As Brian Friel's Translations opens on Broadway, it may prove challenging for an American audience that likes everything to be crystal clear, writes Belinda McKeon
Mayday, 1979. Brian Friel was battling with the beginnings of a new idea. He had thought of something, he wrote in his diary - a "hedge school/ordnance survey play" - and he was circling around it, reluctant to begin. The diary entries which followed revealed the extent of the struggle he created for himself, as he wrote the play which would become Translations.
He worried over questions of craft, of intention, of meaning and motivation. He met issues of place, of politics, of theatrical conceit, of theatrical comprehension. Most of all, he worried about language. The play would carry within itself a linguistic conundrum the portrayal of which would require incredible dramatic sleight of hand; although the characters would be Irish-speaking, living in a Donegal community in the 1830s, and although the British soldiers who would come into their midst would obviously speak English, there could be no question of both languages being spoken in the play.
Only in the case of the Latin and Greek taught and spoken in the hedge school could the strains of a language other than English enter the stage. English would have to contain not only its own meanings but those of the Irish language also; in a play about language, about its complexities, its controls and its complications, the audience would have to find itself confronted with, and forced to reckon with, just such complexities, controls and complications as it struggled to make sense of the play.
An act of translation, especially for Irish audiences conscious of their own impoverished grasp of the Irish language, would be an inherent part of experiencing the play. "Because the play has to do with language and only language," wrote Friel, a month after he had begun work on the idea.
Five months later, Translations was completed. And almost 30 years later, the depth of Friel's accomplishment with the play is undoubted. So deep-reaching is that accomplishment, in fact, that it is still revealing its layers, still yielding its complexities to the interested gaze.
In his introduction to the new Cambridge Companion to the playwright, Anthony Roche shows how Translations serves as a sort of metaphor or mirror for the achievement of Friel's theatrical career to date. Translation itself has become the "key term" of that career, Roche writes, with Friel creating in his plays a set of contexts - dramatical, philosophical, political - so rich that those plays have translated fluidly around the world, culturally as well as linguistically.
Alone among Irish playwrights of his generation, Roche points out, Friel's success at home has been consistently replicated overseas, with his plays enjoying success worldwide despite their typical rootedness "in the remoteness of Co Donegal, in the fictional locale of Ballybeg".
BALLYBEG MAY MEAN "small town" in Irish, but there is nothing small or provincial about the reach of Friel's ouevre. When a new production of Translations opens at the Manhattan Theatre Club, it will mark Friel's 12th time to have his name in lights up on a Broadway marquee. Ten of his plays have been produced there since Philadelphia, Here I Come in 1966; the new Translations, directed by Garry Hynes, will be the second Broadway revival of a Friel play in a year, following Faith Healer's triumphant, Tony-winning return there in a Gate Theatre production.
Things have changed, it seems, since 1980, when an interview with Friel in the Evening Herald carried the headline "Broadway? Who Cares!" At the time, Faith Healer was about to open in Dublin, having transferred there after a lukewarm stint on Broadway, and Translations was set for its world premiere at the Guildhall in Derry, as the inaugural production of the Field Day company. Asked about a transfer to Broadway for Translations, Friel laughed off the very idea; the play's emphasis on the Irish language, he said, debarred such a possibility.
"Can you imagine an American producer asking you what the play is about," he said, "and you saying, well it's set in a Gaeltacht hedge school in Ireland in 1833 . . ."
Of course, the hypothetical American producer turned out to be more than interested in the "hedge school/ordnance survey play"; Translations debuted on Broadway, after a successful off-Broadway run, in 1995. And this time around, not one but two producers have backed Translations: it comes to the Manhattan Theatre Club from a successful run at the McCarter Theatre Center in Princeton, New Jersey.
Back in October, when the play opened there, Princeton was having something of an Irish theatre moment. An enormous - and impressive - archive of Irish theatre materials had just been donated to the university by Leonard L Milberg, an American financier and philanthropist with a particular interest in Irish drama and literature. Milberg made the bequest in honour of the poet Paul Muldoon, who is Professor of Humanities and Chair of Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton.
A comprehensive exhibition in the university library showcased the new archive, including the jewel of its crown: the typescript of The Cooing of the Doves, a previously undiscovered one-act play by Sean O'Casey.
A reading of that same play, starring such diverse players as Muldoon, actor Stephen Rea, playwright Mark O'Rowe, and artistic directors Joe Dowling (of the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis) and Fiach Mac Conghail (of the Abbey Theatre), was the raucous, rambunctious highlight of a major symposium organised by the McCarter and the university to mark the occasion.
The O'Casey reading - and its impromptu casting call - aside, the symposium was a serious look at the practical realities of Irish theatre both in Ireland and abroad; Rea, O'Rowe, Dowling, Mac Conghail and Hynes were among those discussing questions of identity, responsibility and purpose in Irish theatre, in front of large audiences, over the course of the weekend.
But what the onstage conversations returned to, again and again, were questions of translation and translatability. These were red-hot questions; over at the McCarter, a short walk from the site of the symposium, theatre-goers were emerging from Translations either in enchantment or in utter confusion; there seemed few in-between responses.
"I understood maybe one word in 10," one man said during the interval at the Sunday matinee performance. "I didn't even get that much," said his companion. But at least they spoke in bemusement, and at least they re-entered the theatre after the interval.
Others didn't. There were walkouts, and at a panel discussion on the Saturday, a member of the audience intervened to inform Hynes, Mac Conghail and Emily Mann, artistic director of the McCarter, that many Americans found the Irish accents of Friel's characters simply too difficult to understand.
Would it be possible, the audience member asked politely, to "moderate" so that the point of the plot could be communicated, without such befuddling dialogue? Would it be "too much of a simplicity" to ask this much? The frowns and sighs from Hynes and Mann indicated right away that it would be.
In fact, the question turned what had previously been an interesting but inoffensive consideration of theatre-making and theatre-staging into something much more provocative. While Hynes acknowledged that the production was still, in a sense, "in process", and that she and her cast were "moderating for clarity", still the expectations of such moderation irritated her, she said frankly.
"You are looking at a play that comes from another culture. You are looking at a play that is intrinsically about language. I sometimes get my hackles up ever so slightly about the almost demand, sometimes, when you come to America,that all other cultures make ourselves clear to you. I do sometimes want to say, look, do a bit of work yourselves."
Mann moved quickly to support Hynes, pointing out that it wasn't just Irish plays which met with these sort of demands; when producing the plays of August Wilson or other African-American writers, she said, she had been challenged by audience members who resented the staging of plays from a linguistic culture other than their own.
"My rule," Mac Conghail chipped in, "is if it's a good play, you trust the writer. Because the writer writes music. And that pool of language will take you. And if you don't let it, if you resist it, then you are resisting it in a way that you are only looking for a literal representation."
He had seen things in Hynes's production of Translations, he said, that were about clarity, but not things he had read or even heard; "not clarity in terms of enunciation but in terms of thought and language and music."
BUT, FACED WITH a play the language of which it does not understand fully, an American audience can be a formidable force to reckon with. The next day, at an after-show discussion, Hynes, Mann and Mac Conghail experienced at first hand the caterwaul of theatre-goers for whom the meaning of Friel's play was lost in translation. "Any questions?" began Hynes. A hand shot up.
"What happened to Yolland?" a woman asked sharply. Hynes hesitated; the ambiguity surrounding the disappearance of Yolland, the British soldier who falls in love with the Irish-speaking Máire, is vital to the desperate power and poignancy of Friel's ending, epitomising as it does both the futility and the inevitability of human silence, of incommunication and miscommunication.
But a new miscommunication was happening in the McCarter theatre; as Hynes looked as though she might not answer the question, as though she thought it understood that there could be no answer to such a question, a small chorus of voices reiterated the woman's demand to know of the whereabouts of Yolland. Eventually, a distinctly uncomfortable-looking Hynes confided that Yolland was most likely at the bottom of the lake.
The questioners took up again: who put him there? What was with the mute girl? Wasn't this all something to do with Cromwell? While subtler, more thought-provoking questions were forthcoming from some quarters of the audience, they were in the minority; most people seemed to want to know simply what had happened in the play they had just seen.
It was a discussion about meaning, certainly, but at a very basic level. Translations, it seemed, might have to do "with language and only language", but for many of the McCarter theatre-goers, it had much too little to do with the language of their experience. Tiresome as the nit-picking questions became, whingeing as the complaints about Irish accents sometimes sounded, it seems fitting that issues of translation, understanding and clarity should be so hotly debated during a run of Friel's play.
Given Hynes's statement that the production was still, at the time of the Princeton run, somewhat "in process", its Broadway incarnation may be different in some ways. But those differences are more likely to be in mood and interpretation than in diction and enunciation; Dermot Crowley's Jimmy Jack will not be delivering his Greek and Latin dictums in the broad tones of a Brooklynite. Or even in the flat, industry-standard approximation of an Irish accent which often features in Broadway productions of plays from this country.
Hynes knows about bringing an audience to the pain barrier of communicability and comprehension, about giving that audience the chance to push beyond that barrier to something extraordinary; after all, she brought the Synge Cycle, with its music and its rhythms which seem at first so impenetrable even to an Irish ear, to America earlier this year. ("Don't fret if you lose some of the dialogue," Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times, reviewing the cycle, "there's plenty more on the way." )
To be meaningful, Hynes implied during the Princeton debate, is sometimes to be a little merciless where the comforts and the expectations of an audience are concerned: "There is a set of understandings that doesn't necessarily come through an absolute clarity of language. And there is a degree to which you have to assess whether clarity becomes so over-riding that the essence of the experience of the play is lost. Understanding and total clarity is not necessarily the most significant thing you can achieve."
Manhattan Theatre Club presents Brian Friel's Translations, directed by Garry Hynes, in a co-production with McCarter Theatre Center. Previews begin at Biltmore Theatre today. Opening night: Jan 25
