“Even if I did speak Irish, I’d always be considered an outsider here, wouldn’t I? I may learn the password but the language of the tribe will always elude me won’t it?”

Brian Friel’s magnum opus ‘Translations’ is a three-act play written in 1980 and set in August 1833. The action takes place at a hedge school in the townland of Baile Beag, an Irish-speaking community in County Donegal. The well-established and local lives of a small group of Irish-speaking individuals are shattered by the arrival of a detachment of the Royal Engineers who are conducting the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes of cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and rendered into English. Friel presents his audience with a hugely significant and turbulent period of history and uses his Chekhovian style to hone in on a small group of students at a struggling hedge school and use them as his backdrop to explore the universal and timeless relationships between language and authority, between language and belonging, between language and love.