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Date Reviewed: 23 September 2005
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View and add to our user reviewsIt’s easy to tell when a play is on a GCSE syllabus – it’s when you appear to be the only person in the audience who’s over 16 and is not a teacher.
But forget about dumbing down. Brian Friel’s 25-year-old drama provokes many questions while touching on colonial politics, the nuances of language, love across the divide and the economic conditions of mid 19th-century Ireland.
The action is ostensibly about the mapping of Ireland during the 1830s and the standardisation of Irish place names, but the real theme is mutual incomprehension between cultures and languages. The cleverest aspect of the play is that, while it's all in English, the Irish members of the cast speak to each other in Irish. As a result, it takes a while to understand what’s going on but it makes for a powerful effect.
The setting is a local ‘hedge school’ run for the poor by whiskey-drinking Hugh and his son Manus, whose way of life is disrupted when his other son Owen returns as a translator for the army’s engineers. Contrasting to that is the beautiful focal point of the drama, the love affair between the romantic Lieutenant Yolland and a young Irish woman, Maire. While scarcely able to communicate with each other, they play an incredibly tender love scene, reciting English and Irish place names to each other. It’s the highpoint of the play and the closing scene, based around the disappearance of the officer, is in stark contrast to what has preceded it and appears to come from another play entirely.
What’s so striking is that the themes could refer to events in any colonial country at any time in history. The indifference of the colonialists to the indigenous population is an old story, but there seems to be an added level of callousness as the army seeks to strike out a native language. Friel brilliantly articulates the mutual incomprehension of the two sides.
But it doesn’t have to be about language only. The linguistic manipulations of bureaucrats can be used to befuddle the general population – even when they share a common tongue. The awful effects of the army’s activities don’t even dawn on the English-speaking Owen as their intentions are drowned in euphemisms and jargon.
Mairead McKinley and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor are excellent as the doomed young lovers, while Bill Carter captures the difficulties faced by Owen as he tries to act as a go-between between the two cultures. This is a good ensemble cast, sensitively directed by Sean Holmes. If it’s coming near you, it’s worth catching – you don’t even have to be a GCSE student.
- Maxwell Cooter (reviewed at the Corn Exchange, Brighton)
