Embedded Files
Field Day began in 1980 in Derry as a cultural and intellectual response to the political crisis in Northern Ireland. Playwright Brian Friel and actor/director Stephen Rea set out to identify and develop a new audience for theatre.
They established Field Day at the height of the so called ‘Troubles’, and the project had at its core the idea of the theatre as a ‘fifth province of the mind’, a place where political imaginaries could be explored in new ways.
Friel’s critically acclaimed Translations was the first of many Field Day plays to show at Derry’s Guildhall before travelling throughout Ireland and the world. The plays produced by Field Day asked the audience to ‘unlearn’ the Ireland they knew, ‘the received ways of thinking about it and to learn new ones’. And it is precisely on this issue of unlearning and learning that Translations rests, a play considered by Seamus Deane to be Field Day’s central text.
De Souza[1] recalls that Deane once observed that it was the search for an alternative imaginary that brought Friel to understand the role of art in a broken society. Citing Friel himself, De Souza notes that his plays are concerned with ‘man in society, in conflict with community, government, academy, church, family – and essentially in conflict with himself.’[1] (Ardagh 255, cited in De Souza[2])
From its beginnings as a theatre company, Field Day also developed into a publishing company. Its founding members, Brian Friel and Stephen Rea, were quickly joined by Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, Tom Kilroy and Davy Hammond. Publishing collaborations followed with celebrated writers such as Terry Eagleton, Edward Said and Frederic Jameson. Since the mid 1990s, Field Day has become synonymous with the development of Irish Studies. It has acted as a focus for scholars seeking to question the paradigm of Irish history and literature and in so doing, it has contributed to the international debates in postcolonial theory and various strands of cultural history.
Peter Doran[3], Sinead Mercier and Michael Cronin[4] have cited the power of Friel’s Translations – - notably in its implicit linkage of coloniality, language and dispossession – as a parable with echoes of the island’s ecological dispossession and transformation during the Tudor experiment in Ireland that joined language extinction with territorial extraction.
Contact: Stephen Rea
Key words: ‘Troubles’, translations, ‘the fifth province’, language.
Links to wellbeing economy: Political imaginary; language, exile.
Ardagh, John, 1994, Ireland and the Irish: a portrait of a changing society. London: Hamish Hamilton.
De Souza, Michelle Andressa Alvarenga, 2014, ‘Translations: A Movement Towards Reconciliation’, in ABEI Journal 16:109.
Doran, Peter, 2022, ‘Translations: Language and Ireland’s Ecological Transformation’, in The Irish News, 27 December.
Michael Cronin, 2019, An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht/Irish and Ecology, Foilseacháin Ábhair Spioradálta, Ireland.
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