SOURCE: "Brian Friel's Translations: National and Universal Dimensions," in Medieval and Modern Ireland, edited by Richard Wall, Colin Smythe, 1988, pp. 74-90.

In the following essay, Zach evaluates the universal significance of Translations.

In 1970, in a discussion with other Irish authors about the future of Irish drama, we find Brian Friel both critical of the 'quaint' peasant quality of John B. Keane's plays and distanced from Hugh Leonard's preoccupation with presentday urban civilization. Rejecting and, to some degree, combining these two alternatives, he describes the path which he intends to tread, with a somewhat Joycean emphasis on achieving universality through a concentration on the particularly Irish, in the following words [from 'The Future of Irish Drama,' The Irish Times, 12 February 1970]:

I would like to write a play that would capture the peculiar spiritual, and, indeed, material flux that this country is in at the moment. This has got...