But mostly this play's vivacity resides in its pungent use and demonstration of the power of language and communication...It may be a slow-burner of an evening, but it is a piece of timeless, exquisite beauty.
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It’s a traditional and earth-bound staging in many ways, but it’s also captivating, suffused with the wonder of words.
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Brian Friel’s parable about the linguistic colonisation of Ireland, set in 1833 and first staged in 1980, is easy to admire but hard to love. For a story pregnant with romance and tragedy, it’s curiously uninvolving.
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It’s a handsome production, brooding yet sometimes bracingly funny. Rae Smith’s atmospheric set, a sprawling, boggy landscape retreating towards a vast sky that turns from red to blue to grey, generates an emphatic sense of place.
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The play’s nuanced, elegiac and often wrenching exploration of the power and violence of language in 1830s Donegal is as potent as ever.
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While the fate of both Ireland and the rest of the British Isles is hanging on the precise deployment of language, Friel’s devastating insights make for salutary watching. Go, and if you can bear it, take a politician.
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