Translations (and a rant)

Before seeing English Touring Theatre's production of Translations at the Oxford Playhouse, I came upon a book in the drama section of Waterstone's called Mis-directing, by Terry McCabe. Its subject is that of the theatre director as auteur, whose 'interpretation' of a play ends with some ghastly set of gimmicks being imposed on it, elevating the director at the expense of the author. I recently endured an execrable production of As You Like It, in which the director had decided to set the play among asylum-seekers, as a demonstration of its relevance to today's issues. But As You Like It has nothing whatsoever to do with modern immigration: if the displaced characters are trying to get anywhere it is back to where they started, exactly the opposite of the asylum-seeker. The imposed idea is not supported by the text. The Forest of Arden is a peaceful meditative place - at least, for the nobles wandering around there - and this idea was simply smashed by the various searchlights and noises that went on in this assault on Shakespeare's piece. Above all, the play is - like all Shakespeare's comedies - about love. But the young anorak-wearing actors in this version never got anywhere near the emotional currents of the piece, and had evidently spent far too little time actually exploring the words. They had not received the direction that would actually have helped them. False accents abounded. Chemistry was there none.

This is the world of the auteur-director, finding some clever angle on a work that doesn't need it instead of telling the playwright's story clearly. There is far too much of it about: a recent Grange Park production of Bellini's I Puritani was a similar train-wreck, with an army of 'creatives' crawling all over it with their clever ideas. Unlike the actors, though, the singers were good enough to deliver the music clearly and distract us from the various silly things they were being made to do. It's tempting to think of oneself as a creative auteur type. In a recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream I started with a set of concepts probably every bit as bad as those described above; but in the rehearsal process they thankfully fell away as the actors learned the scenes and got on with telling this magical tale, and the production was all the better for it. It's Shakespeare's play, I realized, and our job is just to help it along.


So it was a relief, and a joy, to witness Friel's great play Translations in the hands of director James Grieve, who had clearly seen it as his task to serve the author and get the situation and characters over as clearly as possible. From the opening image, a lovingly detailed set of the yard one got a sense of careful attention to period accuracy. Characters came over richly, the rhythms of the writing were superbly handled, and the key changes were meticulous: we were taken through broad comedy, romance, festivity, pathos and tragedy with absolute smoothness. As a result a play which perhaps borders on being over-clever in places came over as a masterly exploration of the human lives and feelings caught up in great and tragic historical and political processes. Wonderful performances from a cast including Niall Buggy and Ciaran O'Brien and John Conroy but above all a great ensemble production. ETT a company at the top of its game. About work of this quality there is strangely little to be said.