Translations

"To me this story is about people living in the age of change. About how this change impacts everyone personally and the society as a whole. About choice, dignity, love. About chossing a threshold beyond which one looses themselves..." – Kyrylo Kashlikov

"Nations don't die from a heart attack. They go mute first."" – the prophetic words by Lina Kostenko are a fitting epigraph to this play. The people of Ireland were captives of a British empire for 800 years. 800 years of a colonized people fighting for their freedom and independence... Only in 2005 the national language was reinstated as the language of the official written communication, and the age-old names were put back on the maps.
However, this play is not about a happy ending if there ever was one. It's about the beginning, long and systematic erasure of the national language and identity...

A group of British colonial soldiers arrive in a small conservative village. "We hope we're not intruding too much"... Their mission is to replace the local language with English, to adapt the local toponyms to ""proper royal form".

What's the big deal in changing names, one may remark? It very soon turns out that ""making new maps"" actually means "evicting local residents" and "inspecting the territory" translates as ""a military operation""...

Step by step the difficulties in translation build up towards hard choices: to abandon, quite literally, one's own name or to accept that every name is a beautiful formula with unique roots and that the core of what makes an identity will forever be hidden from outsiders.