Turning an opportunity into a fatal flaw

TO a play already brimful of ironies, the current Abbey production of Brian Friel's adds new ones of its own. There is already the layer of doubt, entendre implicit in a story about the loss of the Irish language being acted out in English. English serves in the text both as itself and as a surrogate for Irish, so that the play's governing idea - the irreparable loss that a society incurs when it shifts from one language to another - is continually undercut by the fact that, in terms of what the audience actually hears, there is no difference between one language and the other. And there are the more specific ironies - the subtle presence of America in this confrontation of Ireland and England, for instance - that Friel continually points up.

But there is, at the Abbey, a further paradox, arising from the circumstances of the production rather the nature of the play. This play about the cultural imperialism practised by England on Ireland is presented on the stage of the Irish national theatre by a British director, designer and leading actor.

There is, I hasten to say, nothing at all objectionable about this - the close relationship between the theatre cultures of Britain and Ireland is for the most part mutually beneficial, and the director in this case, Robin Lefevre, has a brilliant record of work with Irish writers and actors. The problem, though, is that the production refuses to acknowledge its own reality, and tries instead to ignore the heavy British presence in a play that is, in another sense, an attack on that very presence.

This attempt is doomed to failure for one very obvious reason. Directors and designers declare their presence indirectly and implicitly. But actors declare themselves open with every word and gesture. In this case the actor in question, Kenneth Haigh, not only has a very considerable stage presence, but also occupies the central role in the play, that of the hedge schoolmaster Hugh. And it is patently obvious at every turn of hand and phrase that he is not, and cannot convincingly pretend to be, a pre Famine Donegal man.

This open incongruity ought to be an opportunity rather than a problem. Translations is not a play that necessarily requires the suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience. Indeed there are very good reasons for asking the audience not to enter into the play by pretending that we have been transported by means of the realistic illusion back into the 1830s.

One reason is that, if it is indeed taken literally, Translations is wide open to the charge of distorting history. Things didn't happen as they seem to happen in the play, and at a time when the destructive power of myths about history has never been more obvious, it is dangerous to create the illusion that what we are seeing is "real".

And besides, the play itself actually invites the audience to engage in an almost Brechtian double take. It issues that invitation both through the conceit of having Irish spoken as English and through very deliberate analogies with the present. Hands up anyone who, has seen the play and didn't think of the Provos whenever the invisible Donnelly Twins were mentioned?

Because of these elements in the very nature of the play itself, it was open to Robin Lefevre to use the presence of Kenneth Haigh as Hugh in a deliberate and self conscious way, disrupting the easy assumptions about national identity that the play can seem to re enforce. At the very least the result would be challenging. It was also open to Julian McGowan as designer to push away the temptation to indulge in a kind of touristic voyage into the past, and to give us something mbre than a "virtual reality Irish barn, however beautifully realised. I recently watched on video a production of the play at the Staatstheater in Mainz, in which the designer Klaus Baumeister created a big, stark expressionistic space whose epic qualities both echoed the play's references to the classical world and established quite clearly that its action was unfolding in the here and now of theatre and not in some pretend past.

Neither of these openings is exploited. Instead, we are offered the play as a kind of intellectual costume drama. Kenneth Haigh tries to convince us that he really is a drunken schoolmaster in Donegal in 1833 by doing his best with the appropriate mannerisms and accent. The result is something very strange indeed, reminiscent - at times of W.C. Fields playing Mr Pickwick and at others of what Jiggs from the old Jiggs and Maggie cartoon might look and sound like if he could get up off the page and tread the boards. The keynotes of the character, pathos and a mock heroic grandeur, are never sounded.

Since Hugh is the human flesh on the play's intellectual bones, the embodiment of its dying world, this failure is, in spite of all the good things on offer in the production, decisive. The pace and rigour of Lefevre's stagecraft, the splendid sense of comic timing that makes the most of Friel's wicked humour, the fine ensemble playing and the strong performances of Al White as Maire, Lloyd Hutchison as Owen and Gary Lydon as Manus all make for an acceptable enough production. But since this is at least the fifth major professional production of the play in the Republic in 15 years, the time for accepting the merely acceptable is surely long gone.