The story concerns the arrival of a band of ‘sappers’ (Royal Engineers), represented by Captain Lancy (Gareth Forwood) and Lieutenant Yolland (Philip Glenister), into the rural, Irish-speaking community of Ballybeg, to make a map and Anglicise the place names. The hedge school is presided over by alcoholic polyglot Hugh (Kenneth Haigh), aided by his son, the lame scholar Manus (Gary Lydon). Among the locals are Maire (Ali White), Jimmy Jack (Derry Power), Bridget (Siobhan Miley), Doalty (Frank Laverty) and Sarah (Dawn Bradfield). The man in the middle is Owen (Lloyd Hutchinson), Hugh’s other son, who got out and made good, and is now returning in the pay of the English as their official interpreter.
The central conceit of the play is that the characters who are supposed to be speaking in Irish are actually speaking in English on the stage, a comment perhaps on the decline of Irish-speaking in Ireland, where it is paid official lip-service, but very few people actually speak it with any degree of fluency, and therefore the piece could not be understood if it actually was in Irish, unless it actually was translated.
The scenes where Yolland and Owen struggle between sound and sense in trying to rename the surrounding towns (‘Eden’s right’ comments Owen, ‘We name a thing and - bang - it leaps into existence.’), and where Marie and Yolland plight their troth in the only words they have in common, the place names, go to the heart of the problem and are particularly effective.
My only quibbles are that Robin Lefevre’s direction doesn’t quite bring out some of the more subtle resonances of the script, for example when Manus says to Marie, ‘How will you like living on an island?’, apparently unaware that they already are living on one, and that Hugh’s final speech, in the hands of Kenneth Haigh, is disappointingly anti-climactic.
But it is almost impossible to go wrong with a play as rich and satisfying as this. ‘No names but thingless names, no things but nameless things,’ as Beckett once wrote.

First published in The Big Issues