The ambitious decision to stage Brian Friel's masterpiece at historic locations around the country has paid dividends for Ouroboros Theatre Company, writes Sara Keating
'IT IS NOT THE literal past, the 'facts' of history that shape us," says the school master Hugh in Brian Friel's 1980 play Translations. It is "images of the past embodied in language". For Ouroboros Theatre Company, however, the past is embodied in physical surroundings, our architecture, as much as in our language, and their ambitious new site-specific production of Translations seeks to bring Friel's play directly into conversation with the history of cultural decline that the play documents. As Ouroboros' artist director Denis Conway puts it "a space can shape us culturally as much as a story can and our landscape is also our history. In the same way a building is not just bricks and mortar. There is a whole culture embedded in stone."
The idea for taking Translations out of the theatre was sparked by the success of Ouroboros's 2007 tour of Friel's play Making History, which was performed in various sites along the historical route of the Flight of the Earls. The production had originated at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in 2005, but a national tour was organised to coincide with the 400 year anniversary of the historical events.
As Conway explains: "We traced Hugh O'Neill's march from his home place to Kinsale and Hugh O'Donnell's route to Donegal, and we originally had the intention of doing it in theatres along the way. But then we realised that there were all these big house and castles along our route. For example, on the route there was this 800-year-old abbey in Kilmallock that both men probably would have passed through. It would have been 400 years old in their day even, and the sense of history, the context that that offered us was immense, so we decided that these sites would be more relevant for us than the theatres.
"When I think about the response to the first production, which had taken place in the Samuel, to the response we got from performances in locations where the characters actually passed through - and where they eventually ended up, like the church we performed in in Rome - well, the effect is incomparable. What the sites offered us was a historical sense, a connection to the real time of the play that a theatre building cannot offer. When you walk into these places you are surrounded by history, by atmosphere."
Translations, however, is set in hedge school in a remote area of Donegal in 1833, and the historical grandeur of some of the venues on the tour seems somewhat at odds with Friel's impoverished peasant characters whose fate is in fact overwhelmed by the history that these buildings represent. But Conway insists that this contradiction illuminates the play's historical context in a profound, if oblique, way.
"People might initially think that with this production we're merely repeating a successful formula: Ouroboros take a classic Irish text to a heritage location. But that's not the case, and I have to give Office of Public Works the credit for that" he says. "Yes, they were interested in doing something with us again, but we came up with suggestions, it was they who chose Translations and it wasn't accidental. They were actively interested in helping us design the whole tour. The board we were working with read the play in detail and it was they who chose the sites, and the reasons that they came up with were fascinating."
Conway continues: "Each of the sites speaks in a different way to the issues of cultural colonisation in Translations whether it's an entirely outdoor venue where we have the field where we perform that infamous love scene or a big house that symbolically speaks to the cultural divisions explored in the play. These resonances tie in with the whole reason the OPW are participating too: they want the local people in these areas to think about their history and these historical sites differently; to think of them as places where people once lived, where decisions were made, decisions that had impacts on our lives now. They want people to feel that they have some connection to these buildings, even now, however many hundred years later."
THE TOUR OPENED at the Magill Summer School in the Glenties in Donegal, which was this year devoted to the work of Friel, and as Conway explains, the production's premiere could not have been more fitting. "We opened the festival with our production of Making History and closed with the premiere of our production of Translations. Placing those two works side-by-side like that was really poignant: a testament to the history of cultural erosion; the fall from an aristocratic culture to an enclave of cultural survival. But more than that, the Glenties site is actually mentioned in Translations. It was a place of enormous emigration during the Famine, and is still very near an Irish speaking area now, so the production on site foreshadows what's to come for the characters in an even greater way. It is the same in the Glebe site in Skibbereen, where this natural amphitheatre overlooks the sea, and the remoteness reminds us of how this area too was culturally decimated by the famine.
"Even the castles we are performing in," Conway continues, "carry the context. At first they might seem like strange match, but these were once the centres of old Irish learning and in Translations we see that culture reduced to hedge school, juxtaposing the idea of loss against the grandeur of what was there before. And then there's Kilmainham Gaol, where the play works on a whole load of symbolic levels, in terms of the imprisonment of language, as well as the consequences of cultural nationalism right up to 1916. Then on the Muckross estate in Killarney there is a recreated site of a pre-Famine village from the 1830s, so that will bring a real sense of the texture of that time to the production."
WHILE THE HISTORICAL sites add to the texture of life as depicted on stage too, it also obviates the necessity for a set, lending shorthand access to the atmosphere that a set in the theatre is designed to provide. Conway looks at this in more practical terms, too: "In Translations, Friel gives you a very detailed description of the set, but with site-specific theatre you can't abide by those configurations as the space dictates the aesthetic and the way in which the actors can enter or leave. This means that there's a certain freshness about each production, because the actors are inhabiting a different space each time." Thus each time the play is performed in a different venue, the production aesthetic, the actor's performances, and the significance of certain themes, are renewed anew for each audience.
But what are we to make of the issues that Translations raises 28 years after it was written? Although it was written at the time of huge civic upheaval in Northern Ireland, and with the aim of finding a shared cultural space between opposing political ideologies, Translations has nonetheless been interpreted over time as a veiled condemnation of the colonial project. For Ouroboros, who see contemporary as well as historical resonance in the play, the language and cultural issues it raises are still pertinent.
As Conway has it, "the Irish language died because it was a decision we made, not because it was something that was enforced upon us. In the play, Owen makes that decision when he starts to work with the British soldiers; Hugh makes that decision at the end when he says he will teach English. Historically, it was Daniel O'Connell who made that decision, to adopt a whole new set of cultural markers, a new language, for economic reasons. And that point is still relevant today, because as a culture we still suffer from that in our own relationship with Irish language and culture, but more that, that every decision that the government make - whether that's political or cultural — is still based on the economy. 'It is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history that shape us. It is images of the past,' the school-master Hugh's speech continues, and unless we renew those images we fossilize."
The reinterpretation of Translations in light of contemporary cultural politics - indeed the reinvention of its historical resonance in Ouroboros' site-specific context - is not just interesting, then, but vital.
• Translations, Glebe Amphitheatre, Baltimore, from tonight until Thurs; Kilmainham Gaol, Aug 5-7; Kilkenny Castle, Aug 10-12; Cahir Castle, Co Tipperary, Aug 13-14; Barryscourt Castle, Co Cork, Aug 16-17; Muckross Traditional Farms, Muckross House, Killarney, Aug 19-21; Portumna Castle, Co Galway, Aug 23-24; Athenry Castle, Co Galway, Aug 26-27; Donegal Castle, Aug 29-31. www.ouroboros.ie
