Translations by Brian Friel, directed by David Mealor. Design by Kerry Reid, lighting design Geoff Cobham. With William Allert, Michaela Cantwell, Elena Carapetis, Lizzy Falkland, Patrick Frost, John Kelly, Andrew Martin, Dominic Pedlar, Stephen Sheehan, Geoff Revell and Rory Walker. Flying Penguin Productions @ the Malthouse, until December 10.



Wandering through Irish galleries earlier this year, I was struck by the the similarities between Irish and Australian art around the turn of the last century. Ireland has, for example, its equivalents to post-Impressionist artists like Tom Roberts. If you felt like it, you could group most of this work neatly under the heading "Colonial Art".

But there are vast differences as well: we certainly don't have a visionary genius of the status of Jack B. Yeats painting in the early 20th century. And one genre of visual art that Australia almost completely lacks is that of the heroic revolutionary: the closest we got to anything like revolution was the little massacre of incipient capitalists at the Eureka Stockade in 1854.

Irish art is, by its very definition, political. Much of its seminal modern literature - Synge and Yeats, for example - is deeply veined with the issue of Irish nationalism. The inability to escape the "Irish question" may in part explain the fact that two of its most famous sons, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, were, equally famously, expatriates.

That same question is also, after all, responsible for a lot of sentimental kitsch, from the shamrock-laden souvenir shops in Dublin to Irish Australia's romance with the "old country" to the sodden cliches about alcoholic Irishmen with the hearts of poets. One can understand any writer's ambivalence towards his or her culture, but in Ireland's case it is particularly vexed. The issue of British occupation still runs deep and bitter, and much Irish art, overtly or covertly, constellates with varying degrees of suspicion around the questions of Irish nationalism, identity and rebellion.

In the late 20th century, many writers were influenced by the post-colonial critique pioneered by thinkers like Edward Said. They were, among other things, questioning the 19th century verities about Irish nationalism, when the continuing violence of the British occupation of Northern Ireland threw these issues into sharp relief. Among these artists was Brian Friel, who with the actor Stephen Rea founded the influential Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1980.

Field Day attracted a number of Irish artists (among others were the novelist Seamus Deane and the poets Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulin). Field Day has also published widely - its releases include anthologies of Irish writing and a series of pamphlets by intellectuals such as Deane himself, Edward Said and Terry Eagleton - that place its theatre work firmly in the context of post-colonial thought.

The first play this company produced was the work widely considered to be Friel's masterpiece, Translations. Perhaps more directly than any of his plays, Translations illustrates this perceptive comment of Seamus Deane's:

Friel is unique ...in his recognition that Irish temperament and Irish talk has a deep relationship to Irish desolation and the sense of failure. It is not surprising that his drama evolves, with increasing sureness, towards an analysis of the behaviour of language itself and, particularly, by the ways in which that behaviour, so ostensibly within the power of the individual, is fundamentally dictated by historical circumstances. His art, therefore, remains political to the degree that it becomes an art ensnared by, fascinated by, its own linguistic medium. This is not obliquely political theatre. This is profoundly political, precisely because it is so totally committed to the major theatrical medium of words.

This broadens Friel's concerns far beyond specifically Irish concerns. As its title suggests, Translations is a play about language: in particular, about the power of naming. It is set in 1833, when the British Army Engineer Corps conducted a major ordnance survey of Ireland, mapping and renaming the entire country. The act of colonisation is always also an act of language, as the governmental spin on in the invasion of Iraq shows all too clearly: and description is, as Said has argued, one of the first acts of colonisation. In Translations, Friel explores some of its ramifications, one of which was the death of the Irish language as a living tongue.

Perhaps what is most admirable about this play is how Friel has explored a subject that is, in his own country, of white-hot emotive power while evading easy vulgarisation or sentimentality. This compelling drama drives its exploration into the heart of language itself, as a living entity that both makes realities and is made by them. Friel refuses to present a simplistic view of the brutal British stamping down the rebellious Irish: rather, he gives a nuanced reading of the tangled relationships between language, power and identity.

And, although Friel is very clear-sighted about the realpolitick that attends cultural engineering, this play is by no means a simplistic nostalgic lament for the death of Gaelic. "Yes, [Irish] is a rich language, Lieutenant," Hugh remarks to Yolland, "full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. ...But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. It can happen... that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact."

Set in a Hedge School in an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal, Translations covers the events of a few days in the life of a tiny community. The school is run by Hugh (Andrew Martin) and his son Manus (Rory Walker) and their adult pupils vary from the wild-haired Maire (Elena Carapetis), who demands to be taught English since Latin and Greek are no use to her, to Jimmy (Patrick Frost) who can quote reams of Ovid and Homer and to whom the Greek Gods are as real as any of his fellow villagers.

The drama begins as Manus' brother Owen (William Allert), who has left the village and found a well-paid job working for the British as a translator, returns home with two British officers, Yolland (Stephen Sheehan) and Lancey (Geoff Revell). Yolland, a shy romantic and a bad fit in the colonial system, finds himself falling in love with the countryside and the music of a language that he doesn't understand and, in particular, with Maire. Lancey, on the other hand, is there to do his job as efficiently as he can: to rename the land in the King's English.

The central scene in this play is a moving and funny dialogue between Yolland and Maire. Friel uses the conceit of replacing Irish for English, so while all the dialogue is transparent to us, it is not to all his characters: he exploits the comic possibilities of miscommunication and misunderstanding with a dab hand.

When Yolland and Maire slip out from a dance and attempt to express their mutual desire while barely having a word in common, Friel explores delicate human realities that language can, in fact, distort or conceal. These realities, he suggests, have very little to do with words. The tentative beginnings of mutual understanding expressed in this scene lead to tragic and brutal consequences, a fair metaphor for the bloody political dilemma of Ireland itself.

Flying Penguin have mounted a beautiful production of this play. Kerry Reid's design sets the tone: it is a naturalistic representation of the byre in which the scenes are set, aside from the Irish writing that covers every wall. David Mealor heightens the artifice by introducing John Kelly as a narrator, who reads Friel's stage directions at the beginning of the play, and by making the actors direct most of their speeches out to the audience; but otherwise he lovingly details it as the naturalistic drama it is. He has drawn excellent performances from his diverse cast, who work as tightly as an ensemble, though perhaps it isn't unfair to pick out Andrew Martin's magisterial performance of Hugh as a highlight.

Watching Translations, I couldn't help reflecting on what has happened to the naturalistic play in Australia. It hasn't been treated well: a while back, theatrical naturalism was colonised by television and voila! this fine form became synonymous with playwrights like David Williamson and Hannie Rayson, the apogee of dead bourgeois theatre. Yet it isn't as if it has always been a moribund form here - Peter Kenna and Richard Beynon wrote some fine naturalistic plays.

Still, its present zombiedom is a disappointing cul de sac for a theatrical form birthed by playwrights like Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov. There are profound pleasures to be had from seeing a superbly-written play done well. In its execution and intellectual context, Translations is an exemplary reminder that the naturalistic three-act play isn't necessarily a synonym for conservative, aesthetically bankrupt theatre.

Picture: Elena Carapetis (Maire) and Rory Walker (Yolland) in Translations. Photo: Shane Reid

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Afterplay by Brian Friel, directed by Malcolm Robinson with Lewis Fiander and Lyndel Rowe, until July 11 at Fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane.

Sometimes I think my passion for theatre - and I suppose I have to call it a passion - is purely a pleasure in watching actors. This isn't entirely true, theatre being the nexus of so many arts, but it's true enough. Perhaps it's partly that I've never had any ambition to act - I will never understand it from the inside. To watch a consummate actor at work evokes in me a kind of wonder, like Franz Kafka watching typists in awe at their ability to use the machine: there's something arcane and mysterious about it, a bewitchingly fragile courage, a generosity which is the exact reverse of narcissicism.

And actors don't come much more consummate than Lewis Fiander. When he's on stage, you can't stop watching him. He never drifts off into abstraction or vagueness, even if all he has to do is sit still and listen. The entire length of his lanky body is all living attention, and his nobly aged face seems to have been designed especially to express nuance and complexity. He might have been born to play Chekhov, that master of human finitude, whose characters orbit their frustrated passions through the suffocating trivialities of their lives, flickering through hope and despair and resignation like poignantly brilliant stars.

In Afterplay, Brian Friel's tribute to Chekhov, Fiander is almost doing that. Friel has taken up what has recently become a common conceit, to take the characters from a classic work and imagine them further than their authors did; so we have versions of Dickens by Peter Carey, or new takes on Jane Austen. I have sometimes wondered what prompts writers towards such exercises, since it wavers dangerously close to a kind of fetishisation; surely a more interesting tribute would be in a truly imaginative expansion of what another writer does, in taking an influence and running with it (as you might argue that Beckett did with Chekhov - these two playwrights seem to me to be profoundly related). But still, when it's done well it can have its virtues, and with a playwright like Friel you can be sure it will be well done.

Friel takes two characters from two of Chekhov's plays, Andrei, the brother in The Three Sisters, and Sonia from Uncle Vanya. Friel has enough skill as a writer to pull off a creditable ventriloquisation of the master. In Afterplay, Sonia (Lyndel Rowe) and Andrei (Lewis Fiander) meet in a shabby Moscow cafe some two decades after the events of the plays. They have fallen on hard times; Sonia is facing the progressive loss of her estate, and Andrei is now forced to busk in the streets, his "useless" culture earning him a living at last. Sonia's practical veneer gradually crumbles to reveal that she still cherishes a burning, hopeless love for Dr Astrov, a passion she will not abandon. Andrei sustains himself by a series of "little fictions": that his wife did not leave him, but died instead; that his children are successful and close to him; that he is a violinist in the orchestra for La Boheme, rather than busking in the Moscow streets with a mediocre balalaika player from Uzbekistan.

The faded remains of the middle class in revolutionary Russia, they can think of the future only with fear. And the biggest fear, for both of them, is loneliness. Like Chekhov, Friel gradually exposes how people create an insulation of dreams to defend themselves against the emptinesses in their lives, stripping away their illusions to reveal the touchingly irrational passions which animate their lives. The effect of all Chekhov's plays is to create an almost unbearable feeling of human mortality, a sense of inevitable darkness encroaching on tiny, exquisitely fragile pools of light. This endows the minutae of life with a piquant significance: the smallest gesture, no matter how futile, is transformed into an act of defiance. Friel goes a long way to achieving this sense, but he is not Chekhov; Afterplay has a more limited idea of passion, and while Friel can emulate Chekhov's skill in exposing human triviality and his sense of comic tragedy, he can't match the ultimate grandeur and pathos of Chekhov's vision.

However, it's enough for the actors to go on, and the performances make this production well worth the price of admission. As the pragmatic, stoic Sonia, Rowe is an excellent foil to Fiander's Andrei. Both these vastly experienced actors give detailed performances of great feeling, and capture with beautiful precision the shifting layers and comic contradictions of their characters. Fiander is unarguably brilliant, and Rowe never less than excellent. I think Rowe's performance suffered a little for me because an extraordinary portrayal by Melita Jurisic many years ago has indelibly coloured my image of Sonia; for all her skill and feeling, Rowe's more restrained performance couldn't dislodge Jurisic's throbbingly lyrical passion from my mind.

Malcolm Robertson's production is about as simple as a production can get: the design is a sketch of greys, browns and blacks against the white wall of the space, which immediately gives it a sense of shabby nostalgia, like an old sepia photograph. The set consists merely of three cafe tables and a cupboard, and the lighting states and sound are minimal. All the focus of the production is on the actors, and it's fair to say that the acting repays the attention.

The only real problem I had was with fortyfivedownstairs itself: the play is presented front-on with the audience seated in rows the length of the theatre, and this doesn't solve the inherent problems this space has with sightlines and acoustics (though I hasten to say the play is always audible). Ideally, this play should be presented in an insulated proscenium like the Playhouse; the performances, all subtlety, nuance and subterranean passion, would blossom under the amplification and focus. And frankly, they deserve such framing. Alas, this is not an ideal world, and to see some of the most accomplished acting on in Melbourne at the moment you will have to bear, with Chekhovian stoicism, the limitations of the theatre itself.

Fortyfivedownstairs

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