Translating "Translations" With The Connecticut Irish Theater Troupe

From left to right: Jason Santacroce and Packy Lillis; Mike DePacale, Sarah Finnegan, Paul Pender, and Seamus Lonergan; Sarah Finnegan, Paul Pender, and Katie Santacroce in Brian Friel’s Translations, directed by Karl Ryan and produced by the Connecticut Irish Theater Troupe. Photos © Karl Ryan.

The play opens with characters embodying a disabled nation. Manus (Mike DePacale), the substitute teacher, whose impaired gait resulted from a young accident by his alcoholic father, is teaching Sarah (Tara Powers), a chirpy ingénue with a speech impediment, how to pronounce her own name. Jimmy Jack (Seamus Lonergan), a middle-aged infant savant, prattles aimlessly about his affairs with Greek goddesses. Hugh (Paul Pender), the hedge-master and Manus’ father, drunkenly waddles in for his senile lectures on Latin etymology.

As the rest of the students arrive, this flotsam of empire hugs the shore: characters exchange anecdotes of bankruptcy, funerals, famished children, absent parents, secret insurgency, and the British educational system that will soon erase them. In the audience, we witness the fragile wool of their bleak habits spread around them like spilled milk.

For its prim revival of Brian Friel’s Translations, a melodic dramatization of the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey of Ireland, the Connecticut Irish Theater Troupe reveled last week in a realism skeptical of reality. Directed by Karl Ryan and staged in the backroom of North Haven’s Small Batch Cellars, memory in this production inhabited a dramatic borderland between private suspense and suspended time. Friel, after all, belongs to that Irish canon, from James Joyce to Seamus Heaney, who co-opt the past to warp the present and bait the future. 

In the fictional town of Baile Beag, on Ireland’s northernmost countryside, Translations unfolds almost entirely inside a tawdry Hedge school, but the characters’ affectations are untethered to time. Maire (Katie Santacroce), the classroom’s most effusive pragmatist, lives in the audience’s present, yearning for modernist mobility as if she has already relished the Celtic Tiger era and is accidentally stuck in 1833. 

Around her, there’s the school’s substitute teacher and Maire’s tentative beau, Manus (DePacale), whose woolly scowl is most repulsed by modernity’s duplicitous trade-offs. Lieutenant Yoland (Jason Santacroce), meanwhile, is sinking in the past. A young British orthographer anglicizing the Irish terrain, he becomes a romanticist for an agrarian mythos of the auld sod—the old country—that seldom existed. 

When Translations premiered in 1980 in Derry, which was the heart of Northern Ireland’s virulent sectarianism and paramilitary campaigns in the preceding decades, the contradictory atavisms and futurisms of the play’s characters mirrored the ideological gridlock between the republican Sinn Féin, the bourgeois nationalism of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and the disparate strands of Unionist bulwarks.

In this production, Ryan offers ample space for Friel’s vernacular humor to delight the audience, such that the period piece costumes appear more Chaplinesque than Chekovian, jovial in their pathos. Baile Beag’s locals speak in Gaelic and the British only in English, yet the play makes no distinction between them, setting up the characters for linguistic slapstick. Hugh’s lecture is interrupted by the return of his second son, Owen (Packy Lillis), a translator for the British army, who has been assigned to the Ordnance Survey under Yoland, uncorking the play’s jokiest sequences of double entendre and crosstalk. 

When Yoland and Maire flee a party together to confess their mutual love for each other—but are incapable of communicating—Maire reaches for the only sentence in English that she has memorized, albeit without grasping it. “In Norfolk, we besport ourselves around the maypoll,” she says. Yoland pantomimes a guilelessly copulatory reply. Maire shrieks away, mortified that she may have recited smut.

Watching their love despair through language in the rest of this scene, as they fruitlessly toil to convey the promises within the word “always,” is the production’s most poignant heartbreak. After intermission, Yoland disappears, presumably as the locals’ revenge for his affair with one of their own, and the final act sags without him. 

Inherently, Translations’ narrative can’t match its subtext of a colonized language’s double-edged metempsychosis. This is dense theater, but it’s Santacroce’s Yoland who makes it accessible. It’s his wistful curiosity and timid defection through which we learn Baile Beag. With his shaggy sideburns and clumped sleeves, Santacroce boasts no regal decorum, especially when standing across from Lillis’ clerical gaze, so when he puts on airs he appears sympathetically impish, even lamentably defenseless. 

Owen, for instance, pleads the virtues of anglicizing their map to modernize impractical colloquialisms, but Yoland insists that the traditional Gaelic must be revived. Then the roles reverse. Owen, who has allowed the British to mispronounce his name as Roland, snaps and demands that Yoland learn his real name, which sends them both cackling. Translations teems with the Anglo-Irish paradoxes found through these games of linguistic Matryoshka dolls, in which histrionic traditions reveal endless historical contradictions, and they are most inviting when Santacroce and Lillis get together. 

Santacroce measures Yoland accurately. When he says, “I can learn the language, but the password will always elude me. The private core—it’s hermetic, isn’t it?” we don’t think, “Hey, the colonialist has become a poet.” We just realize how badly he wanted to be a poet. How quintessentially Irish.

Or take that Yoland admires Baile Beag’s highbrow provincialism, so well-versed in classical literature, but to this vaunted “Irishness” he’s as foreign as their own Fenian Cycle. The Hedge school’s students don’t recognize the Irish canon; solely Hugh writes “after the style of Ovid” and channels his recollections of the 1798 Rising through Virgil’s Aeneid. The village’s de-Gaelicization seems to not have required British intervention, for which, despite the class’ suspicions, there’s seldom forthright resistance. The mere mention of Baile Beag’s clandestine militia hushes them (apropos of the “Whatever you say, say nothing” culture of taciturnity under the paramilitary panic during the Troubles). Within this decrepit school, this halfway house between truth and deception, bargain outpaces desire. 

Under the threat of British eviction and murder by the end of the play, Hugh warns—to Owen but really to himself—that “it is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.” Like the rural corner of County Donegal to which it belongs, the play’s emotional language is rustic and mountainous, as verbose as it is musical. For all of Translations’ archaic accents, its epic poetry, its winks to 1798, and its omens of famine, these prismatic images of empire in this production are always pointed at the private landlocked lives of its characters—all drunk on delusion, pacing to rhythms only they can hear.

Translations imagines how passion and memory are communicated once they’re devoid of the cop-out epithets of “liberty” or “independence.” Like “always,” “freedom” is just another little vacuous word. The hedge school’s students must wonder: if imperial language doesn't deny our nothingness, what nothingness should we deny to language and empire?