Brian Friel once described his “Translations” as having “to do with language and only language” — a subject that the great Irish playwright mastered not only as a writer but as a thinker, an explorer of how we communicate or fail to do so. Offhand, I certainly cannot think of a play that confronts these matters more movingly than this 1980 piece, set in 1833 in a small community in County Donegal, where the townspeople, like millions in their country at the time, spoke primarily in Irish, or Gaelic.

“Translations” addresses language within a particular context, though, one in which other issues become just as relevant. The play unfolds amid the events leading up to Ireland’s Great Famine, as England was tightening its grip, sending in soldiers to devise a new map with anglicized names and introducing a National School System; by the end of the century, both the Irish population and the number of native speakers within it had been reduced dramatically.