Brian Friel was born in Co. Tyrone N.Ireland in 1929 into the nationalist tradition. All his grandparents were Irish speakers. He trained and worked as a teacher and began writing short stories in the '50s. His first play The Enemy Within was produced at the Abbey in Dublin in 1964. Together with the actor Stephen Rea he set up the Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 in order to get funding for their first production which was Translations.

Friel has always used theatre craft in an original and daring way. One of his earlier plays Philadelphia Here I Come has the private and public aspects of the main character played by different actors. Dancing at Lughnasa has a narrator who appears in the play as his child self but is invisible. Faith Healer consists of four monologues by 3 different characters all recounting the same events with the audience left to work out the "real" version

In Translations he uses another original device - the Irish characters speak Gaelic but we hear it as English - this creates humour, tenderness and tragedy.

The play itself is fundamentally about language and relationships. As an Irishman Friel is acutely aware that he expresses himself through a "foreign" language -English. He has said he wanted to create an Irish English - "we must make English identifiably our own language". The language of the play often has a poetic quality through the use of repetition, incantations of strange names and the use of strange languages. The events of the play are historical - the first Ordnance Survey map of Ireland, the changing of Irish place names to English names and the opening of the first English-only National Schools. To Friel naming is the key to identity and it is interesting to note that when his birth was registered the Protestant beaurocracy refused to allow his Gaelic name Brian and he had to be registered as "Bernard", so like Owen O'Donnell he has an English as well as an Irish identity.

Friel was heavily influenced when writing Translations by George Steiner's book After Babel which examines language and translation. Hugh O'Donnell actually speaks some lines from the book. Steiner argued that when languages disappear the identities of the communities that spoke them tend to dissolve too - "each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness". In 1975 only 2.5% of Irish people were found to be Gaelic speakers - a further 10.8% could understand some of it;

With the ever-increasing use of English as the world language, diversity of language is under increasing-threat throughout the world. Perhaps the question we are left with is this: will a common language aid communication and understanding sufficiently to make worthwhile what is lost in the process or will we fail to "interpret between privacies"?

Working on this play has been a joy to all of us. It works at so many different levels that we felt we could go on and on exploring it - surely the sign of a great work.