How do people feel when they are forbidden to think and speak in their native language, the language in which they first addressed their parents and heard answers to their most important questions? When a large imperialist country captures a much smaller neighbour, threatening the identity of its people and the future of the entire nation, they can begin to lose themselves, to lose their sense of who they are.
Brian Friel’s play Translations, about a country whose towns, villages and landmarks are being renamed in a new language, is set in Ireland in 1833, when the foreign power was Britain, but it could be about what Russia is trying to do to one of its neighbours today. “This play is about us, about everything that is currently happening in Ukraine,” says Iryna Buchko of the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre, in Kyiv. She is one of 27 members of the company who are coming to Dublin to stage the play at the Abbey Theatre this week, after performing it in the Ukrainian capital in October of last year.
“When the invaders burn the cities and rename them,” Buchko says, “at this moment in the play I can’t hold back tears, because I remember how the Russians did the same thing at the beginning of the war.”
She plays Sarah, an inhabitant of Baile Beag, Friel’s Irish-speaking Co Donegal townland, where British soldiers have arrived to make an English-language map of the area. Sarah is a student at its hedge school, which secretly educates young locals in defiance of colonial laws. “In our country the language was banned for four centuries with the help of various decrees and laws,” Buchko says. “They burned books, forbade speaking their language in the capital, and moved the capital to another city – all this was done to eradicate the Ukrainian language.”
“This topic is painful for us,” says Andrii Kovalenko, who plays Manus, a son of the hedge-school master. “In the play we see the beginning of a new wave of occupation of Ireland by Great Britain, with all the consequences that flow from this: the enslavement of the people, the economic exploitation of the Irish, followed by linguistic and cultural expansion. Everything is the same as in Ukraine.”
The full-scale war has been going on for more than 470 days, but all the emotions on February 24th are still present. There is pain and incomprehensibility on a cosmic scale
Kyrylo Kashlikov, the production’s director, first read Translations a few years ago. “It is difficult to describe what exploded in us when we reread it after a full-scale invasion,” he says. “When we were preparing for the performance, we were reading facts from the history of Ireland, about the Cromwellian war during which almost 50 per cent of the population was killed. We read all this, and at the same time we had a tragedy in Bucha, Irpen and Mariupol. It was genocide.”
How is such a human tragedy even possible in the 21st century, he asks about the conflict that has followed Russia’s invasion of his country in February of last year. “The full-scale war has been going on for more than 470 days, but all the emotions on February 24th are still present. There is pain and incomprehensibility on a cosmic scale.”
People might think that Ukrainians have grown used to the war. “But no. It is just that all the words on this topic have already run out. There is no point in talking about it. There are only fragments of memories, because there was life ‘before’ and life ‘after’,” he says. “I can talk about February 24th, 2022, for several hours: how we lived in empty Kyiv in the dark. Our theatre was the first in Kyiv to reopen. That is why we also feel like we are on the front line, on the cultural front. We work so that people can feel emotions unrelated to the pain of losing a loved one or the fear of bombing.”
‘Emotional barrier’
Andrii Kovalenko spent the two months after the invasion living in a shelter. “It was the basement of the local hospital. It was hard psychologically,” he says. “We could hear the explosions constantly, and they intensified at night. There was tension all the time. Then, when the Kyiv region was liberated from the invaders, theatres slowly began to reopen. I could not tune into work, however, because concentrating was impossible, and I wondered if modern theatre and entertainment could have a place in life. It was challenging to overcome this psychological and emotional barrier.”
It has required a huge amount of focus. “The shelling usually takes place at night. You sit in the bathroom and you don’t know when it will end. As a result, it is not possible to sleep. Then, in the morning, you have a rehearsal at 10 or 11. I have to gather myself piece by piece.”
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Iryna Buchko, like many others, has family who are fighting to defend Ukraine. “When the full-scale invasion began, my dad joined the armed forces,” she says. Two uncles and a cousin also joined. “My 36-year-old cousin died this winter. This is a great grief for our family, but he will remain a hero in our memory forever. My dad is not young any more. He is 60 years old and has a plate in his knee, but he managed to be allowed to fight. He told me, “Ira, this is our home. I will protect it. No one will take my home away from me.’ This is another reason to be proud of my family.”
This version of Translations will be performed at the Abbey in Ukrainian, with English subtitles. The original staging, in Derry in 1980, was the inaugural production by Field Day Theatre Company, which Brian Friel founded with the actor Stephen Rea. “It was a poignant play for us because the Troubles in the north of Ireland were still raging,” Rea says. “All the issues were local, but he was writing about the bigger picture.”
That production was at the Guildhall, often seen as a symbol of British authority in the city. “It was pretty different for us to do a play there,” Rea says. “It had a huge impact. That in itself was radical, because we didn’t premiere it in Dublin, we didn’t premiere it in Belfast. We did it in Derry, which was very severely affected by the Troubles... When we first did the play, many anti-nationalist people said it was whingeing and moaning about the same old problems. Because of the war in Ukraine, people can see that play has a considerable influence and relevance to colonialism worldwide.”
Translations is one of the greatest plays about identity, language, landscape, history – about how we communicate across those divides or fail to
— Micheál Martin, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs
Rea is thrilled that Lesya Ukrainka has staged Translations and is bringing it to the Abbey. But he would love it to visit Derry too. “Local Derry people would see it and realise the impact. And there are a lot of Ukrainians living in Donegal, on the edge of Derry. I would have loved them to see it, because it helps people realise that their problem is worth a work of art.”
“Translations is one of the greatest plays about identity, language, landscape, history – about how we communicate across those divides or fail to – and how a community or nation can navigate times of profound change and dislocation,” says Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin, whose department is supporting the Abbey production. “Friel wrote it for the Field Day company during one of the darkest periods of the conflict in Northern Ireland – it’s very significant that the national theatre ensemble in Kyiv, and their audiences, have felt that this Irish text resonates with their personal and collective experience as they live through this appalling, illegal war.”
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Translations is also a play grounded in Ireland’s deep participation in a shared European culture – we encounter teachers and students in the Donegal hedge school for whom Latin and Greek languages and literature were a part of their daily lives, and helped shape their view of the world. As Ukraine embraces its European identity, this theme of a shared European culture, from Dublin to Kyiv, could not be more timely.
Voyage of cultural discovery
The production at the Abbey this week could be a mutual voyage of cultural discovery, both for those on stage and those in the audience. Ukrainians will be watching a vibrant exploration of Irish cultural identity and the historical and linguistic complexities within that. For Irish audiences, it will be immensely significant to witness the way these themes resonate in a new way through Ukrainian language and culture, exploring the same questions in a contemporary Ukrainian context.
“Several people from Ireland wrote to me and thanked me for the fact that they will be able to hear the Ukrainian language hundreds of kilometres from home, that they will be able to see Ukrainian theatre,” Buchko says. “I hope many people will come to see the play, and we will share all this.”
Translations, by Brian Friel, translated into Ukrainian by Teodoziia Zarivna, is at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, June 20th, until Saturday, June 24th
