[In the following review of the New York premiere of Translations, Barnes gives the play a favorable reception, claiming that it "gleams with that old bardic poetry translated … into style. "]

Language is the flower of a nation—it can also be the roots of its national disagreements. There is one wonderful scene—well, one scene in particular, in Brian Friel's fine new play, Translations, which has just opened at the Manhattan Theater Club.

The time is 1833. The place is County Donegal in Ireland. Thirty-five years earlier, staggered by the Irish resistance culminating in the bloody battle of Vinegar Hill in Wexford, the English had decided to try to cease its centuries long attempts to colonize Ireland, and to bring it into the same kind of political union that had so far proved moderately peaceful with Scotland and Wales.

Later, at the pressure of Daniel O'Connor, in 1800, the Act of Catholic Emancipation had been passed. It looked like a time of hope for Ireland and for England.

But then the English parliamentarians lost time and interest, and the suppression reasserted itself. British soldiers were sent out to re-map Ireland. The Gaelic names were given English equivalents.

Forgive the politics—Friel's scene has to be set up. Among the young English officers is Lieutenant Yolland—a good-natured, good-looking romantic. He takes one look at Donegal and falls in love with it.

He also meets Maire after a dance and falls in love with her "always." He only speaks English. She only speaks Gaelic. Imagine a Romeo and Juliet who couldn't speak Italian. They manage. He reels off the Gaelic names from the maps he is studying. They pledge love in different tongues. They embrace.

That night he is murdered for his love, and the next morning she goes mad. The English soldiers pillage the countryside in revenge. You see the right translations never have been made—even now.

Friel is also concerned with the loss of national identity through language—the rejection of the Gaelic scholars and their so-called Hedge Schools, who could converse in Latin and Greek, and taught English. And technically he is absorbed by the idea of having two people talk in "English" while the audience has to know that one of them is really talking Gaelic—another translation.

This picture, this analysis, of Ireland at a time conceivably of hope deferred if not lost, is full of that Hibernian gift of transforming a foreign reality into a native poetry. Once more translation.

The play, produced in Derry at the end of last year, has a special importance in the history of the Irish drama. Since the great Anglo-Irish playwrights from Congreve to Shaw, or, dare one say, O'Casey, and the eternal monolith of Yeats, the Irish playwright has usually been a talent with a short fuse, a big explosion and a long silence.

After one early, over-praised success, Friel has seemed a playwright in waiting. The waiting is now over. This play gleams with that old bardic poetry translated—as they say—into style.

It has been staged by Joe Dowling, who is artistic director of Dublin's Abbey Theater, and looks like proving the man the Abbey needed. The setting by Kate Edmunds is exemplary—a pleasant looking hovel—and the costumes by David Murin equally draw that apt line between the picturesque and the unbelievable.

The actors perform with grace. A few stood out—Barnard Hughes as an old drunken teacher, Jake Dengel as an old student drunk, Jarlath Conroy and Stephen Burleigh as Hughes' two sons at war with different futures, and Ellen Parker and Daniel Gerroll symbolizing a history with no past, only a present.