Brian Friel
Friel was born in Tyrone County in Northern Ireland in 1929. His father was a teacher and his mother a postmistress from a Gaelic-speaking area of Donegal. Friel was educated at St. Columb’s College in Derry, at a seminary in Maynooth, and at a teacher training college in Belfast. In 1954, he married Anne Morrison; they have five children and remain married. Friel spent some time as a teacher himself and also considered the priesthood, but in 1960, he decided to pursue a career exclusively as a writer. Early efforts before and after that included short stories, journal articles and radio plays.
Friel struggled with little success at finding recognition as a playwright from 1958-1964. During the summer of 1963, he spent time as an "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie’s theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After that experience he wrote Philadelphia, Here I Come, which made him famous in Dublin, London and New York. This is still regarded as a turning point in Irish drama and as one of the most important plays of the 1960s. He wrote several other plays after this breakthrough, including Faith Healer (1979), many of which included avant-garde and experitmental techniques.
In 1980, Friel co-founded the Field Day Theatre Company with actor Stephen Rea. One of the motivations for its establishment was to qualify for funding from two government arts organizations in Derry so that he could produce Translations. He went on to produce other plays under the auspices of Field Day and also published a multivolume Field Day Anthology. In association with what was known as the Field Day cultural agenda, Friel promoted what he called Northern Identity – a nonsectarian approach to what is unique about Northern Ireland and what are common characteristics, not distinctly British or Irish.
In 1990 Friel staged what is probably his most successful play, Dancing at Lughnasa, and in 1994, he resigned from Field Day. His recent efforts have included a number of different projects, including the re-staging of plays by Chekov. Friel’s career included a stint in the Irish Senate from 1887-1989. He has received a number of awards as well as the recognition of a “Brian Friel Season,” a festival produced throughout Dublin in 1989.
Critical writings about Friel describe his interest in myth and language to reveal aspects of the human condition, including its ironies and contradictions. His plays often demonstrate the ways in which ancient stories and symbols continue to inform our attitudes and behavior.
Translations
Translations was written against the backdrop of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, which consisted of about thirty years (1969-1998)of repeated acts of intense violence between elements of Northern Ireland’s nationalist community (principally Roman Catholic) and unionist community (principally Protestant). The violence among the many factions was ongoing throughout this time, and 1980 was a particularly bad year. The play was premiered in the Guildhall in Derry and has become one of the most translated and staged of all post-World War II plays. Much of its success is due to Friel’s ability to portray English-Irish relations without entirely condemning or idealizing either side.
Historical background of the play
As early as the 12th century, Ireland had fallen by a series of invasions, primarily by England, and was solidly under English colonial rule by the beginning of the 17th century. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries there developed a period referred to as the "Protestant ascendancy," during which the Protestant landed elite dominated Irish society. To assure authority for what was essentially a minority, a series of "penal laws" was enacted to pose limitations on Catholics and Dissenters in terms of education, the holding of political offices, the practice of their religion and property ownership. In reaction to these laws, and partly inspired by revolutionary activities in America and in France, a series of rebellions took place by a group known as the United Irishmen (actually both Catholic and Protestant). These risings were known collectively as the Insurrection of 1798. Following the Insurrection, some 1500 persons were executed, transported or otherwise punished, and there were unofficial reprisals by English loyalists resulting in over 30,000 deaths. This incident and its aftermath represented the most violent episode in Irish history in 100 years and perpetuated a legacy of bitterness on both sides. At this time, there was also a movement for Ireland to become a separate nation with its own legislation. The Irish Parliament under Henry Grattan voted successfully in favor of this right.
As a consequence of these events, the British parliament passed the Act of Union in 1801, which abolished the separate Irish parliament and united the kingdoms of England and Ireland. Irish MPs, Protestants all, were to take their seats in London. This was the reaction to a perceived need for direct control of a neighboring dependency whose instability had become a serious threat.
At the time, Irish reactions to the Act reflected some of the paradoxes inherent 18th century politics in the country. Some members of the old Protestant "Patriot" party opposed the Union for the potential interference with perceived Irish rights. And indeed, some Catholics supported the Union because it was felt that the rule of Protestant Englishmen might be milder than that of their sectarian Irish brothers. These opinions soon changed, as Protestantism became increasingly identified with the Union, while most Catholics wanted the Act repealed.
The formalization of Ireland as part of the United Kingdom led to a number of legal and social conditions which serve as a backdrop to the play. Agitation for the repeal of the penal laws led finally to their being abolished in 1829, but the influence of their long tenure was far-reaching.
Ordnance Survey
This was established in 1791 under the British Board of Ordnance, as authorization for the task of mapping all of Britain to new levels of accuracy, partly in anticipation of a feared invasion from France. It was not so much a military as a civil motivation that brought the survey to Ireland, however, when it began in 1924. In Ireland, there were inequities in the taxation system and disputes over property rights. The survey was carried out county by county between 1825 and 1841, starting in Derry and completed with the maps of Kerry published in 1846. "Townland" boundaries were established along with information gathered on antiquities, place names, geology and industry – although much of this information never appeared on the maps. The renaming of Irish places can be seen as a purely administrative activity, in keeping with the creation of accurate and useful maps, but there is no question of the consequences of such an operation in terms of Irish identity and national character.
Famine
Potatoes, which actually originated in the South American Andes, were brought to Europe and also to England in the late 1500s. Their arrival in Ireland is somewhat obscure but by 1606, there is documentary evidence of potato cultivation in a lease granted to a group of Scottish immigrants. Initially, potatoes were grown as garden crops but were transferred to the field as a rotational crop to re-fertilize land used for cereals. By the early 19th century, potatoes had become the staple food, assuring the poor of a nutritious diet.
A number of factors contributed to famines in Ireland over a period of six centuries – between 1300 and 1900 there were around 30 episodes of severe famine. Aside from potato blight and bad weather conditions, a contributing factor to famine in the 19th century was a marked increase in the population. Farmland was continuously being divided and subdivided among the surviving sons of any given family, and it became increasingly difficult to survive on smaller and smaller holdings. The Irish had also become almost entirely dependent on the potato. Blight and disease caused famine 14 times between 1816 and 1842, including an incident in 1833, the year in which the play takes place. Bridget talks to the others about the sweet smell coming from the potato field. This smell is the fungus which attacks the plant in damp and muggy conditions and causes decay. The ensuing discussion about the potatoes refers to famines past but also to the coming doom of what has been called the Great Famine of 1845-1849, in which the potato crop failed for three out of four seasons. The British government had failed to respond to previous crop failures which exacerbated the effects of this series of disasters and profoundly impacted the Irish poor. There was a very high rate of mortality, not only from starvation but also disease, and many Irish people emigrated to America and other countries.
Education
The action of the play takes place in a hedge school. The hedge schools emerged in response to the penal laws, first enacted in the beginning of the 18th century, one of which specified that "no person of the popish religion shall publicly or in private houses teach school or instruct learning within this realm…." There were English government sponsored schools but the majority of the Catholic population refused to attend them. Instead many chose to pay a school master and receive their education in these makeshift classrooms, sometimes consisting of little more than the shelter of a hedge, but more frequently in a house or barn.
The school masters were usually self-taught or former hedge scholars themselves and were sometimes itinerant, traveling from town to town to set up schools in a cottage or lodging with a family in return for teaching the children. They took payment in money or in kind. Attendance at these schools was erratic but the movement was widespread throughout rural Ireland.
Reports of the curriculum vary. Studies included basic grammar, reading and math. Instruction was often in English (widespread by 1820) as well as Gaelic. There is evidence that some hedge schools were conducted along the lines of the Irish bard tradition – bard being the term for one in a class of medieval poets and scholars, trained to recite history and stories in verse. Some schools included classical languages and literature, depending on the skills and background of the teacher.
Although the hedge schools are presented as being clandestine havens of Irish scholarship, developed to preserve and to pass on the culture, and although Catholic schools were forbidden under the penal laws, no hedge teachers are known to have been prosecuted. In fact, there are official records by census takers of the number of hedge schools throughout the country during the 18th and 19th centuries. These laws were aimed primarily at education by Catholic religious orders and also were designed to force middle class Irish Catholics to convert to the Church of England in order to receive a good education.
A series of Catholic Relief Acts were passed at the end of the 18th century and eventually all the penal laws were repealed by 1829. And then, in 1832 the government established the National School system which was acceptable to most Irish Catholics and which led to the decline of the hedge school movement.
Language
By the first centuries of the Christian era the inhabitants of Ireland spoke an early form of a language recognized as Gaelic. Colonists took the language to Scotland, and Irish and Scottish remained quite similar until the 15th century. Irish remained the language of the majority of Irishmen and women until around 1750. English was introduced by the Anglo-Normans in the 12th century – from the beginning regarded as the language of invasion. The use of English as everyday speech fluctuated throughout the centuries, based on a variety of political and social circumstances, including Gaelic revival movements, but it became dominant by the mid-19th century, among most people. This gradual but inexorable shift from the indigenous language to the language of the conquerors undermined the attachment of the Irish to their own country. Indeed it can be argued that the loss of language is the decisive event in Irish history as it altered Irish self-understanding and removed the continuity between the past and present. The program of turning Irish place names into English ones had the same devastating effect of destroying this link with their distinct history.
The juxtaposition of Gaelic and English in the play can be seen as an allegory of this struggle for identity and, because of the introduction of characters and stories from Greek and Roman mythology, the story takes on mythic proportions. It can be seen as a cautionary tale about any nation or people fighting for identity in a context of failed efforts at communication.
Latin
Latin came to Ireland in the 5th century at about the same time Christianity began to take hold. Writings in Latin by native Irishmen first appeared in the 7th century, as well as writings in Greek, and Latin remained the language of scholarship well after the Anglo-Norman invasions of the 12th century, well into the 17th century. After that time, Latin gradually gave way to English as the language of scholarship.
The use of Latin in Translations serves to elevate the Irish people in the story to a level of learning not shared by the British officials who have arrived to conduct the survey and rename the towns. There is some disagreement about how much classical learning the hedge school masters in rural areas of Ireland actually possessed, but there is enough evidence to give credence to the phenomenon. And in the play it is an important device.
