SOURCE: "A Play Worthy of Translations'," in New York Post, 15 April 1981, reprinted in the New York Theatre Critics' Reviews, Vol. XXXXII, No. 21, 1981, pp. 265-66.

In the following review of the New York premiere of Translations, Barnes gives the play a favorable reception, claiming that it "gleams with that old bardic poetry translated … into style. "

Language is the flower of a nation—it can also be the roots of its national disagreements. There is one wonderful scene—well, one scene in particular, in Brian Friel's fine new play, Translations, which has just opened at the Manhattan Theater Club.

The time is 1833. The place is County Donegal in Ireland. Thirty-five years earlier, staggered by the Irish resistance culminating in the bloody battle of Vinegar Hill in Wexford, the English had decided to try to cease its centuries long attempts to colonize Ireland, and to bring it into the same kind...