The Friel-bad factor

The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been born in Dorset rather than in Co. Tyrone he’d have enjoyed an unremarkable career writing episodes of The Archers with the odd stint on Emmer-dale. He’s a champion witterer whose plays lack suspense, pace, depth or spectacle. His characters are constantly and infuriatingly nice to each other. Occasionally they rise to mild irascibility, or a spot of vituperative teasing, but that’s about it. When he needs a crisis he turns to external sources, to destiny or to happenstance, and his plays often end with dreadful sufferings being visited on russet-faced, cheeky-chappy Irish folk by crool, crool fate.

Translations at the Olivier is set in Co. Donegal in the 1830s where the peasantry can barely scratch a living from the rocky soil. Yet they’re steeped in the classics having learned their Latin and Greek thoroughly at the local ‘hedge school’ — an informal system of education that was tolerated but not condoned by the authorities. According to Friel, the standards of teaching were world-class. The scruffy bumpkins speaking in Nornoirish accents are able to quote Homer and Aeschylus from memory. They hold earnest discussions about the etymologies of ‘acquiescent’ and ‘theodolite’. For fun, the schoolmaster improvises a Latin ode, in emulation of Ovid, on the theme of the evening star. A young crofter, uncertain which seeds to plant, consults an ancient mildewed tramp who keeps a copy of Virgil’s Georgics (a treatise on agriculture) secreted in his tattered pockets.

The peace of this high-minded academy is broken by two British army officers who arrive with orders to anglicise the local place names and to create a map of Ireland that everyone in the empire can understand.