CITIZENS' THEATRE, GLASGOW
DR DOLITTLE ***KING'S THEATRE, GLASGOW
CLARINDA **SCOTTISH STORYTELLING CENTRE, EDINBURGH
THESE are exciting times for Andy Arnold, the veteran director of the Arches in th
e Glasgow. After 17 years in charge of Scotland's most brilliantly successful multi-purpose venue – part club, part bar and restaurant, part music venue, gallery and theatre – he has just been appointed the new artistic director of the Tron, with the task of restoring that troubled theatre's once-mighty reputation as a superb mix of producing company and home for new work of all kinds. The new job should be well within Arnold's capabilities, and right up his street.
And meanwhile, he and his Arches company celebrate by taking possession of the big stage at the Citizens' Theatre with a superb new production of Translations, the great 1980 play by Brian Friel that might have been written to match Arnold's intense engagement over the last two decades with the evolution of Irish theatre, and with the story it tells – of British colonialism challenged, overcome, revisited, understood, and finally left behind.
In Translations – set in an Irish-speaking "hedge school" in rural Donegal in the 1830s, and first seen in Derry at the height of Northern Ireland's troubles – Friel presents a memorably complex and nuanced view of the interaction between the small community of Baile Beag, and the British soldiers who have come to make an Ordnance Survey map of the area with a view to Anglicising and standardising all the traditional Irish place-names. It's not that Friel flinches from portraying the implicit savagery of British rule in Ireland, or its brutal contempt for the Irish people, their communities and culture. But the final tragedy of the play is all the more powerful for the gentleness and subtlety of what has gone before.
There's the distinction Friel draws between Captain Lancey and his sensitive, sweet-natured and generous-minded deputy, George Yolland, whose attraction towards Irish-speaking culture is only matched by his passion for the lovely Maire. There's the ambiguous role of Owen, the elder son of the hedge-school master, Hugh, who has taken the Queen's shilling to become a British army interpreter and translator. And there's Hugh himself, a wonderful, drunken old crumbling monument of an Irish-speaking classical scholar, steeped in the wisdom and poetry of two ancient worlds, but also sharply aware that times change, and that a language that does not modernise is doomed to die.
All of this is captured with tremendous power in Arnold's lyrical but tightly focused production. There are half-a-dozen magnificent performances here, from Tim Barrow and Muireann Kelly as Yolland and Maire; John Paul Hurley as Hugh's damaged younger son Manus; Nicola Jo Cully as the tongue-tied girl who loves him, and above all from Andy Clark as the time-serving Owen and John Bett as Hugh. I doubt if there is any other play in the English language that plays so sharply and brilliantly, through its own linguistic structure, with casual assumptions about the primacy of English as the language of literacy and thought. This play is the masterpiece of Ireland's greatest living playwright; and Arnold has given it a production to match its strength.
Hugh Lofting's much-loved children's story Dr Dolittle also deals in translation, of course; only here, it's the happy fantasy of a Victorian English world in which a good-natured, eccentric doctor learns how to talk to the animals, and to share with them a wisdom that the human race sadly seems to lack. It's possible to imagine a stage version that would seem like a powerful parable for our environmentally stressed times; but there's only the barest hint of that serious edge in the jolly Bill Kenwright touring production currently visiting the King's Theatre in Glasgow.
The show is mainly remarkable for its brilliantly colourful and clever design (by Paul Farnsworth), for the unfailingly genial central performance of the amazingly youthful Tommy Steele (now 71 going on 40), and for the inoffensive feebleness of its nursery-style songs. Steele is no Rex Harrison, though, and there's such a signal lack of chemistry between him and his youthful leading lady, Abigail Jaye, that the air crackles with sheer embarrassment every time they come near one another.
As for Clarinda, currently playing at the Netherbow before a short Scottish tour – well, there is touch of translation involved in Mike Gibb and Kevin Walsh's contemporary musical about Robert Burns's doomed romance with the young Edinburgh matron, Nancy McLehose. The only problem is that it's a translation from the fierce beauty of Burns's own lyrical verse into the most fearful modern doggerel. Essentially, this overlong show contains one decent song by Gibb and Walsh (for lovely Gillian Budd as abandoned lover Jenny Clow), 12 dreadful ones, and one brief unaccompanied version of Ae Fond Kiss – from a haunted-looking George Drennan, as Burns – that gleams like a diamond in a rubbish-heap. It should be recorded, though, that Gibb makes a good-natured, if heavy-handed, attempt to challenge Burns's attitude to women; and that the audience seemed to adore the show all the more, the further the lyrics descended into the realms of McGonagall.
&149 Translations until 2 February; Dr Dolittle until 9 February; Clarinda until 2 February; touring until 16 February.
The full article contains 891 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
