I am in no doubt that Doonreagan has been the key to my career as a writer. Anything that I consider to be of any value to have come out of my pen has been written here. 

To begin with, I worked in an octagonal little hut down by the road. Lately I work in greater comfort in an attic in the stable yard that I have converted to an office. I like to shut myself away for hours, days, weeks, months if possible. I used to think that all I needed to write was silence, and solitude. But I’ve come to realize that it is silence and solitude here, in this location. Being cloistered… enclosed by four walls keeping all external stimulus at bay, I am able to fully absorb the spirit of this place. The sense of freedom it brings me is something that, paradoxically, I only experience when thus confined.

Finding my feet as a newcomer in Connemara, my first interest was the Connemara ponies. And I couldn’t have chosen a better gateway to this region and its people. The ponies cut across all divides and in this fraternity I made friends for life. Before long I found myself running a centre at Doonreagan breaking and training young ponies for the export market – a way to greatly enhance their value for local breeders. However, this work was demanding and I soon longed to be reunited with my pen – if only I could decide what to write!

Then one day I met a publisher, Philip McDermott, who had a holiday house nearby. He commissioned me to write The Connemara Whirlwind, featuring my obstreperous young stallion Cuaifeach as protagonist. His book became a bestseller and was followed by two sequels, The Connemara Stallion and The Connemara Champion. The trilogy remains the most commercially successful venture in my career. However, when media started to refer to me as a “horse book writer”, I decided it was time to try something different. 

I returned to the theatre, where I had had my professional training and early debut as a playwright. In 1997, Baptism of Fire, a comedy set in Connemara, was staged in Galway and Clifden, before travelling as far as Bulgaria. 

I was then commissioned by RTE to write for A Living Word. The texts, intended to be inspirational, had to carry some relevance to each of two million Irish listeners, from varying walks of life, ages and educational background. And no broadcast could last for more than two minutes. 

The need to be both concise, engaging and universal proved the best discipline a writer could ever wish for. For ten years I worked intermittently for A Living Word. My contributions were published as a millennium project in a book called Keylines. It took on a momentum of its own and is now published in many different languages all over the world. 

Some of my keylines are directly attributed to my life at Doonreagan. 

The following I experienced out on a walk with long-time friend Tim Robinson: 

“Hillwalking in Connemara,  

my guide stopped and pointed  

across a broad expanse of barren bogland. 

Down there was a townland  

with a substantial two-storey house  

surrounded by mature trees,  

smooth green fields,  

solid stone walls:  

all testimony to erstwhile prosperity. 

Apparently, this had not always prevailed.  

At one time, a man had lived there on his own,  

starving in a hovel, struggling to survive.  

Then one night he had a dream that,  

if he went to the bridge in Limerick,  

his fortune would be made. 

With little to lose he set out,  

walking for days, until he found the bridge.  

He lingered there, but nothing happened.  

After three days, a man stopped and asked,  

what keeps you here, stranger? 

Hearing about the dream,  

the Limerick man laughed out loud.  

“What would the world be like,  

if we all followed our dreams?  

I dreamt last night I was in a place called Úraid.  

I dug in a place between twin thorn trees  

and unearthed a pot of gold.  

But never would I be such a fool  

as to take any notice of that!” 

“Thank you,” said the man from Úraid  

and returned home,  

to dig in the spot  

between the twin thorn trees.  

The pot of gold was there;  

his fortune was made. 

So this is the place I call home:  

Where dreams take precedence.” 

And here – summing it all up: 

“An adoptee from far away,  

I’ve spent nearly half my life  

living in Connemara. 

The place I was born to  

was quite different:  

a park-like landscape,  

dappled by the sun,  

pretty and sheltered,  

neatly tended  

through centuries of prosperity.  

Trees sighing softly in a summer breeze;  

tidy gravel paths for lakeside walks, 

water lapping gently at your feet. 

Those impressions dwindled to a wistful memory,  

when I found myself exposed to  

the harsh conditions  

of this extreme western edge of Europe.  

A bleak wilderness of vast open spaces  

bordered by a jagged mountain range.  

Stony reaches  

pelted by heavy downpours,  

ravaged by storms devastating  

the little growth they yielded. 

Today, the evidence  

of age-old poverty and starvation  

has mercifully been eclipsed  

by the advance of the Celtic tiger. 

And as my eye wanders unrestricted  

over bogs and meadows 

that know no boundaries, no limits…  

across the wide Atlantic Ocean  

swelling with the tide  

in an echo of my own pulse,  

reaching for horizons ever shifting,  

ever new…  

I am in no doubt that here is my home.  

My bedrock of complete security  

and total freedom. 

Where the heart is at peace  

there is no need for shelter.” 

In 2005 it was discovered that Doonreagan was the place where Ted Hughes had taken refuge in the late 1960s after the death of Sylvia Plath. With him here had been his two young children by Sylvia, as well as his lover Assia Wevill and baby daughter Shura.  

Urbane and sophisticated, but also rootless and displaced, Assia Wevill had abandoned her third husband and a lucrative career in advertising in London for a new life of quiet domesticity with Hughes, in the seclusion of what was at the time a remote Connemara homestead. 

Out of interest I started researching this little-known aspect of the Poet Laureate’s life, largely overlooked by his English biographers. And the more I discovered about Ted and Assia and their time here, the more I felt I could empathize with both of them: with Ted as an artist with a deep affinity to the place, and also with Assia as a woman, coming here from London and, after initial qualms, being won over. However, Ted and Assia, in spite of their efforts to make this their permanent home, had to leave. The consequences have the hallmark of a Greek tragedy: back in London, Assia subsequently killed herself and their four-year-old daughter Shura. 

After spending years researching and contemplating the fate of these two  characters, I began to hear an echo of their voices, clamouring to be recorded. And suddenly, one day, I sat down and in a few days, wrote the play  Doonreagan. It explores the doomed relationship between Ted and Assia during  their brief but intense spell here: an ultimate test of conjugality and family life, at which neither of them had excelled so far. The play reflects their efforts to establish a common ground free from the towering shadow of Sylvia Plath; their longing for peace and contentment; and their discovery that, close to nature, away from the judgments, pressures, demands and expectations of the world at large, they came closer not only to each other, but also to themselves: for Ted, this was a welcome incentive to creative work; for Assia, it was a challenging new experience.  

My intention was not so much to produce a narrative but more to explore how the spirit of an environment can bring you so close to your true self that the essence of your entire life – past, present and future – emerges as crystal clear and inevitable.  

Doonreagan was first shown at our first Ted Hughes conference, where a number of Hughes scholars gave it their whole-hearted approval. It then went on to London and Cambridge and later had an Irish tour. The play is now set to become a feature film. 

 And here are some of the characters’ own reflections on the place. 

Ted is utterly attuned to his surroundings. Poems flow from his pen.  

As he tells Assia: 

“There’s something about these wide open spaces… 

The air is so clear,the light over the sea so brilliant…No shadows, no grey areas,any haze or mist swept away by the wind…Like a giant mirror, reflecting, not what you want to see,not what you expect…but things as they truly are.” 

Still – they cannot escape the ghosts of the past. Suddenly a suggestion comes to light that Assia may have precipitated Sylvia’s suicide. Ted is appalled. Afraid that she’s losing him, Assia has to try something to bring him back. 

“When I think of people around here…like Teresa and her family.They have so little,aspire to so little,and yet they seem perfectly content.It’s as if all the hardship,hunger and deprivationgoing back generations,has taught them more than we knowabout being happy.” 

The two of them seem to have attained a happiness here like nothing they’d experienced before. But it was cruelly cut short by news that the owner of Doonreagan wanted the house for himself. As it turned out, he wasn’t here for long: shortly after moving in, he suffered a stroke that landed him in a nursing home. Following his death, my husband Robert bought the house, fully furnished and equipped, more or less as Ted and Assia had left it. 

In the play, we see Assia devastated at the prospect of leaving. She begs Ted to find them alternative accommodation nearby. 

“You know what Teresa said to me the other day? 

She said to me, ‘There is one thing I shall never give up.When I wake up in the morning,I am in the one place on earth where I want to be.’It made me realize that this is what really matters.” 

“Well that,” Ted sighs, “is a luxury few can afford.” 

In the Epilogue to the play, he admits to being left haunted by an image: the earth in a vast universe, and somewhere in the darkness, two pinpricks catching a glimpse of the morning sun. His memory of Doonreagan: a glimpse of life – as it could have been. 

Teresa was the young local girl working for them, helping look after the children. She remembered the Hughes family well. Sadly, she is no longer with us, though I’m glad to say, she got to see the play. 

However, the line ascribed to her about waking up in the place where you want to be, was not hers. It was uttered over thirty years ago by one of my early friends here, Phyllis O’Donoghue. It stayed deep in my heart and in due course ended up in the mouth of Assia Wevill. I kept forgetting to tell Phyllis that I had included a line of hers in my play. I only remembered on one occasion earlier this year, when we ended up in the same queue for the till in SuperValu in Clifden. I hope she was pleased to hear that I had done my bit to immortalize her little pearl of wisdom – one of many, for Phyllis always had something of value to impart. I say had, for that evening in Supervalu was her last evening in life. She died the following morning. 

Teresa and Phyllis are among many Cashel people who have helped enrich my life here. I owe them a deep gratitude for making the place what it is.  

Or perhaps, allowing the place to be, and remain, what it is.  

A haven in the heart of Connemara. 

I have tried for the last ten years to interest Irish theatres in the work of the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, who is the world’s most performed contemporary playwright, with some nine hundred productions in forty-four countries in the past fifteen years. In England his work has finally won critical acclaim with I Am The Wind at the Young Vic in London, and he is included in the Daily Telegraph list of one hundred living geniuses. Yet in Ireland few people are aware of his existence.  

Having first heard of Jon Fosse in the 1990s, in Bulgaria, where one of my own plays was being produced, I contacted his agent in Stockholm and was able to secure the English translation rights for three of his early plays, on the understanding that I would also do my best to place them in Ireland. 

 Working with Fosse’s material, I was particularly inspired by the poetic quality of his language. Fosse writes in New Norwegian, a man-made language based on dialect, very expressive and favoured by poets. It reminded me of Irish, and I had a sudden vision of presenting a Fosse play, not only in English but also in Irish, back to back. Seeing our two cultural traditions reflected through the medium of a third might even highlight intriguing differences between the two! I enlisted the help of bi-lingual playwright, Máire Holmes, and together we set to work. Fosse himself was keen on the idea – he has a great affinity with Ireland and had spent some time living in the Gaeltacht, in Spiddal. 

 The EU came in to fund the project, as by now Fosse was a big name on the Continent, and in 2001, a rehearsed reading of our two language versions of Fosse’s first play, And We Shall Never Part, was presented at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. However, our great ambition to make Ireland the first English-speaking country to embrace Fosse fell on stony ground, and so did my subsequent efforts, over ten years, to interest Irish theatres in his work.  

 Some of the theatres told me outright that they would not consider putting on a foreign new play at the expense of an Irish playwright: a policy of support that I could only sympathize with. On the other hand, it overlooks the benefit to Irish playwrights from the stimulus of an occasional breath of fresh air from outside. And it ignores the fact that, as long as it’s fairly and critically assessed, external influence has a lot to offer. It doesn’t have to be emulated – even when rejected, it adds something to the existing dynamic. 

 There is of course another, more powerful incentive for Irish theatres to concentrate on home-grown produce: the need imposed by our present system for Irish productions to travel abroad. Success – in terms of commercial viability – has come to be measured in success overseas. And for that to be made possible, theatres need to provide material that appeals to foreign audiences – at this moment in time. In other words, follow the market and cultivate what outsiders perceive as “The Ireland Brand”. 

 In his excellent book Theatre and Globalisation, Patrick Lonergan warns about the danger of turning theatre into brand. Branding, he says, stresses the concept at the expense of artistic merit. It reaffirms prejudice and preconceived notions, and restricts our national identity. Moreover – it undermines the main function of theatre: to act as a genuine exponent of our status quo: there to broaden horizons, deepen understanding, challenge convention, and open new doors. 

 Like everyone else, I am delighted and very proud to see the success of Irish theatre abroad. But in order to maintain our position on the international stage, I believe we need to focus, less on our brand, and more on our place in the world. And to do this we shall have to look, not just out from within, but also, occasionally, in from without.  

August Strindberg.

Sometimes I’m asked how I became a playwright. It’s a difficult question to answer. I’m not sure anyone ever becomes a playwright. It’s more a case of recognizing the fact that you are one.

The Swedish playwright August Strindberg took the view that every play is born out of a secret. That plays are written when something is clamouring to be said that can’t be expressed in any other way. It helps, of course, if you have some working knowledge of theatre as a medium. The Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse maintains that plays write themselves: they take shape in your mind, and all the author has to do is listen carefully and record what’s being said. Eugene O’Neill, likewise, would never put a word down on paper until a play was fully formed in his head.

This may be the reason why a good drama can take years to develop. Why plays commissioned to a deadline are rarely as good as those that have been given the time they require to mature. Why most great playwrights throughout history have left behind no more than a handful of truly excellent plays.

I was nine when I first attempted playwriting. As part of a History project at my school in Sweden, I volunteered to put together a tableau about the 15^th century folk hero Engelbrekt, confronting King Erik over crippling taxes imposed by the Crown. The school performance saw me handsomely rewarded to the tune of 25 öre – the equivalent of 2 pence.

After that I went on writing plays. They were conceived and rehearsed in the basement of my best friend’s house, which her nondescript, conventional parents had transformed into an amazingly inspirational, evocative space – like something out of a fairy-tale. I still have some of these scripts, and looking at them now, I’m surprised to see that they were in fact properly structured, with acts and scenes, and well defined plots and characters.

I have no idea who taught me the rudiments of dramatic art. I remember being taken to see classical plays for children at the Gothenburg City Theatre. I loved seeing the sets and costumes and the stories unfolding, but often found the acting too obtrusive. I had come to enter an enchanted world, lose myself in its magic – not to have the spell broken by a contrived performance.

My early writing was driven by a similar wish to escape reality, away from much sadness and tragedy in my family. Though the plays were regularly performed at school, I wrote them merely to please myself. But one event in the late 1950s stands out as a milestone.

The world had been hit by a serious pandemic called the Asian flu. It struck you down for weeks, and I had suffered like everybody else. Finally I was able to return to school. As I was walking along that morning, I found to my horror my path blocked by the person I feared most: the class bully, who had long had me as his favourite target, subjecting me to regular beatings, which, like most victims, I was too scared, and too ashamed, to report. Now, in my much weakened state, he was the last person I wanted to meet, and I could feel my knees trembling as he approached me. “So you’re well again?” he growled, to which I couldn’t but timidly agree. “And have you written a new play?” he demanded. I said I had – it was the only thing I’d been able to occupy myself with during my convalescence. “Thank God for that!” he exclaimed, slapping my back. “We haven’t had a good laugh since you’ve been ill!”

This was the moment when I realized that my writing was not just for myself but also for others. It meant I had something of value to offer, appreciated even by my worst enemy. I also knew that, as long as I kept providing the entertainment, I would not be bullied again.

So I kept producing plays. But I ran into a problem with censorship. I had been asked to write a play to mark the beginning of the Easter holidays and had conceived what I thought was a perfect plot. The main character, Mother Hen, is given the great honour of laying two eggs for the king’s Easter breakfast. But at the start of the second act, she comes rushing in, literally in a flap, crying out: “Oh dear, oh dear, what will I do? The king’s eggs have hatched into two chickens! I should never have got together with the cock the other day!”

On the morning of the performance, my mother caught sight of the script and perused it. “What kind of filth is this?” she called out. “You can’t have this in a school play!” I couldn’t understand her concern. We had been taught at school that hens lay eggs for eating, but if there is a cock present, the eggs hatch into chickens – what was wrong with that? “It’s inappropriate,” was the only explanation I got. “This line has to be cut!” I protested in all innocence that this was what the play was about. If I cut that line, the whole plot would collapse. But she wouldn’t budge. The line had to go. And though everyone still seemed to enjoy the play, as far as I was concerned, it was a dismal failure.

I’m relating all of this because it is symptomatic of my career as a playwright: a repeated pattern of writing what I have to write, seeing it applauded where I least expect it, and occasionally having the heavy hand of authority coming down to stifle what I myself consider to be utterly sound and reasonable.

Epidaurus.

At second level, I didn’t write at all. Like most teenagers, I was anxious to conform, afraid of doing anything unusual that would single me out. Aged fifteen, I was told by a vocation guidance councillor that I was a perfect cut for an industrial chemist and accordingly made to choose natural science subjects for my final three years. But after two years of studying maths, physics, chemistry and biology, I rebelled. Not because I had anything against natural science – but because I had so little in common with my class-mates. I thought, how can I spend the rest of my life surrounded by people who are so unlike me? My best friends were all doing Classics. My mother, herself a Classics scholar, supported my decision to switch courses, even though it would mean working through the summer holidays plus repeat a year.

All the teachers did their best to dissuade me. What kind of career could I hope for knowing Latin and Greek? In fact, only a year after I left school, these studies were abolished in Sweden as having nothing of value to offer modern society.

And yet… I think it’s the best thing I ever did. The study of Latin and Greek gave me a fundamental understanding of language and how it works. It has helped my command of numerous foreign languages and made it possible to use an acquired language as my own. Not least – it gave me a chance to read the ancient dramas in their original version. As part of the course we performed our own Swedish translation of Antigone, and the power of its speeches made an impression that has never left me.

The Classics studies also introduced me to another favourite subject: History of Art, and when it came to choosing modules for my university degree, I settled for History of Art and History of Literature with the Accent on Drama. It’s interesting to note the composition of the drama course. At a rough estimate, the study of Scandinavian and French plays took up about fifty percent. The rest was taken up to a more or less equal amount of German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, English, American and Irish plays. It allowed for one play by Shakespeare, but included the whole range of French classicists. France of course had been the main influence on Swedish culture for centuries – we had a French royal family and in days gone by, French was the language spoken by the upper classes. Strindberg, our great dramatist, spent much time in Paris and even wrote some of his work in French. He was – and remains – a favourite of mine, and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his chamber plays.

However, we were now at the end of the Swinging Sixties, and we were all aware that the centre of contemporary culture was London, especially for young people. So, armed with my degree, this is where I went, to check out the English theatre scene. Two of my friends, who were Swedish actors, were doing a course at the London Drama Centre, and through them I was directed to an audition for a Leroy Jones play directed by the American Ed Berman. It wasn’t much of a role – a lightly clad vestal virgin – but I got the part and so found myself on stage at the ICA just off Trafalgar Square within weeks of my arrival.

Charles Marowitz.

My other London contact was the American director Charles Marowitz, who had his own theatre called The Open Space in Tottenham Court Road. A brief interview with him led to an offer of work as an intern.

Marowitz is now referred to as one of the world’s ten most important theatre directors of the twentieth century. He first made a name for himself working with Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company, launching the Theatre of Cruelty season, advocating an artifice-shredding theatre that stimulated the audience’s fundamental fears. One major production was Marat/Sade by the Swedish playwright Peter Weiss. His theatre went further than presenting actors in performance on stage: it offered a first-hand experience of the human condition, with the capacity of reaching the deeper layers of our consciousness, not only stimulating and inspiring further thought, but also enriching and intensifying emotions.

Before going on to run his own theatre, Marowitz had also been working in the West End with names like Joe Orton, Sam Shepard and Eugene Ionesco. But it was his irreverent, provocative adaptations of Shakespeare that gave him international recognition. His absurdist collage of Hamlet has been described as “theatrical dynamite”. I shall never forget his version of The Taming of The Shrew, where he turned Shakespeare’s light-hearted comedy into a feminist tragedy, with Kate’s final speech transformed from a show of facetious coquetry into an enforced confession whipped out of a subjugated, terror-stricken victim.

Marowitz had had good experience as a guest director in my home town of Gothenburg, and I think he had an affinity with the modern Scandinavian theatre tradition that had grown out of Ibsen’s social engagement and Strindberg’s expressionist drama. Charles’ approach to theatre made eminent sense to me – I was able to emulate it without question, and my work as his assistant progressed smoothly. This in itself was remarkable, as Marowitz was notorious for alienating people with his abrasive manner and quarrelsome nature. He took a gleeful contrary stance to anything he considered phoney or commonplace. His profound disdain of British mainstream theatre was expressed in incisive, witty and acerbic criticism, often to the point.

I myself had nothing but sympathy, encouragement and support from him. I regret now that I took much of it for granted. I was too young and inexperienced to realize just how favoured I was having such a brilliant mentor.

Notwithstanding names like Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso on the repertoire, and talented young actors such as Glenda Jackson and Philip Schofield, The Open Space Theatre operated on a shoe-string, and I received no pay for my work. Some of it was very exciting, like discovering the script for the Chicago Conspiracy Trials, which Marowitz later produced. But impatient for a more intense learning curve, I decided to audition for a London drama school. Charles’ business partner, Thelma Holt, recommended a place called Studio 68, set up by actors Sean Connery and Robert Henderson, with a view to letting drama students do professional productions as part of their training. I auditioned with two pieces rehearsed by Marowitz – one of them Miss Julie – and was accepted.

Studio 68 prided itself on being progressive. While our instructors were recruited from venerable institutions such as RADA and LAMDA, they were given more freedom here to do experimental work. One of our tutors is now Head of Drama at Berkeley University, one acts as movement advisor to major period TV drama, and another has been given an MBE for his management of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. An invaluable part of our physical training was in the Alexander Technique, which has stood me in good stead all my life. For those of you unfamiliar with this method, it’s much used by actors and musicians as a means to relieve physical tension.

The work we did at Studio 68 was varied and ambitious. It taught us a lot, not only about stagecraft but also about ourselves and each other. Much of it was more like shrink sessions, and I’m not sure it made us excel as actors. In fact, only two members of my group went on to have a successful acting career. Among the others, one is now a New York stage director, another an American film producer; one is Head of English at Toronto University, one a best-selling author and one internationally renowned as an expert in stage movement.

“Smile”.

While still at drama school, I returned to writing for the stage. I had had some personal experience of the London world of rock’n’roll, and been quite distressed by what I witnessed. This was the period that saw the deaths of Brian Jones, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix – all at the age of twenty-seven. My play Smile was about a rock star hounded to death by ruthless commercial interests, taking with him his girl-friend, my own alter ego.

I showed the play to Charles Marowitz, who was very encouraging but explained it was “not his scene”. So instead I sent the script to the Atelier Theatre, a leading fringe theatre in Gothenburg.

Towards the end of my two year drama course, I was offered a part in a play with Charles Marowitz: “Sam Sam” by Trevor Griffiths. It led on to steady employment at the Open Space: as an actress, assistant director or ASM, whatever was required, all to the princely wage of six pounds a week.

It wasn’t easy to survive on that income, and when I eventually heard from the Atelier Theatre that they were keen to do Smile, I decided to return to Sweden. Once there, I was also offered a job as a member of their permanent acting troupe. I appeared in two productions – one about political prisoners, the other about homelessness – and then it was time for my own play to be produced. Apart from providing the Swedish translation, I elected to stay out of it,. The director chosen for Smile was one with personal experience of the rock scene, but unfortunately, this landed him in rehab two weeks before the opening. Finding a suitable replacement proved impossible, and the only way to save the show was for me to take over. I had learnt enough from working with Marowitz to do my own directing, and when the play opened, it was well received by critics. However, I encountered some unexpected opposition.

The Gothenburg City Theatre, a dominant cultural institution, had turned itself into an active political organ. The members of the permanent company had joined the Communist Party, seeing as their mission to transform the role of theatre in society. Concepts such as playwrights, actors and directors, as well as stage hands and cleaners, were done away with. Instead, all employees were referred to as “theatre workers”, acting together as a group on an equal basis, devising productions collectively with the sole aim of raising social awareness. In defiance of all commercial interests, theatre was expected to be funded by state and local government.

There was a famous incident, where a well-known actor took to the stage to address a traditional first-night audience, dressed up in their usual black tie finery. He told them that Bourgeois scum such as themselves were no longer welcome in the theatre, and from now on, they’d be well advised to stay away.

Word was passed on to me through a powerful agent that Smile had been denounced as politically unacceptable. I protested that it was in full agreement with the ethos of the City Theatre, exposing as it did the merciless exploitation of talented young musicians. I, too, believed in theatre as an instrument of social change. I, too, was against crass commercialism, and I, too, denounced petty Bourgeois values – I hadn’t become Marowitz’ acolyte for nothing.

To no avail. Smile was said to glorify celebrity, and plays should be about down-trodden working-class people, depicting their miserable conditions with a view to empowering them politically. If I was to continue working in Swedish theatre, I would have to join the Communist party and change my tune. I would also have to give up things like make-up and smart clothes, food delicacies and domestic comforts. And I would definitely have to get rid of my dog. How could anyone spend money on dog food when there were people starving in the Third World? All of these were symptoms of despicable middle-class habits, in breach of the Communist manifesto and enough to stamp me as a Class Enemy.

One political journalist had the audacity to suggest that such extreme radicalism carried within it the seed of its own destruction. But rather than hang around waiting for that to happen, I packed my bags, found a good home for the dog and took the boat back to England.

London World Trade Centre

In London, my personal and artistic freedom had never been called into question, but now I was presented with more pressing challenges, such as how to survive and how to avoid being deported. No longer a student or employee, and with Sweden not yet a member of the EU, I was persona non grata as far as the authorities were concerned. At The Open Space someone else had taken my place. Equity would only let me play foreign parts, and sporadic work in films and commercials, usually as an au pair or a prostitute, did not bring in enough money to live on. An agent had taken on Smile but had no success placing it.

My friend George Hulme, himself a successful playwright, had one piece of advice to offer: “To succeed as a writer,” he said, “the one thing you have to do is buy London property.” His theory was that it would give me the option of letting out my London home and going to live more cheaply elsewhere. The steady income would give me the freedom to write: what, how and when I liked, without ever having to compromise my talent in order to pay the rent. At a time when I had hardly enough money to eat, I dismissed his idea as ludicrous.

An episode with a turnip, of all things, brought things to a head. I was down to my very last shilling, equivalent to about five cent, and took a trip to the North End market too find something to last me for a few days while I waited to hear from my agent and attended more auditions. My shilling yielded a pound of turnips – three of them. One for each day, I reckoned, would sustain me, until something turned up. But as I put on the first one to cook, my electricity ran out. The meter needed shillings to feed it. I was left with three raw turnips.

That’s when I walked all the way from Chelsea to the City of London in search of a regular job. I managed to land one – as a linguist at the London World Trade Centre, to a generous income of twenty-five pounds a week. But apart from acquainting me with my future Irish husband, that work was merely a stopgap: a means to an end. Still – it was here that it dawned upon me that I possessed one skill that few Londoners could compete with: my command of Swedish. Armed with that, and a degree in English added to my other credentials, I embarked on a new career as a free-lance literary translator.

Before long, I had all the commissions I could wish for. The work with leading English and Swedish authors – the only ones considered worthy of translating – helped me perfect my English and taught me a lot about good writing. They included Ruth Rendell, Joanna Trollope and Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. In due course I was elected Chair of the English Translators’ Association, and for six years represented literary translators on the committee of the Society of Authors and at international congresses across Europe and in the then Soviet Union.

In the UK I remained an undesirable alien, until I managed to get a permanent British visa through working on and off as an interpreter for the British Foreign Office. This was very interesting, as many talks I attended were at cabinet level. Another delightful engagement was as a scout for a Swedish theatre producer. This meant being paid to go to the theatre but got me into a bad habit of walking out in the interval if the performance wasn’t good enough to merit a positive report.

Ingrid Bergman.

At one time, I spent nine months in close collaboration with the London-based film star Ingrid Bergman, who was writing her memoirs and needed someone to handle the Swedish research material and produce a Swedish version of her book. The time I spent with this charismatic lady left a memory I shall always treasure. What impressed me most was her whole-hearted commitment to the task in hand – perhaps this was the key to her great success as an actress. While our work was on-going, every other part of her life was pushed aside; the English ghost writer, Alan Burgess, and I felt as if we were the only people who mattered to her. It followed of course that, as soon as the book was delivered, we lost her to her next project, starring in a film as the Israeli politician Golda Meir.

Although my ambition was always to write my own stuff, I got so much enjoyment out of translating novels, films and plays, it was a surprise to find that it also paid well. What had taken me a week to earn at the Open Space I could make in an hour of translating. And within a few years I had saved up enough money to do as George Hulme had suggested: buy myself a flat.

In 1982, thanks to my regular contacts with Swedish and English publishers, I was commissioned to write a book of my own. It was with a view to putting the finishing touches to the script that I first went to Connemara, where my Irish friend from the World Trade Centre had offered me the use of his holiday house. I had intended to spend six weeks there, but as it happened, I never went back. I’m still in the same house. I’m married to the owner. And I still let my London flat.

“The Connemara Whirlwind”.

Having been through it twice, I can testify that it is not easy for a writer to switch from one culture to another. Once my book was published, I decided to give myself a break in favour of another great interest: horses. Finding myself in the heart of Connemara pony country, I soon became involved in the breeding and training of these lovely animals. The work brought a welcome commission from an Irish publisher. My trilogy about the Connemara Whirlwind, inspired by my own stallion, became an instant bestseller; it is still, after twenty-five years, available in bookshops, read in schools and popular as an exam project.

Both publisher and readers expected me to go on pursuing this successful formula, but after the third book in the series I decided to call it a day. I was missing the theatre. Ever since my arrival in this country I had been an active member of the newly formed Society of Irish Playwrights, and through this connection I came to chair the judging panel of the O.Z. Whitehead playwriting competition. It also led to my appointment in 1996 as Artistic Director of the fourth International Women Playwrights’ Conference, to be held the following year at University College Galway.

This conference attracted nearly three hundred female delegates from all corners of the world. Having ploughed through hundreds of submissions, I selected about seventy plays for presenting over the five days, from rehearsed readings to full productions. I grouped them into themes, one for each day, to give a fascinating insight into the way different cultures handle similar topics. I had some trouble with militant feminists who attempted to hi-jack the conference, objecting to men being admitted to see the performances; but over the years, the artistic benefits of this event have been confirmed time and again.

1997 was also the year when fellow-playwright, Máire Holmes, and I formed the Connemara Theatre Company, with a view to introducing professional theatre in Connemara. The project met with a singular lack of enthusiasm, first from the Arts Council, then from local people who, used only to amateur theatre, could not see the point of going to see a play with none of their friends appearing in it. The business community wanted to take charge of the venture, including artistic control, but were not prepared to help fund it. In the end we went ahead without official support, but faced an uphill struggle, made infinitely worse by the sudden death of Máire’s husband, Tom Breathnach, who was our administrator. Nevertheless, we persevered for five years, presenting as many professional productions in venues all over the country. But the efforts to make ends meet were so draining they excluded all creative work, and in the end we gave up.

“Baptism of Fire”.

The Connemara Theatre Company provided me with an opportunity to take up directing again, and also produced two of my own plays, the first a comedy of manners called Baptism of Fire, featuring a cast of well-known Irish actors. This was a play that gave audiences something they could relate to: a humorous affirmation of shared values. I had always liked the idea of making people laugh. One of my London friends, Terence Frisby, had had a tremendous hit running for years in the West End and on Broadway: the comedy There’s a Girl in My Soup, later filmed with Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, and from him I had learnt a fair amount about the technique of writing comedy.

“The Alternative”.

The other play, called The Alternative, was more serious: true to my Scandinavian conditioning, I had chosen to write about a social issue that I felt badly needed attention: child sexual abuse in the home. Focusing for the first time on answers to the burning question “Why?”, I wanted to start a debate that would provide a helpline, providing answers to those who needed them most. Discussions about the situation depicted in the play would raise much awareness, whilst keeping everyone at a safe distance from personal implications. The play was endorsed and recommended as mandatory viewing by all Irish childcare agencies. Audiences thought otherwise – as one person put it: “Who would want to see play like that?” Posters for the play were torn down overnight, and schools ran for cover at the prospect of having it performed. Also, I discovered that the theatre community was prone to dismiss so called “issue plays”, on an assumption of scant artistic merit.

“Baptism of Fire”.

Baptism of Fire, on the other hand, had a successful run at the Galway Town Hall Theatre, and in March 1999, I was invited to attend its Bulgarian premiere. My arrival at Pernik, close to the Jugoslav border, brought more drama than I had bargained for, as it coincided with the start of NATO’s bombing of Kosovo. Bomber jets could be heard flying over the theatre, and all the Bulgarians was very nervous about an escalation of the conflict to include their own country. At the dress rehearsal, I was taken aback to see that my play, with its elements of farce, was here being presented as dead straight. Apparently, the Slav culture has little time for concepts like mock and satire. Amazingly, the drama worked just as well this way – it was certainly very moving, and at the premiere was given a standing ovation.

In Sofia I was invited to an event at the Swedish Embassy commemorating the 150^th anniversary of August Strindberg’s birth. There I met a Swedish director who told me about a young up-and-coming Norwegian playwright called Jon Fosse. “He’s bound to be huge,” she told me. “Take a look at his work and consider translating him into English.

Jon Fosse.

Her predictions were correct. Today, fifteen years later, Fosse has had close to a thousand productions all over the world. He is on the Daily Telegraph list of 100 Living Geniuses and a hot candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. A definitive analysis of his work is given in a fascinating book called The Luminous Darkness, written by international drama critic Leif Zern, translated into English by myself and published by Oberon Books.

In Fosse’s plays, Zern writes, man is shown to exist, not in the present, but suspended between the past and the future, between all that has been and all that might come about. His characters are caught in the eternal dilemma between their social persona and their inner life, between darkness and light, between appearance and reality. His style is minimalist, his dialogue neither vernacular nor literary, but offering a third dimension, in which we discern ourselves. Without ever resorting to the crude, violent or grotesque effects favoured by many contemporary playwrights, he manages to give dramatic form to the existential quality of life.

I started by translating his first staged play And We Shall Never Part, about an abandoned woman, and was immediately struck by the poetic quality of his language. Fosse writes in New Norwegian, a man-made language based on dialect, very expressive and favoured by poets. It reminded me of Irish, and I had a sudden vision of presenting this play in two language versions, back to back. The EU came in to fund the project and an excellent Irish translation was made by Máire Holmes. Fosse himself was very keen on the idea – he had spent some time living in the Gaeltacht, in Spiddal, and felt a great affinity with Ireland.

Though based on the same original script, the two versions showed up amazing differences, each reflecting the essence of Ireland’s two cultural traditions, emphasizing just how much language contributes to a nation’s identity. It makes a strong case for the promotion and fostering of the Irish language. However, the view in Ireland was that the scant resources available for Irish-language plays should be applied to the benefit of Irish playwrights, not Norwegians. Fifteen years later, we are still hoping to find an Irish theatre willing to share our enthusiasm for this project.

My translations of another two Fosse plays, Winter and Visits, published by Oberon Books, have had numerous productions in England and the U.S. However, as Fosse’s reputation grew, major theatres chose a different method of presenting his work in English: by ordering a basic, literal translation and then letting a named English-language playwright turn it into what he or she considered to be good dialogue.

The pitfalls of this method are easy to see: as the secondary playwright has no knowledge of what is truly being expressed in the original, the unique flavour of the author’s style cannot possibly be reproduced. Having translated over thirty plays, I know that it is not a word-by-word exercise, but more a matter of finding your way through the subtext: recreating the thoughts driving the drama, the patterns of speech defining each character and the actual rhythm of the piece as a whole. For that to be accomplished, you need to be thoroughly acquainted, not only with the two languages involved, but also with the intricacies of each culture.

This applies more than ever to the work of Fosse. Each play is like a house of cards: one false move – and the delicate balance collapses. I believe the reason why the English-speaking world has been so slow to embrace his writing is the attempts to present his plays in a processed, anglicized form.

“Keylines”.

My work with Fosse extended over much of the Noughties. At the same time I became active as a broadcaster, mainly for the RTE programme A Living Word. The brief I was given was the best challenge any author could get: to express in less than 250 words an original thought, relevant to a major part of the Irish population listening in to Morning Ireland, of all different ages and interests, varying background and conditioning.

My contributions, transmitted regularly over ten years, received much attention from listeners, and a compilation called Keylines was published early on. It was intended for faithful RTE listeners, but the book soon took on a life of its own. To date it’s been published in seven European countries as well as in the U.S, India and China.

As I wrote my Keylines, I tended to arrange the text graphically in a pattern to reflect my train of thought as well as the rhythm of my breathing. I discovered that this made them much easier to present effectively. And when I returned to writing for the stage, I found the technique equally suitable to writing dialogue. Actors tell me the unusual lay-out lends itself to good enunciation and helps bring their character to life. Also, they find long speeches in this form easier to memorize.

I’m sure my close involvement with Fosse’s work influenced me in more ways than one. It brought me right back to my beginnings, to ancient Greek drama, to the tradition of Strindberg and Ibsen and, above all, to the theatre of Charles Marowitz: a theatre holding up a mirror, replete with meaning and applicable to all; created, paradoxically, to remind us of our own inner reality, as opposed to the roles we’re induced to play in the theatre of everyday life.

This kind of theatre goes beyond impressing audiences with brilliant performances or entertaining them by playing to the gallery. Whenever I hear critics and audiences eulogizing over good acting in a performance, I feel something’s amiss. It’s like seeing people arrive at their destination after a journey through a spectacular landscape and hearing them express their admiration for the skill of their driver. A theatrical experience should be embarked on assuming you’re in good hands – and leave you with an abiding impression that has little to do with its mechanics.

“Only Our Own”.

When I wrote my play Only Our Own, about a Protestant Anglo-Irish family searching for a place for themselves in an evolving Ireland, my main interest was to portray the emotional and social dynamics that, overtly or covertly, affect all aspects of life but come to the fore within home and family. I see the bringing of such awareness as an essential role for theatre – more so than ever in our time, as the use of advanced technology is making human communication increasingly distant and depersonalised.

Though it was thanks to modern technology that around this time, I was able to renew my working relationship with Charles Marowitz. Thanks to the net I tracked him down in Malibu, California. I contacted him to express my gratitude, to let him know how much his support had meant to me, but before we knew it, we were back working together, as if the intervening forty years had been a mere hiatus. Communication was via Skype and email Charles took an immediate interest in my first draft of Only Our Own and had some subtle but important suggestions for its further development. When the play was finished, he offered to come to Ireland to direct it, if I could interest a theatre or producer.

The Irish theatres I contacted had absolutely no interest in Marowitz’ progressive work. Perhaps they were reluctant to import an American director at the expense of his Irish counterparts. I can sympathize with that, but it does overlook the benefit Irish theatre professionals could have derived from the stimulus offered by someone of Marowitz ‘ stature.

Resistance to outside influence was something I had encountered before, trying for years to place Fosse’s work in Ireland. From my time as a shareholder at the Abbey Theatre in the late 1990s, I remember a clear policy to resist change, almost a duty to preserve and protect what might be called their own “brand”. I hope this attitude is a thing of the past. In his excellent book “Theatre and Globalisation”, Professor Patrick Lonergan warns about the danger of turning theatre into a brand. Branding, he says, stresses the concept at the expense of artistic merit, reaffirms prejudice and preconceived notions, and restricts national identity. Moreover, it undermines the main function of the theatre: to act as a genuine exponent of our status quo: there to broaden horizons, deepen understanding, and open new doors.

The only person prepared to open the door to Marowitz and myself was the late Mike Diskin of the Town Hall Theatre in Galway. Sadly his untimely terminal illness put a stop to those plans, and by now, Charles Marowitz, too, has left us.

After a successful production in London of my English version of Fosse’s play Visits, the director, a young Norwegian called Lars Gathe, contacted me, asking if I had any interesting work of my own. As a result, he mobilized the creative team of Visits for a London production of Only Our Own, and in January 2014, the play had its world premiere in The Arts Theatre in London’s West End.

Some of the English tabloid critics saw it as a serious deficiency that my Anglo-Irish aristocrats spoke without funny Irish accents and showed no sign of the Paddy-whackery they’d been led to expect from Irish plays. But better informed publications, like The Spectator and The Stage, gave it rave reviews. A provincial UK production and an Irish tour for Galway and Dublin of this play followed, but, with all the attention of the upcoming celebrations of the 1916 Easter Rising, was studiously ignored by Irish media.

“Doonreagan”.

In the meantime, my husband and I had made a surprising discovery: that our home Doonreagan in Connemara had once been a favoured refuge for English Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. In his letters, published after his death in 1998, he refers to his time at Doonregan House as a breakthrough, in his writing and in everything to do with himself. Very few people knew about his escape to Ireland together with his partner Assia Wevill following the death of Sylvia Plath – it has been routinely overlooked by his biographers.

I was lucky enough to have access to the three friends who had been closest to him at the time: Seamus Heaney, Richard Murphy and Barrie Cooke. What they had to tell inspired me to write a play called Doonreagan. It was workshopped with Flora Montgomery and Daniel Simpson at the first Ted Hughes conference at Doonreagan in May 2013, and was very well received by the assembled authorities on Hughes. The play had its world premiere at Jermyn Street Theatre in London later the same year, with Daniel Simpson and Flora Montgomery as Ted and Assia.

Doonreagan explores the passionate but doomed relationship between Ted and Assia during their brief but intense spell in Connemara: their efforts to establish a common ground free from the towering shadow of Sylvia Plath; their longing for peace and contentment; and their discovery that, close to nature, away from the judgments, pressures, demands and expectations of the world at large, they came closer not only to each other, but also to themselves. My intention was to show how this kind of personal freedom brings you so close to your true self that the essence of your entire life – past, present and future – emerges as crystal clear and inevitable. The play reflects my growing interest, not so much in what happens to the characters in a play, but more why it happens, giving rise to the question why things happen at all – to you and me and everyone else.

In my view, theatre in today’s – not to mention tomorrow’s – world needs to aim further than presenting technically proficient drama. To continue to excel in the face of all new competition, modern theatre has to take full advantage of its unique power to affect: to cause a shift in spectators’ perception, challenge their outlook on life, enrich them with insights no other medium can offer.

My latest play, called The Sphere of Light, is an historical play, set in the 1500s. Like other plays of mine, it concerns itself, not so much with what actually happened, but more with the underlying forces that brought about events to change the course of world history. The “sphere of light” I see as a symbol of theatre itself – a space where a sharp light is shone on human affairs, so as to make them more intelligible. With the tendency of human nature to evade, suppress and deny, we need all the help we can get to access the ultimate truth. The truth about ourselves – which, at the end of the day, is all that matters.

Where Ireland is concerned, I perceive a need for change. With global audiences in a process of intense development, it won’t be enough to rest on the laurels of a triumphant past. To retain its place at the forefront of the world stage, Irish theatre will need to open up, to expand, out and forward. How to do this, within the framework of its excellent inherent theatre tradition, I see as a major challenge ahead.

To my husband and myself it came as a complete surprise to discover that our own home had once been the abode of this important author. It was on a fine spring day in 2005 that we saw a small hire-car drive up to the house. A couple got out and introduced themselves as authors from Israel. They explained that they were writing a biography of a woman called Assia Wevill, who had at one time been the partner of Ted Hughes, and that their research looking for the house where the couple had lived for a period in 1966 had brought them to our door.  

When their book, A Lover of Unreason, was duly published, it transpired that the period Hughes spent at in Connemara was one he himself considered essential – an impression that was further strengthened the following year, when his letters were published by Faber. This kindled our interest in the role played by Doonreagan in the life and work of Ted Hughes, and the research we did uncovered some new, little explored angles of his life. 

Not many people knew where he was in Ireland. He kept in touch with only a few of his closest friends at this time: fellow-poets Seamus Heaney and Richard Murphy, and artist Barrie Cooke. I was very fortunate in having personal contact with all three, and it was their unrecorded testimonies that inspired me to write my play Doonreagan. It was all in the eleventh hour, as Heaney and Cooke have since died, and Murphy has repaired to Sri Lanka. 

Hughes was born in 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a once-active wool and weaving village set in a deep valley in the Yorkshire Pennines: one of these deep Yorkshire valleys, where, in the winter months, the sun barely touches the roof tops. But by climbing up the slopes onto the moor-land above, you enter a world of wide–open spaces, freedom and silence, except for the wind sweeping in from the North Sea. The untrammelled nature of the moors is in sharp contrast to the abandoned woollen mills in the valleys down below. 

This freedom was well understood by Ted Hughes’ elder brother, Gerald, ten years his senior. Gerald took his young sibling up on to the moors when he was no more than three or four years old, teaching him there how to live in the wild, to camp, spot and catch wild animals and, not forgetting, to fish – a passion dear to Ted’s heart throughout his life.  

In a BBC interview, before he came to Cashel, he described those first seven years as being “sealed off”: they seemed to him to represent his identity. The moorland landscape was imprinted on his psyche and his poetry intertwines in so many ways with the landscape. This “Spirit of Place”, along with what he called “the moist voices of the curlews” had a profound influence on Hughes and his work. 

When Ted was seven, the family left Mytholmroyd to buy a small tobacconist and newsagent’s business in Mexborough, a bleak mining town in South Yorkshire. One reason for this move was the access to good schooling for Ted and his sister Olwyn. Encouraged, first by his mother and then by the English teacher of his grammar school, this is where Ted started to write poetry.  

Post-war England, one has to remember, was a drab, ration-booked, bankrupt country, still ridden with class prejudice, the wartime comradeship having been quickly forgotten. It was into this milieu that Ted Hughes, a precociously gifted son of a jobbing carpenter-cum-tobacconist, won an open scholarship to Cambridge.  

He arrived in Cambridge, having spent much time during his national service reading the works of Shakespeare and W.B. Yeats. One interest Ted shared with Yeats was astrology, which both he and Olwyn studied intently. But he soon discovered that it was far from easy to assimilate into the privileged literary scene in Cambridge, which, at the time, had little interest in working-class people. He had been writing poetry since an early age, but he felt that the study of English literature in Cambridge had little of value to offer him – if anything it gave rise to a distressing inability to write anything worthwhile. After an evocative dream about a fox, reflected in his well-known poem The Thought Fox, he switched to Archaeology and Anthropology for his final year. 

Even though he had had just a few poems published in university magazines, Hughes was determined to become a poet, but money was the problem. He had no income. Once he finished his degree, he took on odd jobs, as a night guard at a steel factory, in a garden centre and at the London Zoo. The financial constraints of following a career in poetry were to weigh on him throughout much of his early career.  

Still rootless after Cambridge, Hughes had applied for a free passage to Australia, but he turned it down, because he was slowly beginning to find his poetic voice and wanted to stay in Europe. But, more importantly, he had fallen head over heels in love with an American Fulbright scholar he met at a wild party in Cambridge. She, too, was a poet, her name was Sylvia Plath, and against all that was written in the stars and against the advice of close friends, he married her shortly afterwards, on Bloomsday – June 16th – 1956. 

There have been few marriages between such acclaimed poets. The union lasted six years and had all the echoes of a Greek tragedy.  For one thing, their temperaments were markedly different. Hughes’s nature craved for a freedom he had begun to express in his poetry. Sylvia, on the other hand, measured her worth in fame and success and became morose and downhearted with every rejection. Her craving for recognition was intense.  

The couple moved to America, to New England, for two years. Sylvia taught at Boston University. She also prepared Ted’s collection of poems “The Hawk in the Rain” and entered it for the Harper Prize for the best first book of poems, which it duly won in 1957. This collection contained such well-known poems as The Thought Fox, Wind and Pike.  

Although Ted was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his next collection, “Lupercal”, which momentarily bolstered their meagre finances, America was not a happy or fulfilling period for either of them. 

Their daughter Frieda was born on their return to London, but their life in a small flat was cramped and difficult. Their only chance to work was by taking turns to look after their child and borrow a neighbour’s room where they could write.  

The marriage was beginning to take a toll on both of them, even though Ted was now winning more prizes for his poetry and starting his long association with the BBC. In the summer of 1961, they decided to move to the country and used all their savings, plus loans from their parents, to buy a house, Court Green, in Devon.  

However, before leaving London, they had to sublet the remaining three years of the lease on their flat. Among the several applicants who appeared, the Hughes plumped for a gentle Canadian poet, David Wevill, and his wife, Assia. 

In January the following year, their son Nicholas was born, but to their friends, strains on the marriage were apparent. The chores and demands of family life, coupled with maintaining Court Green, much of which fell on Ted’s admittedly broad shoulders, didn’t make life any easier for them. Had either of them had a regular income from a secure job, events might have turned out differently, but for Ted this was not an option and in her troubled life, writing was Sylvia’s mainstay.  

His potential remained unfulfilled. He was in what he called a pit at the bottom of a sunless valley and, metaphorically, dearly wanted to climb up onto moors again. 

Into this fraught situation David and Assia Wevill were invited for a weekend at Court Green. Before leaving London, Assia boasted to her colleagues at work that she intended to “seduce Ted Hughes”, and she soon caught his interest. It wasn’t long before Ted and Assia embarked on an affair.  

In July 1962, having become aware of her husband’s adultery, Sylvia Plath sent him packing to London. Thriving creatively, she spent a few months alone with her two small children in Devon, but in December went to live in a flat in London, in time for the January publication of her novel the Bell Jar. In spite of her artistic progress, she was deeply unhappy, and in February she and the children went to stay with friends in London. They worried about her depressed state, but on Friday, February 8th, after she had been out to a meeting with Ted in her flat, they noticed a new radiance about her: the dark mood seemed to have lifted. The following Saturday she left the house, not saying where she was going and not arranging for baby-sitting. No one ever found out where she went that day. On the Sunday, she spent much time in bed, before deciding to return home. As the friends reluctantly drove her and the children back to her flat, they noticed that Sylvia was weeping. Later that night, she put out milk and bread for the children, sealed the door of their room and, for herself, turned on the gas. 

Assia Wevill, née Gutmann, has been blamed for the destruction of the Hughes’ marriage and the death of Sylvia Plath. But one has to remember that she was very much a product, not to say victim, of the world, and the time, she was born into.  

Her father, a well-to-do Russian Jew, had settled in Berlin after the Russian revolution and practiced there as a doctor. To his family’s dismay, he had married a German woman. Their first child, Assia, was born in 1927, and her father doted on his little princess, indulging and pampering her.  

But the family’s comfortable upper middle-class existence came to an abrupt end with the emergence of Nazi Germany. In 1933, realizing that they were becoming increasingly vulnerable, Dr Gutmann took his wife and two daughters away, initially to Italy, and then on to British-occupied Palestine.  

Fast-forwarding to the 1960s, we find thirty-something Assia settled in London, married to a Canadian poet, David Wevill, after detours to Canada and Burma and another two husbands in passing. To all appearances, she and David were a happy couple: charming, attractive, sophisticated, and devoted to each other. Assia herself was seen as intelligent, stylish and classy, captivating and appealing, especially to men, with her cosmopolitan, exotic, cultured and yet unconventional nature.  

The years following Sylvia’s death were difficult for the two lovers. Ted’s family openly disapproved of Assia, as did many others. Hughes himself didn’t let on to his family or close friends that he was still seeing her. He himself lived in Devon, and Assia in London, and her marriage remained intact. Even so, the relationship survived.  

At this time, Ted Hughes had a desperate struggle on his hands, looking after his two motherless children, dealing with Sylvia’s literary estate, coping with his ageing and ailing parents and handling the increasingly frustrated Assia, who had recently given birth to a daughter. Also troubling him was the fact that Sylvia’s tragic end had given rise to much negative publicity, especially in America, where he was being blamed by the nascent feminist movement for virtually killing his wife.  

In the circumstances, it is understandable that his creativity suffered. He was in his mid-thirties, and although well established as an acclaimed poet and broadcaster, he felt himself that his writing had reached a dead end. He longed for a change of scene, a chance to break the stalemate. And his thoughts went to Ireland, to Connemara, and his friend, fellow-poet Richard Murphy, who, at that time, had a house in Cleggan.  

 Murphy arranged for Hughes to take out a six-month lease on Doonreagan House in Cashel.  

 Assia needed little persuasion to abandon her third husband and a lucrative career in advertising in London for a new life with Hughes. She seems to have settled down quite easily to the quiet domesticity of life as a mother of three youngsters in remote Connemara – in those days far more remote than it is today. Ted seriously considered making Doonreagan their permanent home, though this, sadly, proved impossible.  

 The young local woman, Teresa Mannion, who helped with the chores, lived locally until her death last year. She had fond memories of the family. She describes them as “really kind and very friendly”, and the children as “lovely”. To her, as to others in the locality, they were known as simply Mr and Mrs Hughes with their three children. When the time came for them to return to England, Teresa was asked to come along and work for them there – an offer that she declined. 

 Their time in Connemara turned out to be a very happy interlude for them all. Frieda tells us she still remembers “the pretty white house on a hillside”. She herself was enrolled in Cashel school and local people still remember “the pretty blondie girl from England”. Little Shura celebrated her first birthday in the house. A letter from Hughes to Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia Plath, describes the house in detail and mentions its host of daffodils. And this is still the view from the house in springtime. 

 Ted would conclude many years later, towards the very end of his life, in letters to those close to him, that his time at Doonreagan had offered “a breakthrough in his writing and in everything to do with himself”. As he wrote later to his son Nicholas, a flow of good inspiration in Connemara had helped him deal with the deep emotional tangle inside him: a single stride had plunged him right into the productive thick of his best chances. Sadly, it couldn’t be sustained. By the early 1970s, he again faced what he called the glass door that kept him cut off from his real self, and it remained shut until the 1990s, when he found himself ill with the cancer that subsequently led to his death. In leaving his experience of Connemara behind, he told Nicholas, he had “muffed” the best opportunity of his life to enter, in his own terms, “a wholly richer, more productive and complete existence”.  

 So – what was so special about Doonreagan? What did it offer that provided Hughes with something that he himself considered so important? It can probably be summed up in just one word: FREEDOM. 

 Freedom of the kind he had experienced with Gerald when first venturing on to the Yorkshire uplands. Writing to his brother in Australia, he compared Connemara to the Yorkshire moorland, but “with twelve high granite peaks sitting in the middle of it”. 

 And it was freedom to write without distraction, and without the sad and melancholy associations held by Court Green, where Sylvia’s spirit was still very much in evidence. In England and America, there was much controversy over the tragic death of Sylvia Plath. Ted found himself much more at ease in Connemara, where conversation in the pubs would revolve around matters close to his own heart: salmon fishing, livestock, wild life or even poetry.  

 Richard Murphy wrote to me with his impressions of Hughes’ experience here:  

 “For Ted at that time, the bleak bog-lands of Connemara were a benign surrogate for the moors of his childhood in West Yorkshire. Cashel had the advantage of distance and strangeness in freeing both him and Assia, for a good few months, from the guilt imposed upon them by Sylvia’s suicide.” 

 “Connemara,” he went on, “inspired Ted to write ‘Skylarks’, one of my favourite poems, and some of the poems in Wodwo. He also began the ‘super-ugly’ writing of Crow.”  

 This is in fact the desk at which we believe Ted Hughes wrote his Skylarks and other poems at Doonreagan. It is difficult to be precise about exactly what other work he completed there, since he continually revised his poems, often making several drafts over an extended period before arriving at the finished product. What we do know is that he worked intensely. In a letter to a friend he says he has finished one long poem and several shorter ones, besides working on an anthology. 

 The anthology he mentioned, with its detailed introduction, was “The Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse”, published in 1968 by Faber and Faber. The year before, the same publisher had brought out his third major poetry collection, “Wodwo”. Towards the end of his life, in an important letter to his son, Nicholas, Ted confirms that the “grasp of things” (his words) that took hold of him at Doonreagan House in 1966 stayed with him for roughly three years. 

 This period was highly productive for Hughes, with the development of his sequence of Crow poems, or “songs”, as he called them, the publication of “Poetry in the Making”, and the adaptation of Seneca’s “Oedipus” with Peter Brook, among other projects. “Wodwo” – the name is taken from a creature in a medieval poem called “Gawain and the Green Knights” – is a collection of poetry and stories.  

 Taken and absorbed by his Connemara experience, Ted Hughes was hoping to return to settle there permanently, but the plan had to be shelved because once more back in England, he had to cope with his parents’ failing health. In addition, his own work commitments as well as Sylvia Plath’s literary estate “devoured” him all over again. And in spite of frequent visits, amongst others to Peter O’Toole outside Clifden, with each year the freedom of the open spaces retreated further and further away from his horizon. 

 Ted Hughes, at least, survived the return to England, which is more than can be said for Assia and Shura. We’ll never know whether staying on at Doonreagan might have made a difference. Their deaths in 1969 were tactfully ignored by media, and few people were made aware that they had taken place. Even to his friends, Ted himself rarely alluded to his former partner and daughter – only twenty years later did he publish a limited edition of poems called Capriccio dedicated to them. 

 And there are others who remembered little Shura. Last year saw the publication of a volume by Richard Murphy containing this poem: 

“EPITAPH  FOR SHURA 

                          March 1969 

       Before you’d given death a name 

       Like Bear or Crocodile, death came  

       To take your mother out one night. 

       But when she’d said her last good night 

       You cried, ‘I don’t want you to go,’ 

       So in her arms she took you too.” 

To have lost two partners to suicide is by any standard a terrible indictment. But in my view, Ted Hughes can’t be held entirely responsible. Neither do I see the similarity between these three tragic deaths as a coincidence. 

 Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill seem to have had one common denominator: a tendency to project themselves symbolically. Something, to which Hughes the poet would have been highly susceptible. 

 But those who choose to live by an image – in Sylvia’s case a domestic goddess cum talented poetess, in Assia’s a sophisticated femme fatale, do this at their peril. Deep inside they remain unconvinced by their own contrived image, and so they depend on the world around them for constant and repeated confirmation of who they are. We know that Sylvia would plunge into deep despair at the slightest rejection of her work, and Assia had no compunction about leaving three consecutive husbands in favour of someone more promising. 

 Both these women would have fared better, had they worried less about how they wanted to appear and focused more on simply being themselves. I like to think this is what happened to Assia at Doonreagan – an environment too naked to allow for any role-playing. But if that was the case, the process was cruelly cut short. 

 Where I think Ted went wrong – twice over – was by falling in love with his partner’s symbolic persona, thereby unwittingly confirming it as her only worthwhile identity. Once his devotion to this chimera was withdrawn, they had nothing to fall back upon. 

 As a writer myself, I have always been attracted to the charisma of people like Sylvia and Assia, who actually represent something. In my younger days I worshipped such people, mistaking for self-realisation their carefully constructed identities. Until the day when a wise man told me: 

 “Don’t be tempted to live by an image; it’s a much too dangerous game. To survive in this world you need substance. And an image is no more substantial than a dream.” 

Still – few things elicit such fierce hostile reactions as the mere mention of the word astrology. A few months ago, the Irish Times ran a feature categorically dismissing astrology as utter nonsense and deriding anyone taking an interest in it. I couldn’t resist writing a letter to the Editor, pointing out that, by definition, the article defined people like Carl Jung, W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice and Ted Hughes as misguided fools. Needless to say. my letter wasn’t published. 

The problem with astrology is that it takes thorough and profound study over many years to bring you to stage where you can have a view on the subject. Popular opinion is invariably based on uninformed prejudice, made worse over many centuries by innumerable charlatans making capital out of it. In ancient times, it was the reserve of a few selected wise men. If only this had remained the case, much misconception would have been avoided. Even five hundred years ago, Johannes Kepler complained about the misuse of astrology for fortune-telling, as opposed to character analysis, and a century later, mocked by a fellow-scientist for giving any credence to it, Sir Isaac Newton famously replied: “Sir, I have studied the subject. You  haven’t.”  

So how do we know about Ted’s involvement in astrology? Well – first of all, we know that he studied it to the point of proficiency, under the guidance of his sister. Among early letters to Olwyn, some contain direct and detailed references to planetary conditions. His interest is likely to have been further boosted by his reading of W.B. Yeats. And, knowing how complex and demanding such studies are, I can testify that no one would undertake them without being seriously motivated. Conversely, I doubt that no one who has studied the subject in depth could have anything but respect for it, as such studies invariably bring up revelations and co-incidences that cannot be logically or statistically explained.  

To begin with, Ted was cagey about his interest in astrology, aware no doubt that any such admission would damage his credibility. His review of Louis Macneice’s book Astrology in 1966 takes great care not to reveal his own connection with the subject. Not until the publication of Birthday Letters in 1998, the year of his death – incidentally, on a date carefully planned by Hughes – did he, as it were, come out. The poems St. Botolph’s, 18 Rugby Street and Horoscope make no secret of his astrological knowledge. Interestingly, no critic picked up on this. Even Ariel’s Gift, the two-hundred–page literary companion to the poems by Times critic Erica Wagner, studiously makes no mention of the fact.  

As it happens, I can add a personal testimony. In the mid-nineteen seventies, as I was working on a five-year commission to write a book called Modern Astrology, a definitive treatise on the subject, I was approached by an acquaintance asking me to see a friend of hers who wanted to discuss an astrological matter. I made clear that I was not in the business of reading charts, but she insisted and turned up with a beautiful blond, buxom Australian woman, who told me that she was in a relationship with a man who, however, was married and, though he spent the weeks with her in London, he insisted on going back to his wife in the country at weekends. Now he had asked for the exact time and place of her birth, and since she knew that he avidly practiced astrology, she realized he would be examining her chart. As she realized that his findings would have a bearing on their future life together, she wanted me to tell her what he might see in her chart. Out of sympathy I interpreted her chart and also that of her partner, comparing one against the other, looking out for conflict versus compatibility, which is what I presumed he would be doing. I remember the outlook was not very hopeful. As she left, she revealed the identity of the man: he was Ted Hughes. Her own name, familiar from Ted Hughes biographies, was Jill Barber. 

The reason why astrology should appeal to poets is plain to see: it describes human life in terms of symbols – symbols so archetypal, they have remained largely the same for over seven thousand years. Overriding any faith, orientation or ideology, the astrological method of defining the human condition symbolically sums up all that we as human beings have in common – regardless of external conditioning. Used as such, as an aid to bring us closer to our own basic humanity, it has a deep affinity with poetry. Indeed – I find it surprising that not more poets make use of these ancient images to help them delve deeply into the human psyche, challenge conscious thought, nourish imagination and explore a moral, spiritual dimension to life. I would go as far as to say that there needn’t be any substance to astrological claims – as a method it still has a lot to offer. 

Because of its universality, astrology can easily be adapted to any period, location, culture or social environment. What is nowadays referred to as “modern astrology” – the version Ted Hughes is likely to have subscribed to – is in full agreement with prevailing western philosophy. Rejecting any suggestion of fate or inevitability, it maintains that we are all fully responsible for our actions: it is entirely up to our own free will how we choose to handle the equipment, with which we were born: equipment that show the same traits, whether described by genes and DNA or by cosmic conditions prevalent at our birth.

So what does Ted Hughes’  horoscope tell us – or, more pertinently, what did it tell him? How did it help form his own idea of himself and people close to him, and how did it affect his responses to major events in his life? 

Well – this is a graphic depiction of the sky at the moment of Ted’s birth. An important part of interpreting a chart is to measure the angles formed between the various planets, using the Earth as the point of intersection. If an angle amounts to certain fixed degrees, this is called an aspect, each of which has its own significance. Here, the first thing an astrologer would notice is this: in technical terms, four planets lined up at right angles or 180 degrees to each other. You can all imagine the statistical likelihood of this occurring. Called a Grand Cross, it is the rarest of all planetary configurations. In forty years of studying many hundred charts, I have only come across it once or twice. Perhaps it was the uniqueness of this horoscope that first fired both Olwyn’s and Ted’s interest in astrology. 

A Grand Cross is not something you wish to see in a horoscope. It has been described as a heavy cross to bear, a pervasive inner darkness. Appearing in so called Cardinal signs, as here, it can also be destructive. So how did Ted feel about that? It has been found that, whatever it throws up,  most people have a peculiar fondness for their own chart, rather as you have for your own hand-writing. According to astrological theory, all human traits have both positive and negative poles, and it’s up to ourselves to control them. Since a Grand Cross is a real powerhouse, the dynamic energy it generates can be used constructively, and then often with great success.   

To mitigate challenging aspects, one should also look for more favourable points of balance, such as this arrow-point here. The Sun, Moon and Pluto are all well placed, signifying a happy early childhood and a talent for self-expression likely to impact on others. Jupiter and Pluto together close to the horizon at the moment of his birth suggest a literary outlet. It all ties in with the words of the late Keith Sagar: “Every work of art stems from a wound in the artist’s soul. Art gives expression to the healing process.” And Ted himself has referred to poetry as revealing something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate. 

Ted may have used his chart as an excuse for his dealings with women. His Venus, representing emotions, is badly afflicted, part of the Grand Cross, and as for sex, a totally unaspected Mars in fickle Gemini marks him down as unfit for sustained relationships. 

Which brings us to the chart of Sylvia Plath. 

And what is the first thing we see here? The second most ominous sign after a Grand Cross: the T-Square, which has three planets lined up at right angles to each other. And in cardinal signs, just as in Ted’s chart, replicating the same signs!  

We know that Ted examined Sylvia’s chart at an early stage. He must have been struck by these amazing similarities. Perhaps that’s what attracted him? Both haunted by their inner demons, they sought a release through poetry. Though the combination compounded their own conflicts, at least they understood each other! 

Sylvia’s release, this arrow here, is close to the western horizon, suggesting a dependence on other people’s approbation, unlike Ted’s on the eastern horizon, giving him no problem asserting himself.  

When it comes to Assia Wevill, I can’t show her chart, since her time of birth is not known. However, astrological tables still tell us a great deal. For example, Ted would have recognized signs of great charisma in Assia’s chart, combined with strong passion – and also an obvious lack of reason, substance and stability, which may all have appealed to him. Her Venus, ruling emotions, is afflicted in Gemini, indicating multiple partners, and Ted can’t have failed to observe that her Venus is in exactly the same sign and degree – one chance in 360 – as his own fickle Mars. He may have hoped that the violent attraction produced by this bond would be enough to overcome the volatility of them both?    

The most unusual chart of all – something I myself have never seen the like of, nothing but straight lines and diagonals – was little Shura’s chart. Ted had her chart drawn up by a professional astrologer shortly after her birth. Did he not trust himself to be objective, or was he worried enough by what he saw to seek a second opinion? He kept the astrologer’s report, which quotes: “a lot of fantasy, pretence, deception… A hell of a chart… not very promising. Severe loss within the family through death or accidents.”  

One of the most inexplicable things about horoscopes is that astrological traits are often inherited. For example, Nicholas Hughes’ chart shows remarkable parallels to those of both Ted and Sylvia. (Freda’s chart I have, out of courtesy, not examined.) In Shura’s chart, though there are obvious links to Assia, there is hardly anything reflecting Ted’s planetary positions. We can only speculate as to his reading of this horoscope. 

In conclusion, I have no doubt that these observations played a major role in Ted Hughes’ consciousness. How much of it has any real application I leave to each of you to decide. 

I am very pleased to be with you here today. After more than forty years as a literary and dramatic translator I have learnt a few lessons for better and for worse, and I welcome this opportunity to share them with you.

With the advantage of being totally bi-lingual, I started my translating career working into into my native Swedish, for the simple reason that very few Swedish books were published in English at the time. I had the good fortune to be working with wonderful authors like Ruth Rendell and Kazuo Ishiguro, who went on to win the Nobel prize in literature. One highly enjoyable commission was to work with film star Ingrid Bergman for many months, handling the Swedish research material for her autobiography My Life, and then translating the English text into Swedish.

Many years ago, I was invited to a seminar on something then considered revolutionary: electronic translation. A spokesman for IBM gleefully told the roomfull of professional translators that they would soon be out of a job. Flaunting a sheet containing instructions in Russian for the use of a combine harvester, he went on to insert this into a massive desk computer. We were all amazed to see this device spit out a page of word-perfect instructions in English.

Then one delegate put up his hand and inquired politely if he could feed a Russian document of his own into the computer. This was granted, and out came a page with complete gobbledigook. The IBM rep was not amused. He accused the delegate of feeding a sheet of gibberish into the computer. “Not quite,” came the answer. “It was a page from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky”.

The assembled literary translators heaved a sigh of relief. This confirmed that our jobs would not be endangered by technological development.

These days, digital translation has of course advanced much further. I spoke recently to a scientist who is busy developing the new quantum computer for handling AI. She works with components that are a fraction of an atom. And apparently, all that comes in the way of reproducing an exact copy of a human brain is permission by concerned governments.

I thought about it afterwards. An artificial human brain will no doubt prove useful in many ways, but what will it make of things like dreams and hopes, moral decisions, judgements on right and wrong, on affairs of the heart, as opposed to the brain? Our ability to love and cherish, to delve into the depths of our humanity? In short, what the arts are all about. Will there ever be a computer capable of representing all that?

What makes literary translation so fascinating is the fact that this is not just a matter of using our brains to replace one idiom with another. It is a delicate process of interpretation and appreciation, before you find the most apposite means of transferring a text from one language – and culture – to another.

At times this is taken a step too far. Like in the case of Hans Christian Andersen. Most of you, I’m sure, will think of him as a children’s author. But as a struggling writer in Copenhagen in the 1830s, Andersen had absolutely no intention of writing for children. A bit of a social snob, he aspired to be invited to glamorous weekend parties in Denmark’s stately homes. And the only way he could attain that was by producing clever, allegorical stories, masked as fairy tales, the reading of which would provide entertainment for the assembled most definitely adult guests after dinner.

A few decades later, Victorian England saw a big market demand for stories suitable for the nursery. And so, Andersen’s work was adapted in English translation as cosy reading for nannies putting their charges to bed. Hans Christian Andersen went down in world history as a children’s author. Having read his work in the original Danish version, I find some of them highly unsuitable for children.

There was a time when it was near enough impossible to persuade English publishers to take on new Swedish titles. Consequently, it was impossible to make a living from translating them. However, in 1983, when I was Chair of the British Translators’ Association, I got together with a handful of Swedish-English translators to form SELTA, the Swedish-English Literary Translators’ Association, with a view to promoting Swedish literature in English. Over the past four decades this organisation has grown from strength to strength and now has a huge membership. Meanwhile, the outlook for Scandinavian fiction in English has greatly improved.

At the beginning of my career, there was one English lady translator who handled most of the very few Swedish books finding their way into England. Examining her work, I found that the style of English she applied seemed largely identical, whether it was a book for young children, commercial romance fiction or a serious classic. Asked at a seminar whether she thought a translator ought to make an effort to reflect the individual style of the original, she replied somewhat chauvinistically: “Certainly not. The job of a translator is to produce prose that reflects how the English expect a book to read.”

This brings to mind the Nobel festivities I attended in Stockholm in 2017. At a special celebration for the Laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro, at the National Theatre, an actress read an excerpt from one of his books that I had translated. Afterwards, in an address to the audience, Ishiguro referred to the amazing experience he’d had, of hearing his own voice coming through, though he had not a word of Swedish. To me that constituted the best recognition I, or any literary translator, could ever hope for.

For that is the hallmark of a good translator: allowing the author’s voice to find its expression in a different language. And that of course does not come about by just translating the text, but by capturing the unique flavour of all that itcontains: narrative; inner monologue; verbal exchanges; social interaction; conflict and harmony; pleasure and pain.

About thirty years ago, having translated some fifty novels, I decided to specialize in translating contemporary Scandinavian plays into English. With my theatre background, it was a logical choice. And I have been lucky enough to work with leading Scandinavian playwrights, like last year’s Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Jon Fosse, Henning Mankell of Wallander fame, and the highly acclaimed Sara Stridsberg, still waiting to be performed in this country.

I have found that translating plays is in many ways different from working with fiction. For one thing, the text, i.e. the dialogue, is relatively insignificant. Good theatre relies primarily on rhythm, tension, dynamics. Then come things like characters, plot, structure and, finally, dialogue. In drama translation, these qualities need to be represented in that order of priority. And to be able to do this, you must first find your way to the heart of the play. It’s like listening to music: emanating, not only from lines being spoken, but also from the pauses in between: all that is not being said.

It leaves you balancing on a razor-sharp edge of judgement, making constant choices requiring a comprehensive knowledge of social and cultural conditions, both in the targeted country and in the play’s country of origin. The translator has to be very careful not to impose social prejudices lacking in the original version — or missing ones that exist.

When it comes to dialogue, we are all aware that characters speak volumes about themselves as soon as they open their mouth. To an acute ear, things like educational background, social circumstances, political persuasions, religious belief etc. are revealed, not only by the words actually spoken, but just as much by the way they are put together — especially in England, where people are only too prone to judge, or at least categorize, their fellow-human beings on the basis of their speech. I get told that I “have an accent”, as if it was bad breath. Our fellow-Irishman Bernard Shaw commented that “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.”

Through my own experience, I have found that the best way to translate a play is to forget all about substituting words in one language with words in another, and instead aim to reproduce the inner meaning of lines, and give these the most likely spontaneous expression, as spoken  by real people in the given situation.

As for thought, I’m often asked in which language I think – Swedish or English? They look dubious when I tell them that I am quite happy to think in either or, better still, neither. This technique, to go beyond words, known to many linguists, has been my key to translating, as well as to writing plays.  It has taught me that, in drama as in life, content and meaning are more important than words that may be uttered for all the wrong reasons.

Translators working, like me, from Swedish into English, are helped by the fact that the two languages are formatically and syntactically closely related. Words are used in basically the same way, basically the same order. However, that doesn’t mean differences don’t exist: they are subtle, but significant. I will give you some examples of the challenges this presents.

For a start, English in linguistic terms is defined as an analytical language, while Swedish is synthetic, expressing itself more through grammatical structures than through a sequence of words. English, as we all know, has profuse verbal resources flowing from a multitude of sources; Swedish, being more of a pure language, has to make do with a comparatively limited vocabulary. For each Swedish word there are supposed to be on average five English synonyms. In other words, when you translate a Swedish play, for each word uttered, you have to determine which of the five potential synonyms would be the most likely for your character to use.

Even more tricky is another necessary judgement: what proportion of the vocabulary available to them do the characters in the original make use of to express themselves? This has to be proportionately represented in the English version, so that you don’t make characters more loquacious or monosyllabic, basic or sophisticated, than the author intended. The temptation is to apply your own command of the target language, rather than that of the character.

There are also national peculiarities that, if faithfully translated, would convey conditions in the target version that weren’t there in the original. For example, Swedes tend to express themselves more categorically than Brits, using more active forms than the British, who have a fondness for understatement and passive expression. (I’m not sure to what extent this applies to the use of Irish English, which has its own influence, from Gaeilge.) In Sweden, there is also a tendency to overload the language with nouns in preference to other parts of speech. A translator has to be alert to any such quirks, which in the other language would immediately impose personal characteristics unintended by the author.

Just as poets often produce the best translations of poetry, it is often contended that playwrights are the best people to translate plays. I agree with that, as long as the playwright is bilingual like me, but that is, however, rarely the case. Unfortunately, instead of training professional translators to work with drama, a tradition has developed, in both England and Ireland, for theatre managements to take a peculiar way out. Gravely underestimating the importance of accomplished interpretation, they commission (for a paltry fee) a rudimentary literal translation from an unskilled amateur – nowadays, it may even be Google! Considering this to be a perfectly adequate basis from which to work, they then employ a playwright, who is given the task to rewrite the dialogue in acceptable English.

It is a practice so generally accepted, that in a competition for an international drama translation award, applicants were asked to indicate on the entry form whether their version of the play was based on a ‘literal translation’. I’d be interested to know how this may have affected the judging. Is it indeed possible to collect an award for a translation from a language, of which you don’t know a single word?

With the difficulty of finding good English translators for plays, I can see why English-speaking theatre managements have resorted to the solution of handing over these ‘literal’ translations, to established playwrights. Another incentive may be the view that their name will help sell tickets. But like any professional translator, I have strong reservations against this practice, and I think we ought to make our voices heard more clearly. For one thing, the actual translators (quite regardless of the standard of their work) are given no credit whatsoever. Moreover, they lose the statutory right to their intellectual property, since the rewrites are deemed sufficient to transfer copyright to the person doing the adaptation. (Otherwise, as you probably know, the copyright for all translated material legally rests with the translator.) In the case of popular, much-performed plays, this can be a source of huge financial gain to the adapter, who collects a substantial part of the royalties.

The practice of writing ‘new versions’ of foreign-language classics has been particularly successful — and hugely lucrative! — for some. This is of course due to the fact that they are based on brilliant, though outdated, translations, produced by highly skilled professionals in an era when the use of ‘literal translations’ and ‘new versions’ had not yet been introduced. For out-of-copyright classics, the adapters can claim royalties of a hundred per cent for the work.

Another serious effect of this practice is the loss suffered on the artistic level, in all cases I have seen, to the detriment of the original. You lose the import of the interpretation, which, as I mentioned before, is an element every bit as important as the expression. I believe this explains why Scandinavian playwrights, such as the brilliant Jon Fosse, has had huge success in most countries of the world, but is rarely produced in Britain and Ireland. The few English-language productions he’s had have been given only a lukewarm reception. I’m glad to say that my own translations of his early plays have fared better than most – but only in small experimental theatres.

Translating the plays by Jon Fosse has been said to present huge challenges. For one thing, he makes ample use of silence in his plays. How do you translate silence? Not just by writing the word in the script. No – silences for Fosse are an integral part of his dialogue, and have to be treated as such, built to materialise just as the playwright intended. He says himself that writing a play is like hearing a symphony, the music of which already exists. All he has to do is listen carefully and write down what is already there. With its reliance on rhythm and cadence, his plays allow for very little variation. Like a  house of cards, they collapse if not treated with due  sensitivity.

I have always enjoyed working with Fosse. For one thing, I have an affinity with his chosen vernacular, the so-called New Norwegian. Fosse made special mention of the fact that he is the first ever Nobel Laureate to be using this variant of Norwegian. It is a language not at all new, but salvaged from local dialects, in contrast to the official Norwegian, which is a remnant of Danish colonisation and carries the stamp of authority. The written form of New Norwegian is used by only 10% of the population.

I spent my early childhood in a remote village right on the Swedish/ Norwegian border, where the local dialect was very close to Norwegian. So it was a source of pure nostalgia for me to work with Fosse’s idiom, sparse as it is, and always to the point.

Fosse, now Nobel Laureate, is considered one of the most important writers of our time. His plays have been staged in over a thousand productions all over the world. As he rose to the pinnacle of international success, theatres all over the world vied for the privilege of introducing him in their own language. In the major theatres of Britain, this was done by engaging a leading playwright who would work from a literal translation.

To give you a couple of examples of the hazards this practice presents, I shall quote from two productions of plays by Fosse what I consider bad choices that were made, not by translator colleagues, but by these well-known playwrights. They are, by all means, excused by the fact that they were working without access to the original text.

I am the Wind is a play that, like most of Fosse’s work, deals with profound existential issues. It features two close friends onboard a boat. I remember a key moment in the play, one that stays with you. One of the two characters stares vacantly at the horizon, dreamily addressing the sea in preparation to, presumably, drowning himself. In Norwegian he would have said: “havet…” This word I would not have hesitated to translate as “the sea…” But when it was staged at the Young Vic in London, the character said “the ocean …”, which did not capture the depth of feeling expressed by the long “a” vowel in the Norwegian original – a quality that could easily have been represented by the “ea” in “the sea… in English.

The other example is from a play called The Girl on the Sofa, performed at the Edinburgh Festival. There is one moment where Fosse’s sense of humour has the potential to shine. A sea captain arrives home from a voyage earlier than expected, only to find his wife underneath another man on the sitting-room sofa. It takes no imagination to picture what the two of them are up to. The husband stands contemplating them unseen for a good while, keeping the audience waiting in suspense for a highly charged continuation of the scene.

At long last his cheating wife opens her eyes to see him. The pregnant pause continues, until she finally speaks. The axiom she utters is quite absurd in the circumstances, showing just how inane a person becomes when caught in flagrante. In Norwegian I assume she says: “Så du er hjemme nå?” My own version of that would have been: “Back, are you?” Enough to bring the house down. But the person responsible for the Edinburgh version kept the literal translation of the line provided: “So you are at home now.” A flat statement – not in the least funny. In Edinburgh nobody laughed.

When it came to staging one of Fosse’s plays in Dublin, the normal routine was applied: an Irish playwright was engaged to rework an existing translation. However, this was the official version, recently translated by me, approved by Fosse, published by Bloomsbury, and nominated for an award. Nevertheless, I had the dubious pleasure of reading in the Irish Times that a ‘new version’ of this play was to be presented, based on a ‘literal translation’ by myself.

With my professional reputation at stake, I couldn’t let that pass. I contacted the Irish Times, and a somewhat confused debate followed in the press. My friend Fosse, ever shy of confrontation, opted not to get publicly involved. I made a point of examining the so-called new version and found the integrity, not to mention the rhythm, of the play compromised by the addition of some rough Dublin slang and a few four-letter words – in total contravention of Fosse’s style. His dialogue is so minimalist, it avoids any offensive language, leaving profanities unspoken, between the lines.

Furthermore, a handful of words had been altered for no good reason, to the detriment of the play. It is about a depressed travelling businessman, who comes across a down-and-out woman in a park and ends up spending the night with her. Halfway through, she turns to him and says: “I’m your lady.” This is tongue-in-cheek, perhaps with a nod to the song popular at the time, and I can see a good actress having some fun with that line. First, the double entendre – her being a lady of the night – and then the role-playing, as they both make a game of pretending to be something they are not. It works as a clue, inviting a response from her co-performer.

In the Dublin version, this line was altered to “I’m your woman”, which again falls flat and means nothing. Neither actor could do anything with that line. I actually challenged the playwright, asked him what he thought he achieved by altering that word, and he said it was necessary because the woman was a down-and-out, so she couldn’t be a lady. But in the Norwegian original, what the down-and-out woman says is “I’m your lady”, not “I’m your woman”.

I didn’t win this battle. The few changes made were enough to allow the playwright to claim copyright for his version. But since this occasion, any alterations to translation of Fosse’s plays have to be approved by the translator, who retains the copyright.

In the early Noughties, I became involved in a comparative EU project to translate an original play into two separate EU languages. Irish-language poet and playwright Máire Holmes and I got together to produce two versions, in English and Irish, of an early Fosse play, And We Shall Never Part. It was a one-woman show being only an hour long, so the plan was to present the two versions back-to-back: the English one first, for those who might not have a perfect command of Gaeilge, and then after an interval, the Irish version.

We started with a showcase production at the Irish Writers’ Centre, using the same talented bi-lingual actress for both performances. What amazed us all was how different the two versions appeared. To me, the Irish seemed closer to the original, perhaps because New Norwegian, like Irish, is a language living through the spoken word, rather than the written. It is favoured by poets, and the lyrical quality of Fosse’s cadences did come across more clearly in Irish. It went to show just how languages differ, and though Máire and I had worked jointly on the interpretation of the play, she availed of a tool to express it more poetically, thanks to the qualities inherent in the Irish language.

We approached a number of major theatres in Ireland, but surprisingly, no one was the least bit interested in this exercise to illustrate, if nothing else, the clear nuances of language and culture between English and Irish. The two versions remain dormant to this day.

I once did a translation workshop with a Leaving Cert class studying French. I gave the pupils the task of translating into English the opening sentence of Albert Camus’s L’Etranger – The Stranger: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Just four words, couldn’t be simpler. I invited different suggestions, and there were plenty of them, all correct, but still different; “Today mother died. Mother died today. My mother died today. Today my mother died. Mam died today. Today, my mammy died.” Etcetera. What I wanted to show was the wide ramifications of literary translation, even when it is correct. No two translators produce identical results.

Having said that, the same freedom does not apply to translation of work for the stage. With the risk of repeating myself, the work of the dramatic translator is primarily to recreate a virtual stage reality that has the theatrical effect intended by the playwright. And to achieve this, it goes almost without saying that, in order to produce good translations for the theatre, you need to have some knowledge of stagecraft. So if you are at all interested in translating plays, I recommend that you gain, if you don’t already have it, some practical experience of work in the theatre, whether volunteering for a professional company or joining a university dram soc or an amateur drama group: as an actor, director, stage manager, ASM, or just as help to pull the curtain.

To be part of the process of putting a production together will give you an awareness of the way a script is brought to its full theatrical potential. The experience is fascinating, if not addictive, and much less lonely than other translation work tends to be. The culmination of an opening night is always a source of great excitement. Personally, I can’t think of any more rewarding kind of translation work, and I do heartily recommend it.