Translations by Brian Friel

Still packs a punch.......Friel's exquisite theatrical exploration of the interstices between language, identity and history, nearly thirty-five years on, is a model of craft and ingenuity. Hugh O'Donnell, school-master of the hedge school, Baile Beg, Northern Ireland enters drunk after the birth of Nellie Rua's baby at the play's beginning and is drunk from the baby's wake at the end. Between times his family become divided as local lass, Maire, falls in love with Yolland (James Northcote) a sapper employed, along with O'Donnell's son Owen, to anglicise place names to produce Ireland's first Ordinance Survey. Later Yolland  goes missing. James Grieve's direction is sharply intuitive, Lucy Osborne's design the perfect frame, while the acting is superlative, headed by Niall Buggy as the irrepressible Hugh.....