Theatre night:Translations.

"Remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. It can happen that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of... fact".

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.

TADS #22:Wareham to Swanage? (or Wareham Scare 'em).

Yesterday afternoon me, Shep, and Pam found ourselves atop a cliff a few miles north of Swanage being buffeted by the most savage winds any of us had ever experienced. They were so powerful you couldn't hear somebody shouting a foot away from your face, you could barely catch your breath, and you were in serious danger of losing your footing. Not a situation that goes well with wet slippery paths close to cliff edges. Our faces red through exposure to the elements rather than embarrassment we cut our losses and headed back down to sea level. The views were great but they weren't worth risking our lives for!

It was the hairiest moment in all TADS history (at least the hairiest one that didn't involve alcohol) although there was one occasion last year on a Scottish walk that merits comparison. We can laugh about it now but at the time it was terrible. It didn't however deter us from having a thoroughly decent weekend.

Talking of alcohol my personal journey began with the ill advised decision to buy a can of Stella for the train (and a pack of Hula Hoops) at 9am. It got cracked open about 10am and thrown, still two thirds full in to a bin at Bournemouth station an hour or so later. By that time I'd met up with Pam at Clapham Junction and Shep in Basingstoke and the sorely depleted, but always chipper, TADS had disembarked at Bournemouth for an hour due to problems with train strikes.

It was a nice day so we took simple, yet tasty, late breakfasts in the surprisingly (or perhaps not so with the strikes in mind) Chikitita's. The cuppa they served me better than the lukewarm Belgian wobbly pop earlier.

Soon we were on the train down to Wareham and the Jurassic Coast, passing through Poole and its enormous harbour populated with the yachts of the well-to-do. Arriving at the picturesque and historic market town of Wareham we crossed the River Piddle, ambled down the pretty High Street, and crossed the slightly larger River Frome (both rivers wash out into Poole Harbour) where kids played in its babbling waters and holidaymakers relaxed in an almost Toytownesque square replete with church steeple, boats, pub, and ice cream van. A stop would've been tempting but we'd only just left and we had a long walk ahead. 

It seems Wareham and its surrounding villages are partial to a smutty name or two. We saw Shatters Hill, Nutcrack Lane, and Cocknowle as we followed the B3075 past an old stone church, pastel shaded residences, and the little village of Stoborough.

About here we cut off to a path that was either the Hardy Way (a 220 mile route named for the author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) or the Purbeck Way, a must shorter path that seems to share sections of the same route. It was never clear to us which path we were on but, apart from one minor wrong turn right at the far start that had us walking, on a pavement luckily, alongside the busy A351, we managed to keep ourselves on track most of the day.

The Isle of Purbeck is not an island, more a peninsula hemmed in by the aforesaid rivers Piddle and Frome, the English Channel, and Poole Harbour. Its western boundary is so ill defined it's not possible to say how large it is but out on Stoborough Heath, with not another soul in sight, you almost get the impression of being in immense wilderness.

Trees bent out of shape by the wind, endless gorse, heather, and a peculiar train track (it runs from Corfe Castle to Wareham but seems to never be used) we had to cross on foot that looked almost like something from the Wild West. It was undeniably beautiful and we could see the Purbeck Hills (if not Corfe Castle) that we'd soon need to cross in the distance.

There was an old shed decorated with what looked the grizzly tools of a serial killer's trade (judging by the skulls the spoils of it too), Shep larked around with a fire dampener, and we passed a house with so many recycled bottles of booze outside it that Pam could only speculate that the Made in Chelsea lot had rented it out for a summer party.

The terrain regularly changed. We'd drop under the canopy, into fairly deep forest, and then on to open land again. The stone markers indicated that we weren't making particularly fast progress but that didn't matter when the countryside was so generous.

Occasionally we'd have to briefly walk along a quiet country road, or we'd pass pools of blue and lakes of green, and in one field we saw sheep, llamas, and cattle all mixing freely. Just before we passed through the first of many many campsites I spotted a tree that had grown into what wasn't far off a perfect right angle and through a gap in the trees our first sighting of Corfe Castle. We were nearly halfway to Swanage, we were nearly at our first pub, and, most importantly for me, we were nearly near a toilet.

No matter how you look at it the ruined Corfe Castle is a pretty impressive sight. It dominates the skyline for miles around and is surely the reason the nearby village, also named Corfe Castle, sprung up around it. Built in the 11c by William the Conqueror it commands a strategic gap in the Purbeck Hills and it covers a pretty large area. Try walking round it like we did.

Elizabeth I sold the castle to her Lord Chancellor, Christopher Hatton in 1572 and in 1635 it was purchased by Sir John Bankes, Attorney General to Charles I before, during the English Civil War and after one failed attempt, the castle was wrested from the Royalists by the Parliamentarians. Later on in the war Cromwell's forces had the castle slighted and since then it's stood in spectacular ruins and has become an ever more popular tourist destination. Jousting and the like goes on in the grounds and when we took ourselves to the beer garden of the Greyhound pub to suck on a nice warm Dorset Knob we could hear local musicians knocking out Johnny Cash covers to tourists. It was a much needed stop for us but we decided against the old 'two pint mistake' as we still had much ground to cover and we were already running late.

About half a mile down the road on the way out of Corfe the skies opened and the rain was so cold it hardened my right nipple. A path marked out on the map didn't seem to exist any longer so we were back on the busy A351 and this time without a pavement. Luckily it wasn't for long.

We soon cut through some holiday homes, under the train line on which runs the Swanage to Corfe Castle train (complete with its cotton cloud puffs of smoke and regular toot toots it's a family favourite), and through a series of campsites and gentle rolling valleys, even finally passing some fellow walkers, before reaching the pretty but not showy, village of Langton Matravers. Langton just means 'Long Town' and Matravers comes from John Mautravers who owned land there as far back as 1281. Assume he owned land in nearby Worth Matravers and Lytchett Matravers too.

What a friendly, community minded, place. We stopped in the Kings Arms, Pam sampled one gin from an impressively extensive collection while Shep and I took a Steerage from the Titanic Brewery. Locals chatted to us and we saw signs for community cinemas and various other events. The proprietress seemed impressed, shocked even, that we'd walked all the way from Wareham and on the way out we saw they'd left a huge door to a room full of bottled beer open. It's safe to say that'd be a risky mistake in London!

From there it wasn't too far, even it felt like it, to follow the B3069 into Swanage, a pretty seaside town I'd visited on many occasions over several decades but had never before approached by foot.

Several 'welcome' signs greeted us giving the town a friendly air but I didn't feel we'd arrived until we'd reached the beach. It was the weekend of Swanage Carnival and Regatta and, as such, the town was buzzing with revellers, there was a temporary funfair set up to go along with the usual crazy golf and ice cream parlours, and the pubs were full of people who looked like they'd been 'on it' all day.

We gave the White Swan a miss as we weren't quite refreshed enough to join a hen party in an Abba singalong and instead enjoyed a couple more ales in The Ship Inn. It was so busy we had to sit outside. In the cold. With a disused crab bucket on our table. We discussed the likelihood of Huckleberry Hound becoming the next POTUS (after Trump maybe only a blue anthropomorphic cartoon dog that nobody under forty will remember can save the world) and JD Wetherspoon opening a pub on the moon by 2028.

Our next stop was the Masala for our traditional Indian meal. Shep's request for Bangla came with a negative reply and a suggestion he might like to try Tiger instead (like he'd never heard of it or something). Which he did. He didn't like it as much. My Cobra went down okay but my admittedly unimaginative tarka daal was uninspiring and Pam's pusanda was so disappointingly sweet (and full of obviously tinned carrots) that she hardly touched it. That's the downside of seaside resorts I guess. Constant passing trade means standards can fall. I've had worse Indian meals - but not many.

On the plus side we got to see a fight outside. Well, not a proper fight. Just a load of drunk, lairy blokes squaring up to each other while their friends, male and female, shouted "leave it" and "he's not worth it". There's an almost ritualistic aspect to the way this plays out in town and city centres across the UK every weekend night and this example was so typical of the form it was possible to believe that it was staged by an avant-garde theatre troupe as part of the Swanage carnival.

One thing about the carnival being in town (and I don't mean us, ho ho!) was that accommodation was scarce. Pam had got herself a bed in a shared ladies only dorm at the YHA and, luckily, almost last minute, I'd been able to secure a dorm for me and Shep in the same place. We walked up a ludicrously steep hill, checked in by 2230hrs, dropped our stuff off and me and Shep returned to the Red Lion for one last drink. Pam concluding that an early night was her priority.

I slept fitfully despite the bed's comfort, just too much on my mind, and woke with bad guts to bad weather but a wonderful view from our window. After five, count 'em, toilet visits Pam passed me a couple of imodium capsules and that sorted me out. The YHA breakfast, as in Cambridge, was good and, after that, we needed to decide if we could risk attempting part two of the walk. In 2016 we were defeated by rain (but returned a few weeks later to put that ghost to bed) and last year our only problem (and one that didn't stop us) was it being too hot but now we had to contend with rain, wind, and even possible lightning and we had a fairly steep climb ahead of us before we could descend into Studland, Sandbanks, and, eventually, Bournemouth.

We ummed and ahhed plenty but when there was a slight break in the weather we all agreed we should give it a go so it was down to the Jurassic Outdoor shop as soon it opened to buy myself a poncho and Shep a third Pac-a-Mac to add to his collection. A brief browse of the arcade revealed that Rescue A Firefighter has replaced the more aggressive Bash-A-Burgler or Whack-A-Croc of old and with that we we off.

Along the seafront, down a side street, and through a private housing estate before coming out on the South West Coast Path just north off New Swanage. We ascended past fields of cows, all the while in the rain, with the path occasionally slippy below and sometimes the stairs particularly steep.

The views back over Swanage Bay were spectacular, if somewhat grey, but the higher we got the windier it got and the closer we got to the edge of the cliff. At one point we all hung on to a marker stone just to catch our breath. Eventually we reached some kind of plateau and the wind there was more intense than any of the three of us had ever experienced in our lives. Our faces were red, we were out of breath, you couldn't hear the person next to you talking because the noise of the gusts was so loud, and the chance to look at either the map or one's phone was simply not there.

When we started to risk losing our footing (and not far from several potential perilous drops) we decided to abandon the walk. We didn't know what was ahead or if the wind was going to get even worse and we certainly didn't know what it'd take to blow us off the edge of a cliff. I'd really wanted to see Old Harry Rocks but I feared if I was foolhardy enough to carry on I may be receiving a far too intimate view of them.

We all agreed we had to go back down, while wondering what the approximately seventy year old lady who passed us earlier knew that we didn't (and worrying if she'd be okay), so we headed back the way we came. The deal with TADS is always if one person can't go on nobody goes on but this time none of us had the stomach for such insanity.

At Beaver's, a slightly up itself cafe bar that plays terrible lite jazz, I at least got to see a picture of Old Harry Rocks on Shep's bottle of Fossil Fuel. From there we took the Purbeck Breezer to Bournemouth.

The Purbeck Breezer is not a watermelon infused alcopop but an open top bus that took us, in the rain, smashing against overhanging trees with some vengeance as it went, all the way to Bournemouth. The highlight, of course, being the Sandbanks Chain Ferry which can take up to 48 cars (probably less when there's an open top bus on board) across the fairly narrow inlet of Poole Harbour and thus saves commuters etc; a 25 mile road trip round the huge harbour. We'd hoped to cross as pedestrians but we were accepting second best with a smile on our faces. I finally opened my packet of Hula Hoops to celebrate.

In Bournemouth we took a pint or two in The Moon In The Square (a Wetherspoons but it was tipping it down again and we wanted to get warm and dry) before heading up to Agora for very tasty Turkish food:- halloumi, falafels, dolma, potato hara, humus, and some exquisite bread. Agora had advertised itself as a Greek/Turkish restaurant but as the food seemed to be primarily Turkish Shep and I had a Greek Mythos beer to compensate. Pam stuck with the Efe's.

With that there was nothing left to do but return home, the long journey back to Basingstoke for Shep and the even longer one back to London for Pam and I. Our walk had been defeated by the elements but we still had fun and we can always go back one day. There's a slight possibility that might not have been the case had we been foolish enough to plough on. We'll never know.

As Shep remarked:- each walk that isn't completed is a new walk to do. It won't be this year though. We're booked up. August 18th the TADS are doing a circular walk in and around Oxford (satisfyingly free of cliffs) and, as ever, we're open to newcomers to join us.

Thanks again to Shep and Pam for being such great companions, not least in occasionally trying conditions.