"Translations". Pilch

There are no Gaelic songs in Brian Friel's script for Translations. But in director Kate Burke's deeply resonant production at the Pilch, the almost non-verbal character Sarah sings twice, in haunting, solo renditions of Sean-nós songs. Ancestral and intimate, her interludes mourn for the days before English colonisation.

Set (like so many Friel plays) in the quiet community of Baile Beag in 1833, Translations captures a moment in time: the eradication of Irish place-names by the colonising English army. The folk of Baile Beag aren't simple - they learn Ancient Greek and Latin in their local hedge school. But they don't speak the language of conquest, English, and Friel's play examines the erosion of identity through Anglicisation, and the silencing of Irish culture through brutal repression.

Sarah (played with openness and clarity by Becky Devlin) is almost totally mute. She's a symbol of the paralysis wrought in Ireland by colonial domination. But with the two, haunting, added songs, her presence means so much more. Her voice still exists, and will never be truly silenced. Gaelic is her refuge and cultural home. And the fact that we, an English audience, can't understand the words keeps them mysterious, private, outside the coloniser's frame of reference. We become like the English soldiers in the play: shut out of meaning, bewitched by sound, but denied access.

It's a sophisticated, eloquent touch in a sophisticated, elegant production.

Brian Friel is sometimes described as the Irish Chekhov. And Translations shows him at his most Chekhovian. Like the great Russian dramatist, he sets his play amid a period of great social change but focuses the action only on love, longing and missed opportunities. Like Chekhov, his characters dither and dodge action. Jimmy Jack lives entirely in a world of classical allusions, just like the elderly Gayev in The Cherry Orchard, who can think only in terms of billiards.

But where Chekhov's shadow looms largest is in the tragic ache of unrealised futures, depicted so tenderly in this production. The English officer Yolland, who falls in love with Máire the milkmaid, could so nearly have been assimilated, like Mac in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (a parallel story of American cultural conquest in rural Scotland). Manus the schoolteacher leaves in disappointment. And Sarah returns to her world of silence. Quiet devastation is the most devastating of all.

The cast give wonderfully three-dimensional performances, a task especially difficult in a play with such a spread of ages from youths to pensioners. Robyn Hayward captures Máire's mingled love and guilt as she falls for the visiting officer Yolland. And their scene together, as they find a way to express their love across the yawning chasm of unshared language, is one of the most fascinating and poignant moments of the play. The fact that they can't communicate with words actually makes it easier for them to understand each other, a paradox that seems to sum up the entire play. 

And of course there's music, played on the fidil, feadog, consairtin and bodhrán. The band's folk dances do what the politics cannot: they keep identity expressed rather than argued. Kate Burke's production is elegiac, controlled and emotionally devastating, but it's also great craic.