Brian Friel’s 1980 masterpiece is a work of almost unbounded subtlety and nuance. Set in 1833, it depicts the visit of the British military cartographic team, the Ordnance Survey, to the small Donegal village where all of Friel’s plays are set, and in particular their interactions with the pupils and teachers of a hedge school which is about to become obsolete as the network of National Schools opens. The Englishmen speak only English, almost all the inhabitants of Ballybeg speak only Gaelic (as well as Greek and Latin, thanks to their schooling), but that Gaelic is represented onstage by lines uttered in English. We watch a constant series of incomprehensions whilst ourselves hearing and understanding all.

And what a lot of “all” there is. Through the Anglicisation of placenames – even interpreter Owen is misnamed Roland by the Brits – Friel shows how language is a mechanism of identity, whether asserting it for oneself and one’s community or imposing it on others. Linguistic fluidity with all that classicism enables the history and mythology of the past to inform the present. And, of course, all this language can build walls just as easily as bridges. It’s a magnificent piece of work.

Alas, the 1150-capacity Olivier Theatre is inimical to its delicacies. Rae Smith’s set is almost grotesque in the extent to which it inflates schoolmaster Hugh’s cottage, and the opening scene amongst the locals is likewise expanded to fill the theatre, losing not just subtlety of delivery but – ironically – the very rhythms of the words. Ciarán Hinds gets away with it, because Hugh is a bombastic figure anyway, and luckily the other principals, Colin Morgan as his son Owen and Judith Roddy as Máire (who forms an attachment to an English lieutenant), rein matters in and let both the music of Friel’s words and their intellectual harmonics emerge more naturally. The love scene between Máire and Adetomiwa Edun’s Lt Yolland is a beautiful combination of verbal unintelligibility and emotional clarity.

Overall, nowhere else does Friel meditate so deeply or compellingly on his own sense of liminality between British Northern Ireland and the Republic, and even an imperfect production such as Ian Rickson’s is a rich experience indeed.

Written for the Financial Times.