In Germany and Italy, they often "translate" foreign movies by over-dubbing the vocal parts, while in the more conservationist Holland, they tend to use subtitles. But TnaG and RTE, in their first bilingual dramatic co-production, Tales from the Poorhouse/Scealta O Theach na mBocht, has have gone one better. They shot the whole darn thing twice - first in Irish, then in English.
After some years, it's a return to our small screens for Monaghan playwright and novelist, Eugene McCabe, a former farmer who, in the past three years, has leased out his border-straddling lands outside Clones to concentrate on writing - after a life-time of juggling the two careers. Tales from the Poorhouse is a disturbing and typically forthright excavation, in four parts, of the almost unthinkable human realities of the Great Famine; with all the savage rural realism which McCabe always brings to bear, this time to the scenario of a bleak poorhouse, set during those awful years.
The four parts take the form of interlinked first-person testimonies, played as separate one-person plays, straight to camera. McCabe himself adapted and vernacularised them from four, originally lengthier short stories of his own, and the finished shooting scripts were then translated into Irish by fellow Monaghan dramatist John McArdle.
Although intercut with brief traumatised flashbacks, the four parts still bear the mark of first-person prose writing: the conflictual discontinuities between the characters' testimonies, a little reminiscent of Brian Friel's Faith Healer.
But they have an odd kind of confessional, internalising effect. Filmed backto-back in the derelict, ivy-covered old workhouse in Bawnboy, Co Cavan - for a bit of macabre authenticity - they also bear the stamp of veteran RTE drama director Louis Lentin; with his drama-documentary approach to big historical themes, such as his recent powerful drama No More Blues, a more-than-timely examination of Ireland and its treatment of Jewish refugees during the second World War.
The cast for this new project is also strong, with Brendan Gleeson, Mick Lally and McCabe's daughter, Ruth McCabe. Newcomer Sheenagh Walsh kicks off the mini-series this coming Tuesday night, as a young woman Roisin Brady: the half-starved, crop-headed sprite who is, to all intents and purposes, the central character of the series. Her quest to escape the dead end of the poorhouse - and indeed the country - is subsequently threaded through the stories of the other three characters.
Although written into the poorhouse Book of Paupers, the girl is not truly an orphan, as the mother she has disowned (played by Ruth McCabe) is confined to the Idiot Yard in the same poorhouse; she rambles through her horrified memories of the death and stillbirth of Roisin's twin sister, and the sickening typhoid death of her other young infant fed, due to fear of contagion, at the end of a long shovel, his little body later burnt in the byre. The other two characters are Reginald Murphy (played by Brendan Gleeson), the foul, opportunistic master of the poorhouse, who leases the lands of the paupers in his care for next to nothing, to supplement his sideline business in exporting those paupers who can afford it.
There is also Mick Lally as the area's main landlord - an unpopular profession at the best of times, but McCabe's portrayal here is a complex one, projecting a ragged, imperious, but not altogether unkind man, who is himself bankrupted by the Famine.
The whole odd texture of the thing is typical of McCabe's angry, imagistic, lyrical empathy. His story-telling abilities and his needling knowledge of human nature under duress are his main tools here in hubristically recreating those hellish times - in a landscape he knows with physical, even brute, intimacy. After the past few years of official commemorations of the Great Famine, "faminism" almost seems to have taken off as a new genre. But even considering such famine fatigue, Scealta O Theach na mBocht packs a serious and rather unexpected punch.
Scealta O Theach na mBocht is broadcast weekly on TnaG starting next Tuesday, October 6th, at 10 p.m; to be broadcast in English later in the autumn on RTE1.