"Translations" by Maynooth College Drama Group

Translations, by Brian Friel

Aula Maxima at St Patrick's College, Maynooth

20th & 21st April 2010
7.30 p.m.

Maynooth College Drama Group

Among the most distinguished alumni of St Patricks' College Maynooth, Brian Friel was born in Omagh in 1929 and became a student of Saint Columb’s College in Derry for his secondary studies. He entered St Patrick’s College, Maynooth in 1946 at the age of seventeen and graduated with a BA in 1949. However, his career path was to take him teaching in 1950, and by the time he was thirty, he had retired from teaching to become a full time writer.

His grandparents were native Irish speakers from Donegal, and his experience of the conflicts betweem culture, language and nationalism inform his writings.  

Translations is set in Ballybeg, County Donegal which is according to Séamus Deane "in the borderland of Derry, Donegal and Tyrone in which a largely Catholic community leads a reduced existence under the pressure of political and economic oppression".