This (slightly parsed) line from Brian Friel's 1980 play Translations, which I've just seen at the National Theatre (the Olivier no less), gets to the heart of what Friel himself saw as the major theme running through the play. Language and how it both serves us and, equally, divides us. How people communicate beyond language when they desire to and how they let language fail them when it serves their ends.
If Friel was adamant that the play was "about language and only about language" then he was either saying that with his tongue in his cheek or this observer, and many others, have read way too much into it. It seemed to me as much about colonialism, love, sense of identity, and Irish history as it was about language.
Set in the fictional village of Baile Beag in County Donegal in 1833, Translations tells the story of a tight-knit, slightly cliched it has to be said, Irish community coming to terms with illness, running hedge schools (under the penal codes imposed by the British at the time Irish catholics were not allowed to attend school so small illegal schools, named hedge schools, were set up to educate the children), drinking to excess at funerals or christenings, and trying to outwit each other with Latin and Greek word games. Etymology being a particularly popular subject to chat about in poverty stricken rural Ireland in the 19th century supposedly!
Erudite, yet dipsomaniacal, schoolmaster Hugh (Ciaran Hinds - There Will Be Blood, some Harry Potter thing) is holding court to a selection of family and close friends when his son Owen (Colin Morgan) returns from Dublin after a six year absence and brings with him two English soldiers, Captain Lancey (Rufus Wright) and Lieutenant Yolland (Adetomiwa Edun) who have been sent to Ireland to map the land, Lancey as cartographer and Yolland, clearly the junior partner here, an orthographer.
You don't imagine things to go well between the representatives of an occupying force and those they're subjugating but, as with most things, it's not as straightforward as that. While Yancey soon proves himself to be an incurious and punctilious bigot Edun gets a juicier role as the drifter who'd just ended up in Ireland due to a series of coincidences yet has only gone and fallen in love. Not just with the country but with Hugh's young neighbour Maire (Judith Roddy).
The love scene (don't get too excited, it doesn't go beyond kissing) between Yolland and Maire is the most moving in a play that is always interesting but in places lacks passion. Friel had initially wanted the play to be performed in Gaelic but, perhaps realising this would be commercially unviable, stumbled across the surprisingly effective plot device of having everyone speak (mostly) English yet letting us know that the Irish characters (bar bilingual Owen) were speaking in Gaelic and that, for the most part, the English and Irish characters couldn't understand each other.
Except in the aforesaid love scene. We hear Maire and Yolland say almost exactly the same words back to each other and we also get to experience their frustration as they can never be truly certain what the other means. Not at least until the kiss. There's no mistaking what that means. I almost cried (again).
Although this briefly burgeoning romance, with its echoes of Romeo and Juliet, has the potential to cause problems it's the language barrier, and more so the characters different approaches to bridging it or not, that create the thrust that drives the plot.
Yancey makes no attempt to integrate with the Irish characters, seemingly viewing them as people only worthy to be at the receiving end of his increasingly unpleasant barked instructions whereas Yolland not only has fallen for the country and for Maire but is also trying to get to grips with Gaelic and overrules Owen on several occasions when it comes to changing the Irish names of places to English ones. Yolland sees how important it is for a group of people to have a shared history, even if much of it is tied up in mythos.
With more Irish characters there is, unsurprisingly, an ever wider, and more nuanced, range of takes. Owen's brother Manus (Seamus O'Hara), although hurt by the apple of his eye Maire's attraction to Yolland, is clearly deeply hurt by Owen's behaviour, Sarah (Michelle Fox) is not far from mute so learning a second language seems a tall order for her, while Maire herself, who prior to meeting Yolland longed to escape to the USA, feels Gaelic is dying and English should replace it. A view she shares with Catholic emancipation campaigner Daniel O'Connell, active at the time and referenced in the place as if to give it more historical ballast.
The conflicted heart of the piece is Owen (or Roland as his English bosses mistakenly refer to him). He's employed as a translator and, at first, he goes at the job with no little gusto and all the zeal of a convert. His years in Dublin working under the English have lead him to believe they'll provide a better life for the Irish people and though his family have some doubt about this it's a nice touch that Friel has this played out in the occasional caustic comment rather than all out screaming or even fighting.
As the play reaches its denouement we see the penny drop for Owen. A series of events lead him to see that he's being used as an involuntary stooge to sell out his own country and his own family. When we finally reach the denouement things become very confusing indeed as a half-sozzled Hugh sits on a staircase reading, in Latin, a section of the pre-Christian epic poem The Aeneid by Virgil.
It's possible , even hopeful, that said section comments in some way on the inability of language, a human construct after all, to convey our fullest emotions. But, equally, and this is how it had to work for me not being fluent, or even conversational, in Latin, it's possible that Friel was trying to break the fourth wall and, in some way, give us, the audience, the same sense of frustration that Yolland, Maire, and Manus had been experiencing for the previous two hours and four minutes (it's quite a long play).
I left with some small provisos, not least about the 'ambiguous' finale, but on the whole I found it to be a worthwhile, educational, improving experience - if not the most fun one I've ever had at the National (I saw Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum there once). In what was very much an ensemble piece it'd be unfair to single out individual performers but I'm going to do it anyway.
For me the stars of the piece were Morgan (as Owen) for managing to subtly convey the precise, and imprecise, emotions of a man coming to terms with the decisions he'd made in his life and Edun and Roddy for making me nearly well up. The set design was fantastic, the music (Stephen Warbeck, Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love) was unobtrusive yet effective, and director Ian Rickson had done a great job of keeping Brian Friel's play, one that considering its subject was full of bright and sparky dialogue, relevant nearly forty years after it was first performed at the Guidhall in Derry.
Relevant, and timely, too coming at a time when relations and borders between the UK and Ireland are being tested more than ever by a spectactularly short-sighted, and selfish, decision. We need to learn to live and think more like Yolland and less like Yancey.
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