mother and sisters used to put on shows in their back shed."

His company builds on this - the Balor Theatre Company is owned by the Butt Drama Circle, and he has cast a veteran of amateur drama from Castlefin, Aussie Bryson, in the pivotal part of Hugh: "He was one of the first people I thought of. He's a retired butcher. I suppose he's been 40 years in Lifford Players. Often when we have a properties problem, he says, `I've one of those at home' - like a piece of hemp rope."

Laverty has deliberately cast actors from the Donegal, Derry, Tyrone area, of which there are plenty, despite the lack of local opportunities - that's why it made sense to rehearse in Dublin. He himself has been spending his mornings as Ronan Connolly, the farm manager from Glenroe, a part he got when Tim Ruddy's character, Oliver O'Driscoll, met a violent end: "His brother and mother conspired to have him whacked," explains Ruddy. "Now I'm spying on the mother to see what really happened," adds Laverty.

The fact that the play is being brought "home" to Donegal is obviously sending a thrill through the cast and director - and their potential audiences, if bookings are anything to go by. There is an awareness that it had strong contemporary political relevance to the North when it was produced by Field Day - "just the idea of humanising the British solider was controversial," says Ruddy. Last week, a run-through of that electrifying love scene, in which Yolland and Maire at first understand nothing the other says - "Go on - go on - say anything at all - I love the sound of your speech" - had deafening echoes of the peace process.

Laverty is not aware of the contention, made by, among others, the historian of ordnance survey, J.H. Andrews, that Friel's version of events is very far from the truth - that the Royal Engineers employed Gaelic scholars to translate the names and that they were never accompanied by soldiers. And in any case, he's not worried: "We're not dealing with a historical document," he says.

There's no doubt but that the play was emotionally true for many people when it was first performed, and still is. But isn't there a danger, in our political context, in departing from historical truth to create an emotional truth? "I don't really agree," says Laverty. "The theatre is there to stir the emotions and to provoke thought. We have to take risks and push the boundaries of people's thought processes."

It's perhaps harder to be emotional about the loss of our Gaelic heritage now than it was 19 years ago, however, when there was still the sense of an unbroken history of material poverty. Now, we have the resources to save what we want - most of the time, we just don't choose to. Laverty agrees, but adds: "I think every Irish person wants to maintain a certain amount of romance for their heritage.

"You see cinemas closing down in Donegal and brand new shopping centres going up instead, and it's hard to know what people want," he says. "Progress is getting in the way of culture, just like in the play. They have to co-exist - you can't have culture without prosperity." He adds: "It seems like this play is always going to be relevant to what's happening in this country."

Translations runs at An Grianan Theatre, Letterkenny, until Saturday, then tours to Hawk's Well Theatre, Sligo, November 8th- 13th; Civic Theatre, Tallaght, November 15th-20th; Town Hall Theatre, Galway, November 22nd-27th; Backstage Theatre, Long- ford, November 29th-30th; Cork Opera House, December 2nd-5th; Town Hall Arts Centre, Mullingar, December 6th-8th; and Dunamaise Theatre, Portlaoise, December 9th-11th