I have mixed feelings about New Year celebrations. Although New Year is promoted as the second “big event” of the festive season, I have never known it trump Christmas, and I’m sceptical that it ever will. It’s a great shame, as I’d like to believe that there’s a certain magic about ending a year and beginning another, but I think it’s easy to feel like it’s something to get over, rather than celebrate.

Generally, I have found New Year’s Eve to be, well, a massive let down. I have yet to attend a sparkly, glamorous party with elegant finger food and live music. So far I’ve been to numerous less-than-average Greek restaurants, and, on a particularly bad year, been squashed with 70 other people in a dilapidated prefab outbuilding of an insalubrious pub, with cheap paper tablecloths and a limited air supply due to overcrowding. Sat miserably alongside my cousins, hearing relatives complain about the food, the alcohol, the music and each other, these evenings were spent desperately wishing for the arrival of midnight in order to get the night over with as quickly as possible. Another memorable year was spent coughing in bed, garbling some fever-fuddled rubbish as I waited for the out-of-hours doctor to give me an appointment for antibiotics. Oh, and let’s not forget the time a stocking fell off the mantelpiece onto a candle flame during a New Year’s Eve dinner party, causing a minor incendiary incident that left us all in shock.

New Year rarely stands up to the magic of Christmas

Breadmaking on the first day of the year can be soothing

Kashmiri Mirch Credit: Here Design

Aleppo pepper Credit: Here Design

Pulla Credit: Here Design

Dorset Naga Credit: Here Design

An Anarchy of Chillies is a tongue-warming tribute to this fiendish fruit, providing fascinating insight into an exotic world of flavour and flame. It’s an inspiration for gardeners, cooks and seekers of heat, and is a feast for all the senses. It will brighten up your bookshelf no end.

The proscenium arch transformed for The Jungle. Photo: Marc Brenner

Translations is one of Brian Friel’s finest and most renowned works. Written in 1980, the play has been performed throughout Ireland and across the globe to huge acclaim, and has now been revived at the National Theatre by former Royal Court Artistic Director, Ian Rickson. In an Irish-speaking community in Donegal in 1833, the play tells the story of the British Ordnance Survey of Ireland, and the process of translating Gaelic names into English for a new map. The setting is a hedge-school, where adults come in the evenings to study the classics, maths and geography. The schoolmaster’s son, Owen (Colin Morgan) returns home from Dublin in the pay of the British Army, tasked with finding Anglicised names for the places he knew growing up. Accompanied by romantic orthographer Lieutenant Yolland (a supremely eloquent and sensitive performance from Adetomiwa Edun) Owen studies the names of the landscape, searching enthusiastically for new, English ways to express them. But a burgeoning relationship between Yolland and local girl Maire (Judith Roddy) sparks trouble, and when Yolland disappears, Owen's family and friends come under threat.

The play shows us Ireland on the brink of change: as well as the English map, the new, free National schools threaten to overtake the hedge-schools, providing a wholly different form of education, taught only in English. The threat of famine also looms, whisperings of the potato blight that was soon to follow, with a menacing-looking fog hovering over the boggish land that forms Rae Smith’s set. The drip-drip-drip of rain through the roof of the school echoes like a ticking clock, adding to the sense of foreboding, and the fear that something unique and precious is on the verge of destruction.

Ciarán Hinds as Hugh. Photo: Catherine Ashmore

Friel’s script is so intricate, so masterful, it could easily overtake any of the actors attempting to speak his lines. But Rickson’s cast step up to the plate, all of them delivering solid, earnest performances. Charismatic Ciarán Hinds is authoritative and imperious as Hugh, the schoolmaster and patriarch, stalking the classroom and lecturing his students on Ovid and Homer, dismissing English as a “plebian”, unrefined language. His refusal to modernise is often funny and quaint, but when he is left alone at the play’s close, desperately trying to recall translations of the Odyssey, we are reminded of the inevitable isolation caused by clinging on to an idyllic, fictional past. Colin Morgan brings youthful energy and a touch of bravado to the role of Owen, a bundle of enthusiasm and optimism. He has no interest in the poetry that his father and Yolland so romanticise in that “quaint archaic tongue you people insist on speaking” and firmly believes that English is the key to the future. But the consequences of his actions are chilling, and as Morgan translates the names of places that will be razed to the ground if Yolland is not found, he seems to crumble in front of us. Bewildered, Owen chokes on the Gaelic words, as though they have already turned to ash in his mouth.

Colin Morgan as Owen. Photo: Catherine Ashmore

Although Translations could be interpreted as a solely political play, questions of language lie at its heart. Anyone who’s ever had to study translation knows that it’s a lot more complex than looking up a word in a dictionary and writing it down. Words carry a lot more than one single definition; there is context, subtext, history, nuance and register to be reckoned with. Each significance must be identified, each angle considered before a new word in the so-called Target Language is chosen to represent the original to a new audience. But can a direct opposite really be found? Is there even such a thing as accurate translation? Or will it always be a debasement, a betrayal, of the original? For most of us, translating a text from one language to another means doing the best of an inherently flawed job, for there is no such thing as a perfect translation. The only way to do that would be to leave the text as it is. Even if changing the map into English helps to modernise and streamline Ireland and its culture, Friel’s play forces us to question whether we lose far more by sweeping the complex origins of names under the rug. They are not merely letters in order but history, culture and identity.

Friel also uses language to highlight the complexities of colonialism. The alien nature of Gaelic spelling and pronunciation to Yolland and his countrymen gives Irish an air of mystery and fantasy. Both Hugh and Yolland agree that, like Latin and Greek, Irish is a language of poetry, not practicality: it is a form of escapism, a way of keeping real life at bay. To Owen, it is similarly obsolete, but Yolland is intoxicated by it, drunk on the sound of the words, repeating them over and over like a spell. Like the renaissance poet Edward Spenser (and British colonialists ever since), Yolland feels the pull of the “other”, the fascination of the abomination, demonstrating a desire to learn the language in the same breath as his urge to control it.

Judith Roddy and Adetomiwa Edun in rehearsal Photo: Catherine Ashmore

The theory of translation is a philosophical minefield, but differences in understanding can also be very funny, and Friel’s play brilliantly juxtaposes the serious with the silly. Rickson makes the most of moments of miscommunication written in the text with brilliant physical direction: energetic sign language met with blank and increasingly concerned faces, as well as earnest and hapless attempts at imitating the “foreigners”. A particular triumph is the love scene between Maire and Yolland: neither one can understand the other, but still they talk, expressing their feelings any way they can, even through the simple recitation of place names. It is a hypnotic moment, both funny and moving, as Rickson shows that, for all its good, language is not always necessary: the lovers do not need words to understand one another. As the physical space between them decreases, the chemistry palpable, both of them murmur “I know what you’re saying”. It is the one moment in the play in which the barrier between British and Irish understanding seems dissolved.

Ciarán Hinds in rehearsal, Photo: Catherine Ashmore

Friel adds another level of meaning to the piece by writing the whole play in English, despite setting it within an entirely Gaelic-speaking community. Even when the characters are clueless as to what is being said, the audience always understands; as though the entire situation has been translated for us already. Which, of course, it has. As audience members, we must realise that what we are seeing is merely a representation and interpretation of the facts, not the facts themselves. This leads to bigger questions about the nature of language, and what it really means. For mute student Sarah (played superbly by Michelle Fox), just being able to say her own name is a victory (“there’s nothing you can’t do now”) and for Maire, speaking English means an escape from poverty and a future in America. Thus language grants control of one’s destiny, and is a source of power. But this applies to the British, too. By changing names into their own tongue, British soldiers assert their supremacy over the Irish land and culture. Ireland becomes English names on a map: not a living, breathing community. Having the playtext in English is a final, sobering reminder of the impact of the real-life events that inform the play. The verbal scars left by the British presence still remain, and may never truly fade.

Translations runs at the Olivier, National Theatre until 11 August. You can buy tickets via the official website. 

There could not be a more magical setting for Peter Pan than Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Shaded by lush foliage, adorned with twinkle lights and filled with peals of children’s laughter, it takes very little suspension of disbelief to imagine yourself in Neverland. Or at least, it would be, had director Timothy Sheader not taken the brave decision to juxtapose this classic Edwardian fairytale with the horrors of the First World War. Audiences are not presented with the charming Darling nursery as the setting, but a crumbling hospital on the Western Front, held together with masking tape and the hard work of three nurses, one of whom is named Wendy. Surrounded by young men who have been blinded and maimed in the fighting, Wendy tries to provide comfort by reading aloud the story of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

The 2015 original production earned OAT an Olivier nomination for Best Entertainment and Family, and would arguably still be a strong contender this time round. The stage is alive with energy: Sam Angell is a convincing, curly-haired Pan, crowing and laughing as he takes to the sky in the stunning flight sequences. These are engineered by a system of pulleys, with individual members of the cast using their own weight to support the flight of their co-stars, shimmying up and down the set (appropriately) like band of sailors. There is much entertainment to be had from superb gang of Lost Boys, too, bouncing and leaping about in their multicoloured long johns, as well as Captain Hook (Dennis Herdman)'s raucus gang of pirates, who all look as though they've stepped out of a baddies-themed fancy dress party 

With the recent announcement of the closure of Soho denizen Wardour News, a play about the final days of a crumbling Soho institution seems to take on a new significance. With the small difference that fictional Christine Foskett of Absolute Hell is not forced to close her doors due to rent hikes or gentrification, but because the building is literally falling apart. Still, both seem to symbolise the end of an era, and the change in the fabric of a community. Foskett's club, La Vie en Rose (the Pink Room of the play's original title) is the favoured spot of gaggle of Soho luvvies: artists, film-types, G.Is and society ladies, a place where anything goes and all sexual preferences are welcome. 

Over the course of three hours, playwright Rodney Ackland introduces us to the lives and lusts of the club's clientele, set against the backdrop of a recovering, post-war Britain, on the eve of a Labour victory.  The play originally opened in 1952, closing after three weeks of biting criticism. It was only in the 1980s, when theatre censorship was a thing of the past, that Absolute Hell (as it was then renamed) had another chance in the limelight, with significant cuts and rewrites. Despite these, the play retains its epic proportions: a sprawling tableau of London in 1945, with over 21 characters mooching on and offstage.

The company Photo: Johan Persson

The sheer vastness of the play is perhaps its weakest point: with so many characters to reckon with, the audience's sympathy is stretched thin. With almost no history or background to fill them out, much of the ensemble are reduced to 2D caricatures, brought onstage merely to elicit some hollow laughs about the drunken, debauched society they represent. Some of them hit the mark: Eileen Marsh does a brilliant turn as a barmy Boxing Day evangelist Madge, and Patricia England makes a charmingly dotty Julia, mastering an extended joke about Siegfried Sassoon. Others fall short, with genuine feeling lost in all the posturing and hamminess.

Charles Edwards as Hugh Marriner. Photo: Johan Persson

The production's brilliance lies chiefly in the hands of its three protagonists, and none more so than Charles Edwards as the harried writer Hugh Marriner. Lovelorn and desperate, Edwards expertly shifts between the layers of Marriner's psyche, the words tripping off his tongue as he moves from  from plaintive appeals for affection, to needling requests for cash, to virulent exclamations of anger, all at lightning-speed. He offers an authenticity of character that seems lacking elsewhere in the piece, backed up by Sinéad Matthews as femme-fatale Elizabeth Collier and Kate Fleetwood as the woe-begotten proprietress, Christine.

Kate Fleetwood as Christine Fockett. Photo: Johan Persson

Despite appearances, Absolute Hell is not all black-market scotch and orgies,  and Director Joe Hill-Gibbons brings out the more poignant elements of Ackland's script to land sufficient blows on the audience. The references to the Holocaust (thought to be one of the earliest in British theatre) are chilling even in their sparseness, and there is painfully resonant relevance in Elizabeth Collier's insistence that, if she'd only gotten round to voting, she might have been able to make a difference to her country. The gay music and silliness are a garish reminder of the destruction they are ignoring outside of the crumbling building, and as they say themselves, they all go to La Vie en Rose to escape reality. This element is brilliant reflected in Lizzie Clachan's set design: a large mirror dominates one wall, in order to cover up the bomb damage from the Blitz. With the war and the world held successfully at bay, all the clientele can see are themselves.

Absolute Hell runs at the Lyttelton, National Theatre until 16 June. You can buy tickets on the official website.  
All photos (c) Johan Persson, courtesy of the National Theatre