Translations

Act One

The play opens in the hedge-school of the Gaelic-speaking town of Baile Beag in August 1833. Manus is teaching Sarah, a woman with a severe speech defect, to say her name. Also present is Jimmy Jack Cassie, an educated and eccentric bachelor in his sixties who is reading ancient Greek. Manus is waiting for his father. Hugh, who is the school master. However, Sarah mimes rocking a baby and drinking, which Manus translates as his father is at the pub following a local christening. Maire enters the school and deliberately ignores Manus’ greeting. Instead, she has a conversation with Jimmy, revealing to the audience that the characters on stage are actually speaking Irish (despite the audience hearing English).

Doalty and Bridget, two students in their twenties, come in next. Doalty immediately brags that he has been watching the Red Coats insert new surveyor poles in the land and he has been moving them across by a few paces in order to assert “a presence”. While Bridget checks