“Nations don’t die from a heart attack, they go mute first.”
— Lina Kostenko, Ukrainian Poet
Translations was first staged on September 23, 1980 as the inaugural production of the Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. The pair saw Field Day as a “cultural and intellectual response to the political crisis in Northern Ireland”, allowing them to explore Northern Irish identity on stage and in literature. The political crisis in question was, of course, The Troubles, a period of violent sectarian conflict which lasted from approximately 1968 until 1998. The first production of Translations was staged at the Guildhall in the border city of Derry, which allowed for proximity to the play’s location of Donegal and for a cast that was largely from the province of Ulster. Eight years prior to the premiere of Translations, Derry was the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre, when British soldiers opened fire on a crowd of protesters, killing at least thirteen civilians and injuring several more; Friel was present at the protest.
The staging in Derry was advocated for by Rea and the play’s director, Art Ó Briain, who saw Translations as having a more profound impact being staged in Northern Ireland than in Dublin. In a review of the production, critic Paul Wilkins wrote, “A play dealing with two disparate cultures could perhaps find no surer test of its impact than with a Derry audience.” The Irish Times called the opening night of Translations a “unique occasion, with loyalists and nationalists, Unionists and SDLP, Northerners and Southerners laying aside their differences to join together in applauding a play by a fellow Derryman.”
Translations premiered in America at Cleveland Play House in 1981. It was subsequently staged at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York later that year. The play was briefly revived on Broadway in 1995 and again in 2007. Translations has since been performed in Estonia, Iceland, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Norway, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, South Africa, Canada, and Australia. An Irish-language version of Translations was produced by An Taibhdhearc, Ireland’s national Irish-language theater, and the play was also translated into Welsh by Elan Closs Stephens.
In the 21st century, Translations has been adopted by theater groups in Belarus, Catalonia, and Ukraine, to draw parallels to their own historic struggles with imperialism. In 2009, Mykalai Pinygin at Janka Kupala Theater adapted Translations for a Belarusian audience with the Irish characters speaking Belarusian and the English characters speaking Russian. In 2014, Translations was brought to a Catalan audience by Ferran Utzet and performed at the Library of Catalonia in Barcelona.
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Translations was used as an allegory for the war by director Kyrylo Kashlikov, who staged a production at the Lesya Ukrainka Theater in Kyiv in October 2022. “To me this story is about people living in the age of change,” Kashlikov said of the production. “About how this change impacts everyone personally and the society as a whole.” In 2023, Kashlikov’s Ukrainian iteration of the play was staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin with English subtitles