With the high-profile flops it’s hosted over the last year the usual arguments have come up about how the Olivier’s size and shape make it hard to fit anything but the biggest epic on it, so Rae Smith’s design for Ian Rickson’s production of
Translations comes along to comprehensively disprove them: Brian Friel’s play takes place almost entirely in a schoolroom, and that’s what Smith puts downstage, but she surrounds it with foggy moors that suggest the country whose future is being discussed inside it, in ways whose significance is more far-reaching than it may first appear. This is a “hedge school” – a small private school teaching basic literacy and numeracy – in 1833 County Donegal, where a weekly class teaches those of the town’s adults who want to improve their skills. For Sarah (Michelle Fox,) who is almost mute, this can be as basic as building up the confidence to say her own name.
