Lost in 'Translations'

The good news is that "Translations" closes at McCarter on Oct. 29. The bad news is that it's headed for Broadway.

Brian Friel's play, directed by Garry Hynes, takes place in rural Ireland in 1833, in the Irish-speaking town of Baile Beag. The setting is a hedge school, popular among peasants when the education of Catholics was severely oppressed under British rule. As the play unfolds, Owen, played by Alan Cox, returns to the village where he grew up as an English-speaking translator. Accompanying him are two British soldiers who intend to force English upon the Gaelic community, remap the area and make them abandon Irish names for new English ones. The small Irish's community's stilted interactions with the soldiers, through Owen's translations, are the basis of the play. Tensions rise between the two cultures until they collide brutally.

The show's technical aspects far outstrip the theatrical ones. Francis O'Connor's set is the production's strongest asset. Grand and imposing, yet simultaneously dejected and forlorn, it reflects the complex nature of Irish culture and history. A simple barn with beamed ceilings, rotting walls, a musty dirt floor and a diagonal staircase ascending to the ceiling is an especially breathtaking feature of the set. The set's malleability is highlighted by a dramatic transformation into a dark forest.

The costumes, also designed by O'Connor, are very effective in representing the time period. The bright red and black of the British soldiers contrasts starkly with the graying pastels donned by the Irish peasants.

The lighting design, done by Davy Cunningham, shows an obvious attention to detail lacking elsewhere in the production. Each actor was beautifully lit with a warm glow, never falling into shadow. From light seen through a window, to a soft reflection of flames against the actors' skin, the artistic lighting of "Translations" is beautiful.

Aside from the technical aspects of the show, however, the rest of the show is in great disrepair. During the process of writing the play, Brian Friel noted in his diary in 1979, "I don't want to write a play about Irish peasants being suppressed by English sappers. I don't want to write a threnody on the death of the Irish language ... The play has to do with language and only language. And if it becomes overwhelmed by the political element, it is lost."

In that respect at least, Friel did well — at no point did he bombard the audience with politics or history. Instead, his writing depicts a point in history in which one culture is usurped by another, leaving its people in disarray and frantically trying to regain their identity.

As for the second of his goals for the play, Friel is not so successful. "The play must concern itself only with the exploration of the dark and private places of individual souls," he wrote in the same diary entry. Unfortunately, the structure and tone of the play lend themselves to generalization. The peasants are seen as a community, an entity representing the whole of Irish culture. Friel fails, for the most part, to integrate the individual voice, leaving actors little to work with and leading to stylized, generic acting. This makes it difficult to empathize with the individual characters. As a result, the play feels like an exceedingly dry and dull documentary. Pros: Evocative set; artistic lighting Cons: Generic characters; no emotional resonance