[In his review of Translations, Kroll states that beneath the surface of "this sweet and subtle play" lies a "powerful study of the roots of imperialism, the take-over not just of a country but of a spirit through the take-over of its language."]

Resistance to England is a theme lodged deep within the Irish heart and the Irish theater, but Brian Friel's Translations must be the most unusual play ever written on this theme. It deals not with bombs or politics, but with language. The year is 1833, when British Army engineers began to map out Ireland and to Anglicize every place name in the country—a pivotal moment in a complex conflict. The scene is a Donegal hedge school—one of those remarkable schools where peasant children (and grownups) could learn not only the three R's but Greek and Latin from rural schoolmasters who were often scholars and poets.

It's a wonderful setting for this sweet and subtle play, which deals tenderly with the rape of a culture. The culture is embodied in the people of the hedge school: Hugh, the old schoolmaster, for whom the story of his country is an epic as classic as the Aeneid; Jimmy Jack, the peasant scholar who never takes a bath but bathes himself every day in Homer; Manus, Hugh's fiercely patriotic older son, and Maire, his sweetheart. The British map-makers are being aided by Owen, Hugh's younger son, who believes in their good faith and the inevitability of "progress." But when Maire and Yolland, a young English officer, fall in love, brutality replaces cartography.

Beneath its lilting, sometimes romantic surface, Translations is a powerful study of the roots of imperialism, the take-over not just of a country but of a spirit through the take-over of its language. Although everyone on stage speaks English, the Irish characters are understood to be speaking Irish, which is characterized by Hugh as "a rich languagex, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception," but a language "which no longer matches the landscape of fact." The altering of this landscape is a spiritual earthquake, and Hugh's proud, pedagogic blarney is really a cry of pain.

Translations is no lyrical snarl at British beastliness; it shows cultures and people trying to "translate" each other's signs and souls. In a lovely scene, Maire and Yolland try desperately to understand one another, finally resorting to an exchange of place names that resound like the drums and trumpets of love. This play, one of Friel's best, has been staged at the Manhattan Theatre Club by no less a Hibernian than Joe Dowling, artistic director of Dublin's Abbey Theatre. He plays his American cast like a harp—the chief string being Barnard Hughes, whose Hugh matches his performance in Hugh Leonard's Da.

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