dokumen.pub_theatre-and-translation-9781350363656-9781137611611

For Eva and Elena, with all my love
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series editors’ preface
T he theatre is everywhere, from entertainment districts

to the fringes, from the rituals of government to the
ceremony of the courtroom, from the spectacle of the sport-
ing arena to the theatres of war. Across these many forms
stretches a theatrical continuum through which cultures
both assert and question themselves.
Theatre has been around for thousands of years, and the
ways we study it have changed decisively. It’s no longer
enough to limit our attention to the canon of Western dra-
matic literature. Theatre has taken its place within a broad
spectrum of performance, connecting it with the wider
forces of ritual and revolt that thread through so many
spheres of human culture. In turn, this has helped make con-
nections across disciplines; over the past 50 years, theatre
and performance have been deployed as key metaphors and
practices with which to rethink gender, economics, war, lan-
guage, the fine arts, culture and one’s sense of self.
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theatre & translation
Theatre & is a long series of short books which hopes to

capture the restless interdisciplinary energy of theatre and
performance. Each book explores connections between the-
atre and some aspect of the wider world, asking how the
theatre might illuminate the world and how the world might
illuminate the theatre. Each book is written by a leading the-
atre scholar and represents the cutting edge of critical think-
ing in the discipline.
We have been mindful, however, that the philosophical
and theoretical complexity of much contemporary academic
writing can act as a barrier to a wider readership. A key aim
for these books is that they should all be readable in one sit-
ting by anyone with a curiosity about the subject. The books
are challenging, pugnacious, visionary sometimes and, above
all, clear. We hope you enjoy them.
Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato
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Foreword by Caridad Svich
E l mundo es un pañuelo, my mother would often say in lilt-

ing Spanish. In the English, the rough translation is ‘The
world is a handkerchief’.
One could say that the metaphor and its meaning are to
some extent the same: a world that can feel sometimes as if
it were meeting between or among the folded corners of a
handkerchief and, by so doing, the fabric of global intercon-
nectedness becomes a palpable and very real thing.Yet if we
contrast this phrase with the more ubiquitous and quotidian
‘It’s a small world’, the meaning, whilst ostensibly the same
in theory, changes in the image it evokes in the mind. A small
world is not at all the same as one in which interconnectivity
is implied.
In this book, Margherita Laera will walk you through the
complex, radiant and necessary paths involved in the art of
translation and theatrical production. Laera demonstrates,
with sensitivity, skill and passion for this wide-ranging
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subject, the political, artistic and aesthetic frameworks that

mitigate the difficult and ever-evolving negotiations that are
part and parcel in acts of translation on the page and stage.
At a time in geopolitics where increasing far-right nation-
alist, fascist-leaning movements are on the rise, and xeno-
phobic ideologies are finding favour once again, to speak of
translation as an important artistic instrument of empathy is
no small matter. Laera shows us that without translation, in
its multiple and myriad facets, there would be precious little
understanding between and among cultures. Laera is right
to posit that theatre and performance as art forms are
uniquely positioned to serve as models for the practice of
empathy and also as tools for the examination of situations
where empathy is lacking or absent.
Laera’s book illuminates the threads that make theatre
and translation vital to the cultural work of progressive
societies.
Caridad Svich
∗
Caridad Svich received the 2012 OBIE for Lifetime
Achievement and the 2018 Ellen Stewart Award for Career
Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association of
Theatre in Higher Education. She is a playwright and transla-
tor and has authored and edited several books on theatre and
performance. She also serves as associate editor at Contemporary
Theatre Review, and drama editor at the literary translation
journal Asymptote.
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Introduction: For/On Behalf Of
On a scorching summer day in July 2018, I walked from

Woolwich Arsenal Station in south-east London to Artillery
Square. The latter is now a large public space surrounded by
residential developments, but from the eighteenth to the
early twentieth centuries, the British Armed Forces’ Royal
Arsenal used to be housed here, along the southern banks of
the river Thames. The thought that bombs and guns that
killed so many lives in the name of the British Empire were
made here chilled my spine as I took my standing place on an
outdoor platform to see This Is Not For You, a performance
devised by the British theatre company Graeae to commem-
orate the centenary of the end of World War I. As I took my
place, I was offered instructions on how to hear audio
descriptions and visualize captions for the performance
through my mobile phone. In front of us, on a makeshift
parade ground, 30 limbless veterans who served in various
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conflicts – Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq, Kuwait and

Afghanistan, to name a few – marched, walked or wheeled
their chairs and introduced themselves to the audience with
their name, rank and impairment. Speaking into a standing
microphone, a performer read out these words from the
script by Mike Kenny, while two actors doubling up as sign
language interpreters – positioned right in the middle of the
stage – translated them into British Sign Language (BSL) for
the deaf and hard of hearing:
They’re doing it for all of us
Now is not the time for hateful
Now’s the time for grateful
There’s nothing like a war
To separate the men from the boys
The men from the boys
The men from the women
And everyone else as well
This is not for you. They said
This was not for any of us
Up to them to keep us safe
Up to us to keep the faith
It was all on our behalf
Keep things safe
We won’t be long. They said
We won’t be long (14–15)
These sentences resonated in my head. What could be not for
you – or not for me? And conversely, what could be for you – or
for me? The war is certainly not for me, I thought, it’s not for
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those who are left at home, untrained to cope with its
unspeakable brutality. And yet the war, any war, fought by
the army swearing allegiance to the country of my birth, and
to any other country who might have granted me citizenship
thereafter is – technically, theoretically, arguably – fought for
me too. It is fought on my behalf, whether I like it or not. In
Artillery Square, I was looking and being looked at in the
eyes by people whose limbs were amputated following wars
they thought they were fighting for me too. That was quite a
shocking thought: they lost their limbs on my behalf. I didn’t
think I could bear that thought any longer. Now the war, any
war, was no longer for them either. They could no longer fight
for me for real, for their country, anywhere other than in a
theatre. They could only be on stage now, performing for
me, for us, for themselves, for others. The veterans in Artillery
Square performed themselves, telling the audience about
fighting at the front and facing life after war, confronting
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and coming to terms
with their new bodies, routines, dreams and nightmares. But
by virtue of theatrical convention, as well as performing (for)
themselves, the limbless ex-soldiers before us also embodied
World War I veterans and spoke for them – on their behalf –
because those being spoken on behalf of did not have a
chance to take part in the performance and tell their own
stories, or because they were no longer with us and could no
longer speak for themselves.
I have used ‘for’ and ‘on behalf of’ several times already:
but what do these actually mean? What are the ethical and
political implications of doing something for/on behalf of
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somebody else? Who exactly do/should performers per-

form for/on behalf of in the theatre? Is it everybody, or only
some people? For starters, they speak for those who are able
to turn up and understand. According to the 22nd edition of
Ethnologue, a database of all languages, there are 7111 living
languages in the world (Simons 2019), and not everyone can
equally talk, see and hear – hence humans’ reliance on vari-
ous types of languages and forms of translation to connect to
and understand one another. Graeae’s Artistic Director
Jenny Sealey calls her approach to theatre ‘the aesthetics of
access’: by this she means that her company consistently
cater for the widest possible variety of spectating styles by
creatively weaving captions, audio description and BSL
interpretation into each of their performances and offering a
relaxed space in the auditorium for those that would benefit
from less strict standards on audience etiquette. Graeae’s
productions are therefore always at least bilingual, in English
and BSL, and include various forms of translation so as to
make sure the company are performing for you too. Too often
theatre can be exclusive, because it addresses and represents
only certain kinds of people, but it is the theatre communi-
ty’s duty to rise to the challenge of making sure the theatre
speaks for, addresses and represents the largest possible
number of people by using various forms of translation,
even if there are inevitable cost implications. Make no mis-
take, though: someone’s always inevitably being left out as,
for instance, it is customary to assume that those attending
the theatre in a certain country can understand the local
spoken and/or sign language. But those theatre-goers who
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don’t – such as, potentially, migrants or tourists – are mostly
not specifically catered for. I for one have often found myself
attending theatre productions in countries where I didn’t
speak the language, wishing that a translation fairy could
whisper the translation in my ear during the show without
disturbing others.
But how can one actually speak for, or on behalf of,
another – in other words, how does representation work?
How can we make sure that the theatre becomes a truly
inclusive art form, whereas many people as possible feel
adequately represented and catered for? Like an actor speaks
on behalf of a character – she stands there on stage in lieu of
the character, taking their place, becoming (an)other by
uttering their words – a translator speaks on behalf of an
author – she writes in their place, often trying to imagine
how the author would have phrased a particular word or
sentence, had they been native speakers in the target lan-
guage, or else trying to insert her voice in the target text.
Taking theatre and translation at face value, one might
think that acting, speaking, writing, staging or interpreting
on behalf of someone else is not only possible, but funda-
mental to the very nature of these practices, which few peo-
ple question as structurally unethical. For instance, we
hardly ever hear the argument that actors playing historical
characters do not have the right to portray them because
they are too distant from them. But ethical problems arise
when someone in a position of power is seen to seize the
right to represent or speak for someone who has less power
than them, for instance when a straight actor plays an
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LGBT+ character, because homosexuality has been rou-

tinely marginalized by heteronormative discourses.
So should people only be allowed to speak for them-
selves – or maybe just for the groups of which they are a
member? On the one hand, speaking on behalf of others can
be seen as an act of violence given the potential to misrepre-
sent and appropriate an identity that isn’t yours. Some stage
artists have chosen the realm of presentational performance
to avoid this ethical conundrum and to question the very
notion of representation – Antonin Artaud was one of the
first. Feminist translators, such as Nicole Brossard and
Barbara Godard, have challenged the requirement to faith-
fully represent their source by embracing conscious manipu-
lation of the text. On the other hand, for much current
theatre and translation practice, representation of the (cul-
tural and linguistic) other is a central concern, therefore it
seems essential that we find an ethically sound base for the
act of speaking for/on behalf of others. Linda Martín Alcoff
(1991) examined whether and how scholars can ethically
speak for others and concluded that retreating into only
speaking for one’s self denies the very fact that each of us is
always already made of other people’s stories. But Alcoff
rightly recommends that the privileged who find themselves
in a position to speak for the less privileged must speak with,
not only for them.
This book explores the intersections between theatre
and translation by proposing that the two practices have
something fundamental in common. By attending a live per-
formance and/or reading a text originally conceived in a
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language other than the one in which they are accessing it,
audiences and readers encounter stories written/spoken/
performed on behalf of others, such as people from other
cultures, but also people from our own culture that are dif-
ferent from us, or even the other in ourselves. As users of
theatre and translation, we are given the task to interpret
someone else’s interpretation of an other, and, in so doing,
we become translators too. This book aims to support you,
the reader, in taking on this delicate yet key role, that of the
interpreter of the stories (told on behalf) of others – no mat-
ter if you are a theatre-maker, spectator, scholar, student or
anything in between.
Theatre and translation share questions about ethics,
politics and aesthetics, which I will examine in this volume.
Chapter 1 will explore the ‘what’ of theatre and translation:
what do we mean when we talk about translation in relation
to theatre? Defining the field will be my aim here. Chapter 2
is concerned with the ‘how’ of theatre and translation. I will
focus on how practice is informed by political and ethical
paradigms, and formulate ideas about challenging the status
quo. In Chapter 3 I will tackle the ‘why’ of theatre and trans-
lation and argue that more (types of) translations are needed
to support a culture of equity, diversity and inclusion.
The point of this book is not to prescribe but to interro-
gate, critique and propose a series of points for further dis-
cussion. My arguments will inevitably be informed by my
position of privilege as a white, middle-class European and a
full-time member of staff at a British university, but they will
also filter my sensibility as a feminist scholar, a practicing
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theatre translator, and an Italian migrant who writes and

lives her daily life in a language/culture other than her native
one, and has consequently developed a mixed identity. This
book also reflects the views of someone who has recently
had some experience of what it means to be part of an
unwelcome minority – EU nationals in the UK – who woke
up on 24 June 2016 feeling like the country they had decided
to call home wanted them out.
Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation

Etymological Labyrinths
Definitions first. What do we mean by ‘theatre’ and ‘transla-
tion’? It has become customary for scholarly investigations
into specific concepts to start with etymological musings,
almost in search of a word’s ‘essential’ meaning, but, of
course, etymologies can only tell the relative point of view
of one language/culture, and they encapsulate the relics of
past – if sometimes persistent – ways of conceptualizing the
world. I want to propose that, rather than using etymology
to find the definitive meaning of a concept through the lim-
ited perspective of a single language, investigating how
words are made of smaller units of meaning, and how those
units have been used in the past to construct more complex
concepts, can tell us a great deal about the cultural history of
an idea as it develops through, for instance, Latin and ancient
Greek and into Romance and other European contexts. This
activity can in turn help us relativize, destabilize and unlearn
some of our own linguistic-cultural biases.
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theatre translator, and an Italian migrant who writes and

lives her daily life in a language/culture other than her native
one, and has consequently developed a mixed identity. This
book also reflects the views of someone who has recently
had some experience of what it means to be part of an
unwelcome minority – EU nationals in the UK – who woke
up on 24 June 2016 feeling like the country they had decided
to call home wanted them out.
Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation

Etymological Labyrinths
Definitions first. What do we mean by ‘theatre’ and ‘transla-
tion’? It has become customary for scholarly investigations
into specific concepts to start with etymological musings,
almost in search of a word’s ‘essential’ meaning, but, of
course, etymologies can only tell the relative point of view
of one language/culture, and they encapsulate the relics of
past – if sometimes persistent – ways of conceptualizing the
world. I want to propose that, rather than using etymology
to find the definitive meaning of a concept through the lim-
ited perspective of a single language, investigating how
words are made of smaller units of meaning, and how those
units have been used in the past to construct more complex
concepts, can tell us a great deal about the cultural history of
an idea as it develops through, for instance, Latin and ancient
Greek and into Romance and other European contexts. This
activity can in turn help us relativize, destabilize and unlearn
some of our own linguistic-cultural biases.
8
For instance, we know that ‘theatre’ comes from the
ancient Greek noun θέατρον, theatron, literally ‘the place of
seeing/watching’, and originally it only referred to the seat-
ing area of an open-air amphitheatre, not to theatre as an art
form. The Greek verb θεάομαι, theaomai, meant to behold
and to contemplate both literally – I see through my eyes –
and metaphorically – I understand. Noting the emphasis on
seeing is crucial to grasp the cultural history of theatre as
visual spectacle in ancient Greece and its influence on the
western world. This etymology helps us understand how, in
the many western languages/cultures that have inherited the
word ‘theatron’, theatre tends to be understood as some-
thing that one accesses mainly with one’s sight. This might
permit us to critique the understanding of theatre as a place
where vision is the master of our experience, and instead
propose one in which each of our senses, such as hearing,
touching, smelling and tasting, should be considered. How
do the blind or partially sighted fit into this visual definition
of theatre?
Similarly, the etymology of ‘translation’ allows us to illu-
minate a key aspect of the complex cultural history of trans-
lation in the western world. We know that it comes from the
Latin translatio, a compound of ‘trans-’ (across) and the root
lat-, associated with the irregular verb ferre (to carry), so that
we may say that to translate means ‘to carry across’.
Translation could be considered, then, a metaphorical accep-
tation of translatio, which in a literal sense means to trans-
port something from one place to another. According to the
Romans, translating was something comparable to shipping
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meaning across to a different location.This etymology brings

us face to face with a deep-seated western understanding of
translation as a matter of relocating content from one lan-
guage to another, whereby the parcel’s content would
remain unchanged in the process of delivery. Searching fur-
ther afield within etymological connections, we also know
that the Latin transferre is a calque – a linguistic process also
known as ‘loan translation’, whereby a word construction in
one language is the translation of a word in another – of the
Greek verb μεταφέρειν, metaphérein (to transfer, to change,
where ‘meta-’ = ‘trans-’, and ferre = phérein), so this
makes the Latin-derived word ‘translation’ cross-
linguistically connected to the Greek-derived word ‘meta-
phor’. In modern Greek, a removals van may actually have
the word μεταφορά, metaphorá (‘transport’), painted over
it – but moving houses has nothing to do with metaphors, or
has it?
As with the image of delivering goods across to a differ-
ent place, western conceptualizations of translation have
been haunted by the metaphors that have been used through
the ages to define it, which often operate across linguistic
barriers. For instance, the influential trope that the best
translations are ‘faithful’ evokes patriarchal ideals of femi-
ninity (a translation is faithful, passive, derivative) versus
masculinity (the original is active, masterly, unique) and
works across many European languages. A ‘good’ translator,
like a ‘good’ wife/servant, should stand behind their origi-
nal/master/husband. But as is pointed out by the well-
known Italian idiom traduttore traditore (translator traitor)
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and the French expression belle infidèle (literally, ‘beautiful
and unfaithful woman’, which refer to translations that,
despite their aesthetic quality, supposedly depart too much
from the original), the popular imagination both demands
faithfulness and denies its very possibility. The take-home
message of these metaphors is that translators and women
can hardly be trusted.
Post-colonial and feminist metaphors of translation have
tried to subvert these traditional images: in his 1928 Manifesto
Antropófago, Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade proposed a
new way of understanding translation as a form of cannibal-
ism, an attempt at liberating Brazilian culture from mental
colonialism whereby, following native rituals, the coloniz-
er’s blood could be transformed into new energy by the
digestive system of the colonized. The expressions ‘re-belle et
infidèle’ (literally, rebellious and unfaithful’, a pun on the
‘belle infidèle’ image), ‘reécriture au féminin’ (feminine rewrit-
ing) and ‘womanhandling’ (a wordplay on ‘manhandling’)
are used by feminist writers and translators Susanne de
Lobitinère-Harwood (1982), Nicole Brossard and Barbara
Godard to refer to the process of translation as a creative
endeavour, refuting the hierarchic binary of original vs copy.
In the western popular imagination, translation has been
(and still is) understood as the task of moving units of mean-
ing across to different places. But to think of translation as
factual transportation of content is, at best, reductive and,
at worst, misleading – it can lead one to think that there are
such things as ‘literal’ or ‘exact’ translations, and that they
are distinct from ‘free’ translations.The fact is that a translation
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is never about simple and unproblematic ‘transfers’; and ‘lit-

eral’ translation, understood as an accurate and indisputable
version of a text in another language, is never actually pos-
sible. Translators, like actors with their characters and
directors with their scripts, will always have to make choices
that highlight this or that aspect of the source text (namely,
the entity previously known as the ‘original’), and their
choices will solicit different associations in the spectators/
readers of the target text, precisely because no two lan-
guages segment the world in the same way.
Perhaps exploring the etymology of ‘translation’ in
other languages/cultures could help us further redress the
cultural associations explored so far through English. Many
modern languages use loan translations of the Latin trans-
ferre and of the ancient Greek metaphérein – for instance,
the German übersetzen and the Russian ηереводить,
perevodit, which both mean ‘to carry across’. But in other
languages, like for instance Japanese, the word used to
refer to the process of translation does not suggest spatial
metaphors. In Japanese, the verb/noun 翻訳, hon’yaku, is
formed of hon – ‘to turn around’, ‘to change’ – and yaku, a
character with many possible meanings – such as ‘reason-
ing’, ‘meaning’, ‘situation’, but also ‘translation’ – which
are qualified by the context (in this case the association
with ‘hon’). Therefore, you could say that in Japanese, to
translate suggests ‘to change one’s reasoning’, ‘to change
one’s mind’ or ‘to change meaning’, but also ‘to change
situation’ Can. As Judy Wakabayashi argues, ‘the notion
underlying hon’yaku is one of change (including
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intralingual change) rather than intralingual transfer or
carrying across identical meaning’ (2009: 183).
In Chinese – which by the way is somewhat ‘etymologi-
cally’ linked to Japanese via the practice of kambun kundoku,
the translation of written Chinese into written Japanese – to
translate is 翻譯, fānyi.The first character, which is the same
as in Japanese, but is pronounced fān, again signifies ‘to turn
over’, ‘to flip’. The second character, yi, also means ‘to inter-
pret’ but is a homonym of the character meaning ‘exchange’.
According to Maria Tymoczko (2014: 72), the etymology of
fānyi is linked to the practices of embroidery and turning
pages of a book, which suggests the image of the reverse of
an embroidered work, with loose ends and hanging threads.
By letting ourselves get lost in the maze of etymological
quests, we have encountered semantic chains linking transla-
tion with notions apparently distant from it.What we should
take home from this is how the cultural history of words can
shed light on established assumptions within languages/cul-
tures, but also prompt reflections for how to subvert them.
What’s in a Cup of Tea? The Mirage of Equivalence

If translation is understood as delivering a fixed meaning
unchanged to a different context, it is clear that we will
always have a problem in fulfilling that goal and that transla-
tion will be understood as a paradoxical endeavour. Even the
simplest sentence, for instance, the English, ‘Would you like
a cup of tea?’, does not easily map on to other language/
culture combinations and could be translated in many differ-
ent ways, none of which fully reflect the associations that
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such a sentence suggests in a British English context (because,

of course, that same sentence means different things in South
African, Nigerian, Jamaican, Australian or US English). Tea
has such a rich cultural history in China, Japan and Korea,
where it has been consumed for thousands of years, but also
a very different one in India – where it was introduced as a
crop by British colonialists – and in the West – where it
became popular following the British Empire’s successful
attempt to challenge China’s trade monopoly. Back in the
1800s, plantations in India and Brazil were looked after by
slaves or badly paid labourers. Imagine the context of the
sentence is a British parent talking to their child who is feel-
ing down, where ‘a nice cup of tea’ is that thing that is sup-
posed to always make one feel better, an ailment for the
soul’s ills – something that French scholar Roland Barthes
might have called a ‘mythology’, whereby tea is transformed
into a pre-ideological fact and deprived of its history, con-
cealing its association with colonialism and exploitation (see
Barthes 2000). The history of tea and tea-drinking habits
alone is enough to change the meaning of this beverage for
different people in different places.
It is certainly not offered to cheer people up in Northern
Brazil, Peru or Croatia, where you would only drink it if you
had a temperature or an upset tummy. So if that mother
offered that cup of tea to her child on a stage, a spectator in
São Paulo might infer that the child is physically unwell, or
the whole notion of the British ‘cuppa’ might be lost on her.
What should a Brazilian translator do then? One of the pos-
sible interpretations of the sentence is, ‘Can I comfort you
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with something that will make you feel better?’ But if in the
target culture tea is not commonly drunk, or if it is consid-
ered an expensive luxury of the upper or colonial classes, a
translator wishing to communicate ‘equivalent meaning’ and
elicit an ‘equivalent effect’ in the target audience may decide
to swap the cup of tea with the local panacea of choice.
For instance, my Southern Italian granny would never
have dreamt of offering me tea (an entirely alien drink to
her) and would have cooked me spaghetti with tomato sauce
instead. If I were looking pale, for an extra shot of positive
energy, she would have made me an uovo sbattuto (a whisked
raw egg yolk with tons of sugar). However, what tea means
to an English person will never exactly map on to what pasta
or uovo sbattuto mean for an Italian (and they mean different
things to different people in different Italian regions too):
there is no real cultural equivalence available there, as with
most other cases of culturally-specific notions.
At this point you might ask, ‘Are you really telling me
that an exact equivalent can never be found in translation –
even for concrete things like, say, “carbon dioxide”?’ Yes, I
am telling you just that, because a word’s meaning is never
reducible to its referent (here, CO2), but it consists of the
sum of all its possible uses and associations, and its definition
shifts with context. Mind you, in Italian, you have two pos-
sible translations of ‘carbon dioxide’: biossido di carbonio in a
more technical register and anidride carbonica in a more pop-
ular one. Even if both seem like exact, literal translations of
‘carbon dioxide’ without ‘loss’, you need to take into
account that cultural associations and use patterns of this
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notion will vary widely in different contexts: a Guardian-

reading middle-class Londoner in 2020 might typically asso-
ciate any mention of ‘carbon dioxide’ with climate change
and one’s carbon footprint; the same phrase in Barbados will
have a different meaning. A Southern Italian cattle farmer or
coal plant worker, or indeed anyone living in a context in
which fighting climate change is not considered a priority,
might be more inclined to associate anidride carbonica with
sparkling water or photosynthesis than with the greenhouse
effect. One can never entirely replicate how a notion in one
language/culture is linked, semantically, socially or ideo-
logically, with other notions, and the maps these associations
create in people’s minds.
I hope you can see now that the notion of equivalence is
little more than a fantasy. And yet translation is far from
impossible, it just needs to be reframed and reimagined:
from the relocation of invariable pieces of content to the
creation of interpretative possibilities for constantly shifting
meanings (see Venuti 2013: 2–5). People think, segment and
name the world differently through different languages: we
need to learn to accept and value that difference, rather than
silence it, through the practice of translation. This is why
more people need to become aware of the processes and
complexities of translation.
In Algerian playwright Mohamed Kacimi’s French-
language play Terre Sainte (Holy Land, 2006), two characters
we can presume to be from a Palestinian context converse
about the ongoing war while drinking arak – an aniseed-fla-
voured distilled spirit typical of the Eastern Mediterranean
16
and Western Asia. In Colin Teevan’s English translation of
this play, the characters drink whisky (a decision taken in
agreement with Kacimi, but the script warns the reader that
the director can choose to switch back to arak). If the char-
acters drink whisky, what will remain of the specifically
Middle-Eastern context – assuming it was relevant? If arak is
kept, what would spectators of the English-language pro-
duction make of this ‘alien’ spirit? Will they read it as ‘par-
ticular’ or ‘universal’? It is a small decision that could have
big repercussions on the production’s reception. Neither of
the two translation approaches will give the audience unme-
diated access to the ‘original’. They will only give them
access to the theatre-makers’ subjective rendition of the
source.
So far, I’ve touched on single word choices. But transla-
tion is also about things like the use of sounds, figures of
speech, the structure of sentences, style, genre, discourse,
intertextuality and much more. And the complications don’t
end here. If we have now established that there are many
possible translations of the same source, each highlighting
different aspects and evoking different associations, what can
we say of the other element in the pair, the entity formerly
known as the ‘masterly original’?
Since at least Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the
Author’, which postulates the ‘Birth of the Reader’, critics
have questioned the stability of texts, foregrounding instead
how porous, indeterminate and open they are to interpreta-
tion, not only in different times, places and cultures, but to
different people in the same historical and cultural context.
17
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Barthes argued that oppressive western notions of author-

ship led literary critics to tie their readings to authorial
intention and that we must instead learn to separate the
‘scriptor’ (the author-figure, now deprived of authority)
from the text (1977: 145). Literary critics are now more
likely to stress that each reader is entitled to a different
interpretation of a text, no matter the author’s intention
(that elusive notion) – hence the nature of a ‘work’ is intrin-
sically unstable and no single interpretation can ever claim
superiority.
If, then, textual sources are not repositories of fixed,
unquestionable meanings, then it is only obvious that trans-
lation is all the more one interpretation of an entity that will
keep changing depending on the time, culture and point of
view from which it is approached. If there is no single, valid,
authoritative meaning of a text, then there can be no single,
valid, authoritative translation of it. Both elements in the
pair – the source and the target text, or the ‘original’ and its
‘copy’ – are unstable, shifting, indeterminate. Suddenly, it
all seems a little bit more complex than just shipping a par-
cel across from one place to another.
Translation as Performance, Performance as Translation

We have seen how staging a play can be considered a kind
of translation, whereby a director or ensemble/collective
transfer a performance script from page to stage – or,
more accurately, author an ‘intermedial adaptation’, from
the medium of writing to the medium of performance
(Laera 2014: 6). One of the most outspoken people to
18
make the connection between staging and translating was
French theatre director and translator Antoine Vitez, who
famously said in the 1980s that ‘mise en scène and transla-
tion are the same activity: they are the art of selecting
among a hierarchy of signs’ (Vitez in Déprats: 32). Drawing
on Vitez, director and performer Simon McBurney said in
a public lecture that ‘all theatre is a process of translation’
and that, in the context of the theatre, ‘translation demands
a return to the pre-verbal’, meaning that body language
can narrow the gap between the source text and the target
language rendition (2017).
The relation between a translation and its source is a bit
like the one between a theatre performance and its script. In
this sense, the translator is like a theatre-maker creating a
performance of the source, one of many possible (re)pre-
sentations of it. Much western theatre prides itself on being
able to reflect reality, holding a mirror up to the spectators
so they can recognise themselves. The realist and naturalist
movements became invested in the ‘fidelity’ and ‘authentic-
ity’ of their stagings, a bit as if they were trying to be ‘faith-
ful translators’ of life on the stage. But the fact is that
theatre’s mirror is always a distorted one – the theatre gives
audiences as much access to ‘real life’ as a translation gives
reader access to the ‘original’. Performances, play scripts
and translations are interpretations of a reality/source, they
don’t embody that reality/source itself in any presumed
‘essence’.
19
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In western traditions, both theatre and translation have

been thought of as practices that ought to be subservient to
the written text. While the dominant continental European
view of mise en scène (the French term for ‘putting on
stage’) has already largely emancipated directors from the
duty of serving the text and granted them the status of
‘auteurs’, the understanding of mise en scène as secondary
to playwriting still survives today in certain pockets of
British theatre, where the role of the director is conceived as
subordinate to the playwright’s intentions, and therefore not
acknowledged as a legitimate form of authorship (see
Billington 2007). Equally, traditional western thinking wants
translations to reflect the original author’s intended meaning
and style by searching for ‘equivalence’ in the target con-
text. This understanding of translation demands that trans-
lators take all necessary steps to efface themselves and
become transparent, giving the impression that translation
never actually happened, and that the source was magically
transformed into a new original in the target language.
According to Judy Wakabayashi, the issue of originality
vs derivativeness in Asian translation traditions is not entirely
relevant. Notions such as reverence towards the authority of
a written text were only introduced in Japanese, Chinese
and Indian thinking on translation as a consequence of cul-
tural contact with the West. Wakabayashi points out that
concepts of ownership derived from western capitalism cre-
ate sharp divisions between public and private, original and
copy, which are less pertinent in places like India and South-
East Asia where written stories were shared on palm leaves
20
(very different from the permanence of printing) and retell-
ing with variation have long been a crucial part of oral story-
telling traditions (2011: 27).
With its obsessive recycling of old stories, performance
in many cultural contexts is an inherently repetitive art. But
ask any theatre-maker, and they will tell you that no two
performances are exactly identical. Changes in performers’
energy levels can affect the audience deeply, and the timing
of a joke can make or break the comic effect. Repetition
with variance is essential to both translation and perfor-
mance in many cultures – it often lies at the core of theatre’s
aesthetic models and forms the basis for its creative pro-
cesses (rehearsals in French are called répétitions). For
instance, Japanese Noh’s classical repertoire is composed of
roughly 240 canonical plays which consist of a set combina-
tion of music, script and choreography, amongst other ele-
ments. While inevitably there are subtle variations in each
classical Noh performance that expert spectators can spot,
painstaking reproduction is key to this art form.
Interpretive practices often lie at the heart of experi-
mental, devised performance too, even if this stage genre
does not rely on or start with a predefined text. Many
theatre-devising techniques and physical performer training
exercises draw on ideas of translation to spark the imagina-
tion of practitioners and audiences. French theatre educator
Jacques Lecoq took inspiration from translation for his
actor-training exercises: for instance, in his basic improvisa-
tion classes he taught students how to express the emotion
(or the ‘movement’) of a colour, concept, poem or work of
21
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art through what he called ‘mimodynamic’ processes, or

mimetic movements. According to Lecoq, the task is not for
an actor to mime these external prompts figuratively (for
instance, by hugging somebody to mime ‘love’), but to
embody the ‘internal movement’ that they make the per-
former feel, thus communicating the notions’ ‘spirit’
through gestures that have no reference in the real world
(for instance, creating a non-descriptive movement embody-
ing the essence of ‘love’) (48).
Lecoq wanted his actors to learn how to instinctively ‘be’
a concept, colour, poem or painting, rather than to describe
them – he wanted his actors to be like translators so trans-
parent and exact that they would be able to embody the so-
called ‘spirit of the original’. We have seen how such an
instrumental conception of translation is problematic
because of how it is based on the idea that the source is an
invariant and only one possible interpretation of it is cor-
rect. But Lecoq went even further with his thinking on
translation, reflecting on the various languages spoken by his
students and arguing that the way each language leads to spe-
cific bodily expressions has no direct equivalents in other
languages. He argued that, unlike the fallible practice of
translating poetry from one language to another, only trans-
ferring poetic writing into mimodynamics reaches the true
‘essence’ of a text:
With the word ‘prendre’ [to take], for example,

the French students embody the thing they are
taking, closing their arms around the upper part
22
of their bodies. They are not trying to take this or
that object, but to take in a general way, to take
everything […]. Germans, with ‘Ich nehme’, pick
something up. The English, with ‘I take’, snatch.
Of course, this raises the problem of translating
poetry. ‘I take my mother by the arm’ cannot be
translated as ‘I pick up my mother by the arm’,
nor by ‘I snatch my mother by the arm’. The best
way to translate poetry thus seems to be through
mimodynamics, truly putting the poem into
motion in a way that verbal translation can never
attain. (51)
Lecoq here seems to elevate performance, or rather mimo-

dynamics, to the only form of communication that is truly
universal. According to him, if we translate a sentence into
mimodynamics, we no longer need to translate it into any
other language as it will be accessible in its ‘essence’ to
everyone – an argument that problematically assumes bodily
movement to be transhistorical and transcultural.
On the other hand, the view of translation that emerges
from Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal’s exercises
understands performance as one language among many oth-
ers, rather than a universal one. Boal posits that each person
interprets a message differently; accordingly, in order to
make sure that a message is understood, it must be delivered
in various different languages, meaning that translation and
multilingualism are seen as the bases for true communica-
tion. Boal’s starting point was the realization that traditional
23
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theatre practices oppressed spectators because they did not

give them a chance to be active participants, so his aim was
to empower audiences by turning them into ‘spect-actors’.
Boal devised translation-inspired exercises that would sup-
port his vision for a participatory Theatre of the Oppressed,
especially in the techniques for Image Theatre. Stressing the
idea that translations of notions into bodily languages are
crucial to creating a common ground between performers
and spectators because they multiply meaning-making
through translation, Boal introduced the function of Image
Theatre in these terms:
We must not forget that words are only vehicles

which convey meanings, emotions, memories,
ideas… which are not necessarily the same for
everyone: the word spoken is never the word heard.
[…] If I say [a] phrase to a hundred people, it will
be understood in a hundred different ways: who
is each of my listeners? What am I for each of
them? That’s why, in order to really understand a
message, it is important to receive and to send it
in different languages. An image is one of those
many possible languages, and not the least of
them. (174; 176, emphasis in the original)
Boal then describes an exercise called ‘Image of the world:

illustrating a subject with your body’. In this game, work-
shop participants are asked by a Joker (the workshop leader)
to create ‘models’ – still images that represent, express or
24
visualize a given theme – and ‘dynamizations’ – moving ver-
sions of the still images that connect each participant to oth-
ers in the group. In his practice, themes that are translated
into Image Theatre are generally about various forms of
oppression in society, such as family, violence, unemploy-
ment or religion, and how these can be overcome. Boal’s
initial Image Theatre exercise is the building block of a series
of over ten games that become ever more complex and
interactive: the second exercise involves a sculptor using
other people’s bodies to ‘translate’ a theme into an image,
and the third, called ‘Image of transition’, requires a group
representing both the image of an oppression and of the
ideal state of affairs (in which the oppression has been elimi-
nated), then figuring out how to transition from one to the
other.
Lecoq’s and Boal’s influential actor training and theatre-
making practices have shaped generations of performers
through translation-inspired exercises, but while the former
ultimately sought to eliminate the need for translation
through what he conceived as the ‘universal language of per-
formance’, the latter sought to multiply interpretations
through multilingualism and the empowerment of
‘spect-actors’.
Translation as Adaptation
We have seen how both the source text and the translation
are not fixed, but shifting entities, both depending on cultur-
ally, socially and subjectively determined interpretation,
25
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which turns ‘fidelity’ into a questionable notion. Translation

cannot be ‘faithful’, but neither should it be characterized as
‘unfaithful’. We cannot reproduce a word, a sentence or a
whole play in another language and assume nothing has
changed in the process. Therefore, a translation is always
already what we now call an adaptation.
What is crucial to realize is that accessing a perfor-
mance/translation of a foreign source in your language
might not give you an accurate idea of the source text as it
signifies, or used to signify, in its own context. Crucially, this
realization exposes us to the fact that the translator’s subjec-
tive point of view, her ideology, her every word choice, have
extremely impactful consequences that can affect how end-
users of her translations view culturally and linguistically
distant others. It is no longer possible to keep the transla-
tor’s work invisible, unacknowledged, untheorized and rel-
egated to the attic. The translator’s work is not secondary,
derivative or passive: it is creative and active, like that of a
theatre-maker who contributes to a performance in a col-
laborative context.
But the realization that translation cannot give immedi-
ate access to source texts and cultures can also feel disem-
powering. How are we going to communicate across cultural
and linguistic differences, if the only tool we have, transla-
tion, cannot open all doors for us? And why is this book
arguing that translation is a way to communicate across cul-
tures, if what one gets through translation is not the other
culture at all? It’s an interesting conundrum. Despite the fact
that translation does not provide direct access, without
26
intermediaries, to other languages, texts or cultures, as a
critical practice translation can bring us closer to them. It
can spark much-needed conversations about different cul-
tural values, linguistic identities and how individuals negoti-
ate their place in the world.That is why more people need to
become aware of the processes, ethical implications and
politics of translation from the perspective of someone who
negotiates the impossible position of speaking on behalf of
someone else that they are not.
I would argue that citizens of increasingly multicultural
societies have a duty to engage with culturally/linguistically
distant others through investigations, experiences, encoun-
ters, exchanges, apprehensions and inevitably also misappre-
hensions, so that it may be possible to respect and empathize
with one another. Maybe the realization that a translation does
not or cannot equal the ‘original’ will encourage some of us to
start learning other languages and experience other ways to
subdivide up the world, seeing it through other people’s meta-
phors, idioms and etymologies. No one can learn every lan-
guage in the world, but one can try to learn one or two, and
by doing that one might begin to discover the arbitrariness of
how any language is structured, how it links sounds with
meanings, and meanings with material or immaterial entities,
leading us to see the world in a certain way. Having said that,
there are always going to be thousands of languages – past and
present – that will remain inaccessible to any one of us at any
given time, and we are going to have to rely on translation at
some point or other in our lives. Language-learning alone
does not necessarily teach us to respect others, but it can teach
27
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us to relativize our own perspectives and train us in becoming

better guests and hosts of others.
Linda Hutcheon defined adaptation as an ‘extended
intertextual engagement with the adapted text’ (2006: 8),
which also seems like an appropriate definition for interlin-
gual translation. In my book Theatre and Adaptation, I pro-
posed to classify adaptation practices on the basis of six
variables: language, medium, genre, culture, time and ideol-
ogy (4–10). All translations and adaptations are interpreta-
tions, and interpreting is what we do, every day, when we
communicate with one another, read a text or a performance
and understand, for instance, the content of an advertising
campaign or a news item. Translation and adaptation prac-
tices essentially rest on the same process of intertextual
interpretation, but their definition and differentiation vary
according to historical and social contexts. Current western
definitions of translation prescribe that the translator should
not rewrite, add or subtract elements of plot; however, this
was not the case in seventeenth-century France where, if
chunks of the story were removed or added, the target text
would still have been called a ‘translation’ (Baker and
Saldanha 2011: 406–09). In the twenty-first century, adapta-
tions tend to be defined as those texts that, like Ola Rotimi’s
The Gods are Not to Blame or Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A
StageVersion, do not set out to be accurate and complete ren-
ditions of their sources but programmatically take elements
of the source into an entirely different shape, overlooking
others. However, this description is also true of translation,
that it ‘takes some elements of the source into an entirely
28
different shape, overlooking others’. This is why I see the
difference between translation and adaptation as historically
and socially determined, not as structural.
Translating/Adapting Cultures in Performance

A striking example of translation/adaptation processes in
performance can be found in the puppetry traditions of the
Indonesian archipelago. For the contemporary Javanese
shadow puppet master (dalang) Enthus Susmono, translat-
ing traditional scripts from literary Javanese – the conven-
tional local language used in wayang performances, but
increasingly difficult to understand for young Indonesians
across the archipelago – into standard Bahasa Indonesia –
the official national language, spoken by most people in
Indonesia – was a matter of relevance and accessibility
when on national tours. In his view, in trying to keep up
with the times and in order to be able to reach out to all
Indonesians and educate them to the message of spiritual-
ity that is embedded in the genre, wayang kulit needed to
modernize and adapt. Enthus was known as dalang edan
(crazy dalang) for his innovative brand of wayang kontempo-
rer (contemporary wayang) and for the controversial nature
of his personal involvement in politics. In his work, he
combined the traditional elements of Javanese wayang –
namely, the stories form the fourth-century BCE Hindu
epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the religious teachings of
Islam and reference to current affairs – with contemporary
global politics and popular culture figures, such as Barack
Obama, Osama Bin Laden, Batman and Harry Potter.
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Wayang kontemporer artists are known to have brought

about innovations to the traditional elements of puppet
design, music, use of lights and storylines of wayang kulit.
According to Miguel Escobar, however, using a language
other than Javanese in wayang is the single most radical inno-
vation that kontemporer dalangs have made, ahead of changes
proposed in other areas (135). This is because in Indonesia –
where bilingualism and code-switching are part of everyday
life – the national language is used in the sphere of official-
ity/objectivity and local languages are used in the intimate
sphere of family life and religion, of which wayang is part.
Therefore, a wayang in Indonesian ‘transgresses these catego-
ries: it compels the audiences to interpret personal life-
worlds in the language of objectivity’ (135).
In addition to this, the version of the Mahabharata tradi-
tionally read in Java was translated from Sanskrit into
Javanese in the eleventh century and differs from the source
on several counts, including elements of the plot (for
instance, it censors instances of polyandry in the original,
reflecting historical Javanese attitudes to this practice).
The translation from Sanskrit into Javanese formed the basis
for Hinduism to spread in Java, where a characteristically
syncretic culture combined the latter with Buddhism until
the Islamic expansion in the sixteenth century (Sumarsam
2011: 46). Dalangs essentially improvised (and still do) the
stories for wayang characters based on the Mahabharata and
(less often) the Ramayana following a set of strict principles
called pakem. With the Islamization of Indonesia, wayang
puppets and stories underwent subtle changes to fit with the
30
new religion (54–55). To complicate things, wayang tradi-
tions during the colonial period were deeply influenced by
Dutch taste and the colonizers’ attempts to systematize,
‘upgrade’ and ‘clean up’ the stories and overall aesthetics of
the genre. The publication of printed books of what for cen-
turies had been improvised scripts and the establishment of
a Dutch school system in Java, in which some dalangs were
educated, resulted in a split between the ‘court’ tradition
(aimed at Dutch and Dutch-educated Javanese) and the ‘vil-
lage’ tradition (aimed at peasants). Nowadays, wayang ver-
sions of Hindu epic stories have come to be conceived as
deeply entrenched in local cultural identities, so that perfor-
mances of wayang feel and sound deeply Javanese to
Indonesian audiences. And yet, their origins are linked to
imported Indian legends that were domesticated through
translation, appropriated by Islam and subsequently ‘rear-
ranged’ by Dutch colonizers. Such is the complexity of cul-
tural ‘authenticity’.
Enthus’ multilingual performance, Dewa Ruci, presented
in Bali in 2006 – mixing standard Indonesian with the
Banyumasan dialect of Javanese and some English sen-
tences – combined the mythical story of Bima, who goes in
search for the meaning of life under the deep seas, with a
comic scene referencing contemporary local politics. The
main narrative, drawn from the Mahabharata and performed
in Indonesian, was interrupted by a comic interlude, deliv-
ered in Indonesian, Javanese and some English, directly
praising the open-mindedness of the Balinese people who
had recently been targeted by Islamic fundamentalists with
31
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attacks in 2002 and 2005 (Susmono 2008). The production

was specifically designed for national touring and therefore
Enthus decided to deliver the main narrative in the national
language, while retaining Javanese for the comical interlude.
Enthus’ message urged his (mostly Hindu in Bali, but gener-
ally Muslim elsewhere in Indonesia) audiences to practice
inter-religious tolerance and presented Islam as exhorting
peace among peoples (Escobar 2014: 343).
A breakdown of the translative chain embedded in Dewa
Ruci is particularly impressive: it encompasses interlinguistic
translation (from Sanskrit to old Javanese, to contemporary
Javanese, Indonesian, and even English), intermedia adapta-
tion (from the page to the puppetry stage), intergeneric
adaptation (from epic narrative to the genre of improvised
wayang puppetry), intercultural/interideological adaptation
(from Hindu to Javanese/Indonesian, to Islamic/Javanese,
to Islamic/Javanese/Dutch, to Islamic/Indonesian) and
intertemporal adaptation (from the fourth century BCE
through various stages of history up to the twenty-first
century).
The overlapping among translation, adaptation and
appropriation is particularly evident when distant time peri-
ods are at stake, like with Dewa Ruci. But think, for instance,
of staging a play text written a long time ago in what can be
classed as essentially the same language as the source. Even if
the language is still intelligible, the social context may have
shifted so much that the same word could have assumed a
completely different meaning or connotation, a cultural ref-
erence may now evoke an entirely new set of associations
32
and feelings, and a widespread performance convention
could have become wholly controversial. This is precisely
what happened in American playwright Branden Jacobs-
Jenkins’ play An Octoroon (first staged in 2014), adapted from
Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859), a melodrama set in a
Louisiana plantation.
For starters, in Boucicault’s play, the n-word was used
throughout by both white and black folk.The plot – in which
black characters have little agency – was ambivalent about
slavery and colonialism. In its original performances, its
mixed-race and native American roles were played by white
actors and the casting of ‘real’ black performers was mar-
keted as an attraction. These characteristics presumably did
not cause much concern among white middle-class audi-
ences at the time of the play’s original performance at
New York’s Winter Garden Theatre, as derogatory vocabu-
lary and performance conventions were part of endemic
racism in the US at the time. While Boucicault wrote the
play, debates about abolition were very high on the American
political agenda. The British Empire had abolished slavery in
1833 and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was to fol-
low in 1863, but the road to equality was, and still is, very
long. Today, structural racism still contaminates personal,
social and political spheres throughout the western world, as
highlighted by the #BlackLivesMatter activist movement,
founded in the US in 2013, a few months before Jacobs-
Jenkins’ play was first performed.
In An Octoroon, Jacobs-Jenkins decided to shape more
rounded black and mixed-race characters and inscribe a
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critique of racism through the introduction of an external

narrative frame. However, he opted for keeping the n-word,
so that contemporary audiences are made acutely aware and
uncomfortable by the continued use of the now wholly
unacceptable term, which has rightly been excluded from
current vocabulary. In this sense, Jacobs-Jenkins practices a
form of anti-racist ‘reverse discourse’ (Weaver 2010) re-
appropriating racist sign-systems in order to develop an
opposite semantic effect, that is, to disempower racism.
Some audiences in the 2017 and 2018 London runs of An
Octoroon could understandably be seen squirming at each
iteration of the n-word, and some even left the theatre: per-
haps this was the desired effect of Jacobs-Jenkins’ adapta-
tion. Similarly, instead of removing blackface as a racist
performance convention, Jacobs-Jenkins added whiteface
and redface to the mix, using cross-colour casting and exhib-
iting face make-up, perhaps to question, relativize and theat-
ricalize the notion of race and its performances. His was a
controversial aesthetic choice that finds its political efficacy
precisely in the act of adapting/translating its historical
‘source’ – the racist practice of blacking up in minstrelsy
shows.
Meditations on the problematic act of appropriating – be
it ethnicity, history, culture, aesthetic or linguistic conven-
tions, and so on – can be found throughout An Octoroon. In
Act 3, Jacobs-Jenkins’ self-reflexive re-writing technique
includes a discussion of Boucicault’s coup de théâtre – namely
his use of photographic evidence to solve the murder case of
an innocent black boy. A dialogue between the characters of
34
BJJ (partly coinciding with the author) and Playwright (rei-
magining Boucicault) highlights the issue that photography
would have been seen as exciting new technology in 1859,
but that it is perceived as no longer novel or shocking today
because, in our era of smartphones and social media, we see
photos as entirely mundane. The plot of both plays revolves
around George, a young photographer and the new inheri-
tor of the Terrebone plantation, which was mismanaged by
the previous owner – George’s uncle – and is now up for
sale. George decides to marry the rich heiress Dora in the
hope that her fortune might resolve Terrebone’s financial
situation, moved by his concern for the fate of the property
slaves, who are also set to be sold and relocated, and particu-
larly by his love for Zoe, his uncle’s illegitimate daughter
(also known as the octoroon, or one-eighth black, an ex-
slave whose free papers are now missing). But George does
not act swiftly enough and the evil Mr M’Closky, who is also
in love with Zoe, buys the property and many of its slaves,
including the octoroon.
Nevertheless, George begins suspecting that M’Closky
has lied and committed crimes in order to buy the land and
its slaves. In a previous scene, a camera had been set up to
take a portrait, but inadvertently captured the murder of a
young slave, Paul, at the hands of M’Closky. When George
fortuitously checks his camera towards the end of the play,
he finds that one of the pictures taken serendipitously in
his absence was of Paul, who had been delivering impor-
tant correspondence about Terrebone’s debt to its new
owner, being murdered by M’Closky. This revelation
35
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represented the height of the plot in Boucicault’s melo-

drama and was meant to shock and thrill the audience,
because it would have meant that M’Closky’s claim on the
property and its slaves would have been revoked. Jacobs-
Jenkins’ characters BJJ and Playwright discuss the conun-
drum of conjuring an ‘equivalent effect’ on contemporary
audiences as follows:
PLAYWRIGHT. But part of the thrill, part of the Sensation
of the scene, was giving people back then
a sense of having really witnessed some-
thing new and novel.
BJJ. And that’s basically impossible for us to
do now. If anything, the theater is no lon-
ger a place of novelty. The fact is we can
more or less experience anything nowa-
days. So I think the actual frontier, awk-
wardly enough, is probably just an actual
experience of finality, I think.
PLAYWRIGHT. Like – death, basically?
BJJ. So for a while I was thinking maybe I
could actually just set this place on fire
with you inside – […] But that would be
crazy […] Anyway, I thought I’d try
something. I hope it isn’t too
disappointing.
ASSISTANT has wheeled out an overhead projector. He projects a
lynching photograph on to the back wall. (67–68)
36
Jacobs-Jenkins’ choice here is to replace the outdated ‘sensa-
tion’ of a fictional photographic evidence of a racial murder
with a real photograph of a historical lynching of black slaves
by white Americans. While Boucicault would have hoped to
overwhelm his audience in a positive way with his ‘theatre
trick’, revealing the evil Mr M’Closky as the murderer of a
black boy and therefore finding closure for the plot, Jacobs-
Jenkins’ real photograph – which is framed in the play as his
search for an effect ‘equivalent’ to the nineteenth-century
sensation around the fictional photograph – is intended to
cause horror in his audience by piercing the fictional plot
and reminding us of the unspeakable crimes committed
against black people. A recent string of white-on-black mur-
ders in the US attests that there is still a long way to go to
eradicate systemic racism (see, for instance, the killing of
Trayvon Martin by a white vigilante in February 2012 and
the killing of Eric Garner by white policemen in July 2014,
to mention but a few violent episodes that happened just
before and after Jacobs-Jenkins’ adaptation opened in April
2014).
As we have seen with An Octoroon, the process of relocat-
ing a play from one context to another requires a reframing
and renegotiation of language and performance practices. In
Caridad Svich’s 2009 Spanish-language adaptation of Isabel
Allende’s The House of The Spirits for the Repertorio Español
in New York, the playwright took inspiration from the
Chilean author’s choice of setting the novel in an unnamed
Latin American country, even though it is well known that
the book refers to Chile and the rise of Pinochet. Svich
37
&
decided to mix idioms from different Latin American coun-

tries because in her view Allende writes ‘about larger lega-
cies of colonialism and economic neo-liberal policies that
led to the rise of dictators in the Americas’ (2018). Svich
also knew that the Spanish spoken by the New York-based
actors would carry accents from various Latin American
countries. Instead of aiming for a standard Spanish that
would erase these different cadences, she opted for a more
heterogeneous mix of jargon from across Latin America. But
when the play was performed in Santiago de Chile, the local
cast insisted on reflecting a Chilean context and parlance.
Change of context in translation often unleashes what
one may call a misleading transparency, which needs to be
questioned. This is what happened with Dalia Taha’s Keffyeh/
Made in China, a play written in Palestinian Arabic portraying
everyday life in the occupied Palestinian territories, which
was staged at the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels in 2012,
at Shubbak Festival in London in 2013, at the Théâtre Ouvert
in Paris in 2014 and at Beit Zatoun in Toronto in 2016.While
Taha’s play placed the violence of an unending war in the
background in order to highlight the humanity and resil-
ience of her characters, does the word ‘war’ or ‘bomb’ really
mean the same thing for a Flemish, British, French, Canadian
and Palestinian audience? For European and North American
spectators, ‘war’ and ‘bomb’ are something you read about
and see on the news, but for Palestinians these concepts are
not abstract or remote – ‘war’ is something one wakes up to,
day in, day out, and ‘bombs’ may be heard or seen flying over
one’s head, killing loved ones at any point. So while
38
translators will inevitably use the words available in their
languages, these will not conjure up the same sentiments in
different contexts (similarly to the argument I made for car-
bon dioxide earlier). While this misleading transparency
complicates translation even further and highlights how
communication is hardly ever a smooth process, it is impor-
tant to remind ourselves that, despite all the obstacles dis-
cussed so far, translation remains an ethical imperative. How,
then, can we practice translation? And how can we practice
it fairly? The following sections will explore how translation
for the theatre happens by examining practical approaches in
contemporary theatre, along with their political contexts
and ethical underpinning.
hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics

C
of Translation
Power Differentials: The RSC in China
Even if translation is often conceptualized as a practice that
can further a democratic agenda and lead to a world more
open to cultural differences, translation is not essentially
‘good’. In fact, translation can equally be a force of oppres-
sion, colonization and plunder because of its link to the
exercise of power through knowledge. Translation has been
one of the main instruments of empire as colonizers can only
truly subjugate the colonized when they can communicate
with them, thus extending their oppression to the realm of
the mind. Power differentials between the dominant lan-
guage/culture and the dominated ones severely affected,
and continue to affect, the lives of people living in former
39
translators will inevitably use the words available in their
languages, these will not conjure up the same sentiments in
different contexts (similarly to the argument I made for car-
bon dioxide earlier). While this misleading transparency
complicates translation even further and highlights how
communication is hardly ever a smooth process, it is impor-
tant to remind ourselves that, despite all the obstacles dis-
cussed so far, translation remains an ethical imperative. How,
then, can we practice translation? And how can we practice
it fairly? The following sections will explore how translation
for the theatre happens by examining practical approaches in
contemporary theatre, along with their political contexts
and ethical underpinning.
hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics

C
of Translation
Power Differentials: The RSC in China
Even if translation is often conceptualized as a practice that
can further a democratic agenda and lead to a world more
open to cultural differences, translation is not essentially
‘good’. In fact, translation can equally be a force of oppres-
sion, colonization and plunder because of its link to the
exercise of power through knowledge. Translation has been
one of the main instruments of empire as colonizers can only
truly subjugate the colonized when they can communicate
with them, thus extending their oppression to the realm of
the mind. Power differentials between the dominant lan-
guage/culture and the dominated ones severely affected,
and continue to affect, the lives of people living in former
39
&
colonies in ways that have only recently begun to be fully

uncovered by post-colonial studies and decolonial theory.
For instance, the colonial othering of eastern identities, that
Edward Said so lucidly denounced in his study Orientalism,
are based entirely on linguistic/cultural processes of domes-
tication of the foreign. The image that the white colonizers
built of the colonized as childish, effeminate and irrational
subjects relies on the work of western translators and cul-
tural interpreters trying to dominate the cultures they pil-
laged and enslaved in the East and South. How could such an
unequal exchange ever lead to fair representation of, or
unmediated access to, Asian, African and Australian native
cultures?
One of the most significant repercussions of colonialism
that is still difficult to overcome is the international domi-
nance of English as the global lingua franca, backed by the
combined economic, political, diplomatic and cultural capi-
tal of both the United States and the United Kingdom,
where English is the first language: in other words, the
Anglo-American world still benefits from colonialism
through the so-called ‘soft power’ of language. For instance,
in the contemporary literary translation market, English has
the privilege of being translated into other languages much
more often than other languages have the chance of being
translated into English. Why is that? The argument (or the
perception of gatekeepers) is still that appetite for Anglo-
American cultural products around the globe is greater than
the Anglo-American demand for foreign books, plays, films
and other language-based artefacts: but is it really so? Part of
40
the problem may actually be the reinforcement of inward-
looking taste produced by the conservative choices made by
theatre programmers, book publishers, TV and film commis-
sioning editors, and other gatekeepers, whose perceptions
of their target audiences’ tastes are limited, and who have
little incentive in questioning the status quo by expanding
their audiences’ horizons of expectations. Because, of
course, opening up cultural borders also means giving up a
proportion of one’s own soft power, heading instead in the
direction of cultural equality and reciprocity. It would mean
‘provincializing the west’.
While there may be very little money invested in foreign-
language play translations worldwide, one exception to this
rule saw the geopolitical sphere intervene in the field of
artistic practice. In 2015, the then British Chancellor of the
Exchequer, George Osborne, unveiled plans to make China
Britain’s second-biggest trade partner within ten years. This
move was branded by officials in both countries as a ‘Golden
Era’ of diplomatic, political and economic relations between
the two superpowers. In 2016, Osborne announced in his
Budget that he was to allocate £1.8 million funding for the
Royal Shakespeare Company to embark upon a major cul-
tural exchange programme with China. The project, which
is still ongoing as I write this book – featuring translations
from and into English and Mandarin – aims to ‘foster deeper
understanding between cultures by sharing and telling each
other our stories’, in the words of the RSC’s artistic director
Gregory Doran (Royal Shakespeare Company 2015). In
other words, Britain and China will not only trade more
41
&
goods and services, but the Chinese will have more

Shakespeare plays on their stages, and the British will see
more stories adapted from early-modern Chinese plays in
their playhouses.
To this day, China’s soft power has not been able to pen-
etrate the snobbish, often xenophobic Anglo-American
world, but as the crisis-struck western economies struggle
to find ways to keep afloat, using theatre translation to build
cultural bridges with the Chinese – whose economy contin-
ues to grow at much higher rates than that of any western
country – seems like a sensible way forward. However,
while the exchange programme positions the two trading
partners as equal cultural players whose stories deserve to
be heard by the other, it is interesting that the status of cul-
tural icon is still granted to Shakespeare alone, not to any
specific Chinese classic. In a world dominated by brands, this
gives Britain the upper hand.
The first element of the RSC’s cultural exchange pro-
gramme with China – known as the Shakespeare Folio
Translation Project – aims to instigate stage-friendly transla-
tions and performances of all Shakespeare plays into Chinese
in partnership with Chinese theatre companies. The second
element of the exchange – known as the Chinese Classics
project – consists in translating and staging English versions
of Chinese canonical plays from the early-modern period
adapted for the British stage and performed by the Royal
Shakespeare Company in Britain. The translation of every
Shakespeare play into Mandarin is driven by what the com-
pany sees as the current lack of ‘theatrically-viable’ (2015)
42
and accessible versions in the Chinese market and the conse-
quent difficulties in understanding, studying, reading or per-
forming Shakespeare ‘accurately’ throughout the country.
Headed by creative producer, cultural advisor and edi-
tor Shihui Weng, the project began in 2016 with Henry V
and King Lear, which were translated and performed
through a collaborative process drawn from standard the-
atre translation practices in the UK, featuring a literal
translator and an adaptor with playwriting credentials, and
by inviting the Chinese makers to take part in RSC rehears-
als for the same productions in English. The translation
process is now different for each play, and the project has
departed from using a literal translation, engaging instead
translators who are also dramaturgs or playwrights to cre-
ate the new versions. The translation process generally
involves four to five people in different roles, all relying on
the experience of watching directors and actors in action.
The team usually includes an official Mandarin translator
with experience of literary translation and/or contempo-
rary stage practices in China (but not necessarily an expert
in Shakespeare); a British theatre director with first-hand
experience of the specific play to be translated, whose
knowledge of the script is stage-specific rather than schol-
arly; the Chinese theatre director who will direct the play;
a Chinese dramaturg with expertise in stage practice; and
an editor, usually Weng herself. The final draft is the prod-
uct of multiple negotiations between theatre-makers,
translators working both at their desk and with actors in
rehearsal rooms. All translators are credited as part of the
43
&
translating team, but only one, the official translator,

retains the copyright of the translation, while the others
receive a buyout fee.
The RSC translation process acknowledges that theatre
translation is not just about producing a script in the target
language. The journey starts when a selected team from the
partner Chinese theatre company visits the UK during RSC
rehearsals of the play in question (each Mandarin translation
immediately follows an RSC production of it so as to maxi-
mize possible synergies). The Chinese creatives discuss the
play with the British director and attend RSC rehearsals.
After this visit, the first Mandarin draft is produced. The fol-
lowing stage consists in a workshop held in China with cre-
atives from the partner company, involving a provisional cast
to test the first Mandarin draft. At the end of this rehearsal
workshop, a second draft is produced. What ensues then is a
desk-based phase, with several people involved in painstak-
ing, line-by-line translations and back-translations (namely,
translating the target text back into the source text to check
it still makes sense), editing and refashioning as they go
along, at the end of which a third draft will emerge, having
been influenced by its practical application in the rehearsal
room. The last stage is a five-to-seven-week rehearsal work-
shop with the final Chinese cast, the first two weeks of which
are aimed at finalizing the third draft to arrive at the fourth
and final draft. After the first two/three weeks of rehearsals,
in which the translation is still in flux, the linguists leave the
room so that the performers can get on with learning their
lines for the opening. This collaborative process is
44
remarkable because it shows the extent of the skillset
required to translate theatre and it draws attention to the
fact that theatre translation is always a matter of collabora-
tion between several parties involved, while it is not often
acknowledged as such in western culture (see Frigau
Manning 2016).
The Chinese Classics project, on the other hand, brings a
range of outputs such as plot summaries, play translations
and RSC productions of old Chinese canonical work to
English-speaking audiences. The translation processes in this
case draw on different paradigms, with the British model of
a ‘literal’ translation adapted by a commissioned playwright
featuring prominently. According to the RSC, ‘every transla-
tion will demand collaboration, rigorous discussion and cul-
tural exchange, as we investigate both the possibilities of
these classical texts for our times, and of a range of transla-
tion and playwriting practices’ (RSC website, n.d.). But the
RSC model, especially that of the Shakespeare Folio
Translation Project, is hardly reproducible in small-scale,
cash-strapped theatre productions. And even if the theatre-
makers have enough money to fund translation, they hardly
ever choose to spend it on getting the translation scrupu-
lously checked and re-checked by several collaborators. A
large portion of makers in western theatre agree that it is
best practice to produce a stage translation in a rehearsal
context (retranslating a text anew each time, tailoring the
version to a specific staging project) and, where this is not
possible, that it is good to invite the translators/linguists in
rehearsals to discuss their approach to the text or elements
45
&
of the source culture. However, that is not always the case

and many Europe-based companies rely on pre-existing
translations, only ‘adjusting’ minor elements of the text if
they can get away with it and if literary agents or estate man-
agers do not intervene. If not handled carefully and with
respect for, and involvement of, representatives from source
cultures, these intercultural negotiations can lead to damag-
ing forms of appropriation.
‘Performability’ and the Ethics of Theatre Translation

According to Weng, the register aimed by the Shakespeare
Folio Translation Project is neither everyday nor archaic,
but ‘heightened language’. The primary goal is ‘to locate a
clear through-line for actors and create distinct, vivid char-
acters and voices with their own momentum and drive’,
principles which, the RSC hopes, will give rise to more
accessible and engaging stagings of Shakespeare in China
(Weng). You might have detected in this characterization of
the project’s mission a certain attitude against so-called
‘stage-unfriendly’ translations. This presupposes the
idea that certain translated texts are more performable than
others, referring to translations that are too ‘literary’ or that
use a written, rather than an oral register. According to this
line of argument, the best stage translations are those
achieved through a process of collaboration with the theatre-
makers who are going to stage it, ensuring scripts conform
to their ideas for the production, but also so that the target
text can come across as relevant, agile and of-its-time, wip-
ing off any of the dust or stuffiness that comes with aging
46
language. This may be a sensible approach for some contem-
porary audiences, but it is important to point out that the
distinction between translations that can and those that can-
not be performed is entirely ideological, based on taste and
cultural/subjective conceptions of theatricality. For instance,
in Romeo Castellucci’s Oedipus der Tyrann (2015), an adapta-
tion of Oedipus Rex performed in German, the Italian theatre
director chose Hölderlin’s translation of Sophocles’ tragedy
(1804) out of all possible German translations, precisely
because of its highly literary, cryptic, mysterious images –
which many before him had branded ‘unperformable’ – to
build a remote, dream-like, symbolic world on stage.
Similarly, Robert Wilson’s Oedipus Rex (2018) – which pre-
miered in Pompeii and was performed in Italian, English,
Greek, French, German and Latin – picked the most literary
and old-fashioned Italian translations of Sophocles carried
out in the 1920s by classical scholar Ettore Romagnoli –
whose contemporary credentials as a ‘performable’ theatre
translator were near zero – to envelop stage actions with a
sense of extraordinariness. This is because both Castellucci’s
and Wilson’s theatres tend to rely on distancing and estrange-
ment effects, not on familiarity or proximity with the spec-
tator.Their highly stylized, anti-naturalist aesthetics – though
very different from one another – are supported by scripts
featuring higher, more archaic or literary registers, which
aim to create an atmosphere of otherworldliness, unfamil-
iarity, and even awkwardness. This is clearly in contrast with
the actualizing agenda that the notion of ‘performability’
tends to endorse.
47
&
The debate on the concept of ‘performability’ erupted in

academia in the 1990s and, back then, the main players were
Susan Bassnett (1991) – who argued that the notion was
undefinable and therefore to be dropped in order to avoid
marginalizing translators any further – and Patrice Pavis
(1992: 131–54) – who related performability to the practice
of mise en scène, arguing that to translate is already to envi-
sion a staging through interpretation. In my view, the notion
of ‘performability’ has been instrumental in the development
of normative practices around the translation of plays, such as
the demand for performance texts to be ‘fluent’ and fully
inscribed within standard dialects and spoken registers in the
target language, avoiding not only ‘translatese’, ‘academicese’
and page-focused scripts for ease of pronunciation, but also
actively reproducing the perceived taste of the receiving
audience, favouring cultural assimilation.
The proponents of ‘performable’ translations should
acknowledge that, especially when translating into a major
language like English or Chinese, ‘performability’ is a rela-
tive concept, and that there usually is a power differential
involved in the process of translation, whereby the target
culture is effectively licensed to adapt, appropriate, if not
even ‘colonize’, the source language/culture (in this sense,
one could say that the RSC’s method seeks to retain control
in order to minimize the appropriation of Shakespeare by
Chinese theatre-makers, who would have had the upper
hand, if the translations were not being funded by the UK
government). With the excuse of ‘performability’, the
inevitable degree of domestication that is inherent in every
48
act of translation can find an allegedly indisputable justifica-
tion fuelling a wholesale eradication of otherness from the
target text. Upon closer inspection, the notion of ‘perform-
ability’ can be used conservatively to prevent innovation and
theatre’s potential to challenge social, cultural and ideologi-
cal norms in the receiving context, including power stratifi-
cations at work in current uses of the standard dialect.
But how, then, can translation communicate linguistic
and cultural difference? What strategies can be adopted by
translators driven by a desire to create ethical encounters
with other languages/cultures that do not sweep difference
under the carpet? And how does the specificity of perfor-
mance complicate the matter for theatre translators? This
question has tormented me in the past few years. In order to
begin to answer it, I want to tell you about Lawrence Venuti’s
powerful critique of ethnocentrism in translation practice.
According to traditional views, which Venuti critiques,
translations must read like originals and the translator should
make herself ‘invisible’ behind the original author. She
should achieve this by conforming to the standard dialect,
expectations and norms in the target language, giving the
illusion that there were no dissimilarities between discourses
in the source and target languages/contexts, and that the
equivalence of original and translation has been ensured.
This cultural discourse is captured by the Italian word
simpatico – meaning ‘likeable’, ‘congenial’ and ‘possessing an
underlying sympathy’ (2008: 237) – which Venuti analyses
in an illuminating chapter of the same name. The traditional
view presupposes that there should be an intrinsic
49
&
consonance of ‘spirit’ between the author and the translator,

otherwise mimicry will not work (incidentally, this is a bit
like the principle behind traditional casting for stage and
screen, whereby actors are only cast if they ‘resemble’ their
characters, to avoid coming across as ‘fake’). The translating
ideology encapsulated by the word simpatico ‘seeks an iden-
tity, a self-recognition, and finds only the same culture in
foreign writing, only the same self in the cultural other’ but
‘this is always a misrecognition as well, yet fluency ensures
that this point is lost in the translating’ (2008: 264). Pursued
by the Anglo-American publishing industries, ‘fluency’ and
‘readability’ boost sales while busting difference. Might
‘performability’ be the theatrical equivalent of the
transparency/simpatico discourse?
Instead, Venuti put forward the notion of ‘foreigniza-
tion’. Developed as part of his re-examinations of the theo-
ries and practices of writers and translators such as Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Antoine Berman, Philip Lewis and others,
foreignization is a translation ethics that aims to pay respect
to cultural otherness ‘in an indirect way by questioning and
upsetting the hierarchy of cultural values in the receiving
situation, where dominant values tend to suppress differ-
ences through assimilation or to marginalize them through
neglect’ (2013: 2). In other words, Venuti believes that
translators need to reconfigure cultural difference within
the target language/culture by challenging its (the target’s)
hegemonic discourses – hence translation should be under-
stood as inherently contextual and relative to its intended
audience. For instance, if the standard literary language
50
prescribes the use of a formal register that is geographically
consistent and homogeneous, Venuti suggests carefully
inserting colloquialisms and localisms in the target text to
subvert the culturally constructed discourse of ‘fluency’ in
the dominant dialect; in the US, that would be the standard
American English that readers would expect in literary
publications.
While Venuti sees every translation as an act of ‘domesti-
cating inscription’ of the foreign, ‘never quite cross-cultural
communication’ (2013: 11), he strives to conceive of a prac-
tice that would limit this inherent violence of translation and
supplement the loss of source-language difference with
target-language difference. Venuti’s two main suggested
ways of achieving foreignizing effects are: first, a non-
discursive strategy, namely the selection of source texts that
subvert the corpus of translated literature from the source
into the target language, and the canon of target literature of
the same genre in the specific target context; and second, a
discursive strategy: the adoption of a translation method that
‘cultivates experimentalism’ by pursuing an aesthetics of
heterogeneity and discontinuity, rather than homogeneity or
narrowly defined ‘fluency’ and ‘readability’ (2013: 2).
Venuti takes as an example the work of nineteenth-
century Italian writer I. U. Tarchetti, who translated Mary
Shelley’s 1833 fantastical/Gothic short story ‘The Mortal
Immortal’ into Italian. The most important of Tarchetti’s
achievements is, according to Venuti, the fact that by intro-
ducing a new genre and discourse, the fantastical, to Italian
readers, he challenged the dominant realism of Italian novels
51
&
and their link to bourgeois ideology – a gesture that Venuti

argues ‘initiated a change in literary taste that culminated in
a significant canon reformation’ (2008: 152–53). Examining
Tarchetti’s practice leads Venuti to argue that in order to
achieve a foreignizing effect, such as introducing a new genre
that upsets dominant norms in the receiving context, it may
be more important to choose the right text – one that sub-
verts dominant literary canons – than to find the right words
to translate it.
Rather than being the opposite of domestication, for-
eignizing translation ‘challenges the receiving culture even
as it enacts its own ethnocentric violence on the foreign
text’ (2008: 18). Stressing that a foreignizing effect may be
achieved differently in different contexts, Venuti highlights
that otherness, when translated, cannot be carried across as
an essence, so it has to be reconfigured as a ‘strategic con-
struction’ by playing with non-standard forms in the target
language/culture (2008: 15). However, ‘fluency is not to be
simply abandoned, completely and irrevocably, but rather
reinvented in innovative ways. The foreignizing translator
seeks to expand the range of translation practices not to
frustrate or impede reading, certainly not to incur a judge-
ment of translationese, but to create new conditions of read-
ability’ (2008: 19). Venuti’s theories have been very
influential, despite attracting many criticisms and misread-
ings. But how can they be useful to a theatre translator,
director or collective devising ensemble? Because of the
added layer of staging and embodied knowledge in perfor-
mance, these theories and strategies have to be – guess
52
what? – translated into a theatrical language that theatre-
makers can understand. I’ll try to do this in the next section,
alongside examining models of cultural encounters on stage.
e My Guest? Practising Reciprocal Hospitality

B
Through Theatre Translation
In a discussion of intercultural theatre practices, Marvin
Carlson categorized the ways in which theatre can forge
relationships between the culturally familiar and the cultur-
ally foreign in seven stages. In his formulation, the first step
is ‘the totally familiar tradition of regular performance’,
such as the Japanese Noh theatre tradition. In the second
step, ‘[f]oreign elements are assimilated into the tradition
and absorbed by it. The audience can be interested, enter-
tained or stimulated by these elements, but they are not
challenged by them. Often they do not even recognize them
as foreign.’ Carlson sees Peter Brook’s Mahabharata as located
here. With the third step, ‘[e]ntire foreign structures are
assimilated into the tradition instead of isolated elements’.
For instance,Yeats wrote English-language plays in the man-
ner of Japanese Noh, modelling his composition on a genre
foreign to him; Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa staged his
version of Macbeth in the 1980s, transporting the Elizabethan
play set in Scotland into sixteenth-century samurai culture
for Japanese audiences. The fourth step sees the foreign and
the familiar create ‘a new blend, which is then assimilated
into the tradition. Molière’s absorption of the Italian com-
media dell’arte into his new comic style might be an example
of this.’ In step five, an entire foreign tradition is imported
53
&
and becomes familiar, such as Italian opera in England. Stage

six sees the use of the foreign as an exotic inscription,
whereby it remains foreign for ‘shock value’, such as the use
of a whole foreign dance sequence within David Henry
Hwang’s adaptation of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly. In the sev-
enth step, an entire foreign performance is imported, ‘with
no attempt to accommodate it to the familiar’ (Carlson in
Pavis 1996: 82–83).
Carlson’s classification is useful to begin to think of the-
atre in translation as a kind of intercultural theatre. In this
sense, the performance of foreign-language theatre in trans-
lation can be located in any of Carlson’s stages, depending on
how much the theatre-makers decide to engage with the for-
eign/source theatrical culture. The whole field of intercul-
tural theatre, particularly reflections on ethical modes of
making theatre interculturally, might help us find ways to
manage this encounter – and maybe this is the time to re-
read Ric Knowles’ Theatre & Interculturalism. Carlson’s clas-
sification, however, leaves the paradigm of assimilation
unquestioned, assuming that any foreign practice is either
forcibly assimilated to target conventions or becomes famil-
iar at some point in time.
But let’s imagine for one moment that we can compare
plays to people. If a play travels to other places, like people,
it might need to find a host willing to offer hospitality in
their home, or it might need to build a new home of its own.
I know – earlier I said that metaphors of physical movement
are not ideal to think about what translation does (transla-
tion does not transfer meaning from one place to another),
54
but maybe we can use this anthropomorphic image to think
about the ethics of reciprocal hospitality in theatre practice.
On the one hand, through theatre translation we receive the
stories of others in our home, welcoming them as their
hosts, and on the other we inhabit them, becoming their
guests. So who is hosting whom in this intercultural and
interlingual exchange – and how can we ensure it is a fair
and inclusive one?
Many translators and theatre-makers believe that only
those foreign-language plays that already conform to target
norms should be allowed to visit and that the best way to
welcome them into a new theatre milieu is to assimilate
them as much as possible to the receiving context’s expecta-
tions and norms. The pre-selected guest, so to speak, will
not only be required to learn the language of the host (and
not the other way around), but will also be expected to
adopt the customs of its host in all other respects in order to
have the best chance to be welcomed, and not rejected, by
the owners of the house. For instance, it will be required to
conform to the hosts’ stage conventions in relation to ‘per-
formability’, acting styles, visual aesthetics, conceptions of
humour, genre, discourse and ideology. Only then, they
argue, can the guest have a decent chance to be understood
and appreciated as much as it would have been in its original
context. According to this conception, exposing theatre-
going audiences to a guest that is unfamiliar to them (for
instance, a guest with different conceptions of politeness) is
to be avoided at all cost. This attitude is the reason why, for
example, the majority of foreign plays translated into English
55
&
are of western ‘classics’, such as works by Brecht and

Chekhov, which to a degree already ‘belong’ to dominant,
white Anglo-American culture. Of course, translation always
means reconfiguring an unintelligible message into an intel-
ligible one within target-language values, forms and prac-
tices in a way that necessarily has to inscribe the foreign into
a new context – but isn’t theatre’s role much more than reit-
erating the familiar? Isn’t theatre, like Brecht would put it,
about recognising the familiar in the foreign, and the foreign
in the familiar?
Assimilation has been one of the most persistent models
of cultural interaction between immigrants and their host
countries. It has been enforced by nations, such as France,
eager to assert and protect their cultural identities against
the perceived threat of foreigners. ‘You can only come here
if you stop being different and become the same as us’, the
assimilationist state apparatus tells the immigrant, in a typi-
cally hostile fashion. But is the same approach for plays ethi-
cally sustainable? As respectful hosts and guests, shouldn’t
we learn different ways to practise reciprocal hospitality?
The British multiculturalist approach, which is often con-
trasted with French assimilationism, hardly offers a way for-
ward.The latter seeks to impose less of an identity framework
from above, granting immigrants more freedom to practise
their customs and retain their belief system, but treating
them instead as ‘ethnic minorities’ who are different and will
remain marginal within the nation’s dominant cultural blue-
print. Such an approach to translation would lead to the
exoticization and othering of difference, another instance of
56
what Sara Ahmed calls ‘stranger fetishism’ (2000: 1–17).
For instance, as highlighted in a recent panel discussion fea-
turing playwrights from the Arab world as part of Shubbak
Festival at the Gate Theatre in London in 2019, entitled
‘Writing in Europe: Opportunities, Challenges, Risks’, this
kind of approach tends to select for translation plays that
already represent pre-conceived, western-centric ideas of
‘Arab-ness’, or that only deal, for instance, with the themes
of war, violence and terrorism. Texts in Arabic or about the
Arab world are only welcome for the pre-codified foreign-
ness they carry.
Whether the paradigm is assimilating cultural others or
isolating them as exotic, it is clear that contemporary state
policies construe foreign immigrants as dangerous and do
much to discourage, regulate and delimit their existence to
containable numbers. The issue is that migration (or hospi-
tality) is too often perceived to be at odds with the mode of
being together that we call ‘nation’ and its fantasies of homo-
geneity. But as Ahmed puts it, ‘the definition of the nation as
a space, body, or house requires the proximity of ‘strangers’ within
that space, whether or not that proximity is deemed threat-
ening (monoculturalism) or is welcomed (multicultural-
ism)’ (2000: 100, emphasis in the original).
The very survival of the national paradigm depends on
there being a majority of national subjects who identify
with it and perpetuate its values and belief system, but
also on the assumption that there are others, ‘strangers’,
who do not conform. If that majority becomes a minor-
ity – if, for instance, African refugees alighting on
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southern Italian shores one day became the majority of

people living in Italy – then the nation in question would
cease to exist – or so think many Italians. Self-preservation
and self-definition through exclusion may be unsurpris-
ing pulsions of the nation state, but what are we to do
with plays wishing to visit our stages from abroad? How
can we be good guests, and good hosts, of them? How can
we avoid framing them as exotic, delimiting their action
range, and marginalizing them? An assimilationist the-
atre, by definition insular and inward-looking, can con-
tribute to the dissemination of misleading conceptions
about migration and cultural difference, furthering
inequalities and the exclusion of the already underserved
and marginalized in our societies. An exoticizing theatre
that positions the foreign as ‘other’ similarly excludes
more than it includes. Part of the theatre’s role may be
precisely to point to an alternative to assimilation and
exoticization. So where can we look for models that will
help us be better hosts and guests?
Two Paradigms: Cosmopolitanism and Creolization

The question of what models of cultural interaction should
drive our translation strategies has potentially far-reaching
consequences. Perhaps we should be prepared to ask how
theatre/translation might expose the oppressive, othering
machinery of nation and use the stage to rehearse the demise
of the arbitrary borders it enforces and the imaginary com-
munities it wants us to feel part of. Perhaps we should also
ask how theatre/translation might enable and produce
58
different, ethical modes of encountering and hosting others,
or being hosted by them. Perhaps we should let translation
reconfigure the theatre as a permanent border zone in which
identity is neither here nor there, but eternally heteroge-
neous, porous and open. In any case, it is clear that the
host – not only the guest – will need to change in the pro-
cess, and be ready to unlearn some of her most deep-seated
ways of conceptualizing the world.
I want to introduce two possible paradigms, cosmopoli-
tanism and creolization, that might help us think through the
ethics of hospitality beyond the assimilationist and exoticiz-
ing models offered by nation states. They are by no means
the only two options available, but the ones I wish to exam-
ine here. Both cosmopolitanism and creolization present
some problems, while they solve others. However, they are
worth discussing to at least begin to shake the hegemonic
‘common sense’ of assimilation and exoticization and start
the search for ethical ways of encountering others and tell-
ing their stories, of speaking with and for them.
Saying ‘welcome to my home’ is a complex and contra-
dictory gesture. For Jacques Derrida, hospitality is an unde-
cidable concept, an aporia: on the one hand, Derrida writes,
true hospitality is unconditional hospitality, and has no lim-
its; on the other, one can only welcome guests when one is
the owner of the house and in a certain sense in control of
the guests, restricting their actions and behaviours with vari-
ous degrees of violence. There is no hospitality if there is no
ownership. Therefore, one could say that true hospitality
deconstructs the relation of self and other, making it
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impossible to host any guest at all; at the same time, a kind

of hospitality that still relies on borders and ownership easily
turns inhospitable, imposing exclusions on those who come
to visit us. It is within this paradoxical tension that Derrida
considers the notion of ethics and hospitality as co-extensive.
In an essay entitled ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, he writes:
Hospitality is culture itself and not simply an eth-

ics amongst others. Insofar as it has to do with the
ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the
familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a
manner of being there, the manner in which we
relate to others and to ourselves, to others as our
own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality: ethics is
so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of
hospitality. (17)
Living together on this planet will necessarily mean finding

ways to integrate the mentality of the local with that of the
global, but the idea of cosmopolitanism has been dividing
theorists into proponents, opponents and everything in
between for centuries. A ‘cosmopolitan’ can be broadly
defined as someone who thinks their ‘home’ is not a specific
nation or region, but the whole world. This might come
across as an elitist way of thinking fit for jet-setters and
globe-trotters, yet it needn’t be so: in our globally intercon-
nected world, the choices one makes on one side of the
globe can directly affect people on the opposite side, and
vice versa. So, in a sense, we are all cosmopolitans, although
60
we might not identify as such, or we may not like the word
itself, or because the national paradigm is imposed on us
since birth and it is hard to think outside of it. A cosmopoli-
tan, then, is someone who is able to see the irrelevance of
nationalisms, without necessarily embracing a universal or
homogeneous global culture.
Kwame-Anthony Appiah stresses that in a cosmopolitan
view of ethics, ‘no local loyalty can ever justify forgetting
that every human being has responsibilities to every other’
(xiv). Appiah developed a theory for how we might learn to
co-exist by having conversations with one another cross-
culturally, a project which requires translation and the dis-
carding of current models of thought. Appiah believes we
should all learn to care for one another in a globalized world,
but locates the current issue with implementing true cos-
mopolitanism as that of transitioning from a national to a
global ethical paradigm:
Each person you know about and can affect is

someone to whom you have responsibilities: to
say this is just to affirm the very idea of morality.
The challenge, then, is to take minds and hearts
formed over the long millennia of living in local
troops and equip them with ideas and institutions
that will allow us to live together as the global
tribe we have become. (xi)
Appiah suggests mindsets need to change – so what role do

stories, and specifically stories in translation, have in this
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transition? Paul Ricoeur grappled with this conundrum in

his essay entitled ‘Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe’
(1996: 3–13). There, he argued that it would be impossible
for the European Union to build support for its new supra-
national structures without a change of ethical paradigm in
the minds of its peoples, who are used to think in national
terms. How can changes in the imagination, asked Ricoeur,
support unrealized changes at institutional level? Ricoeur
proposed three ‘models for the integration of identity and
alterity’ (4): first, ‘the model of translation’, understood as
‘really a matter of living with the other in order to take that
other home as a guest’ leading to a new ‘translation ethos
whose goal would be to repeat at the cultural and spiritual
level the gesture of linguistic hospitality’ (5, emphasis in the
original). Second, ‘the model of the exchange of memories’,
as ‘a further step: that of taking responsibility, in imagination
and in sympathy, for the story of the other through the life
narratives that concern that other. This is what we learn to
do in our dealings with fictional characters with whom we
provisionally identify through reading’ (6–7). And third,
Ricoeur analyses ‘the model of forgiveness’, as ‘the exchange
of the memories of sufferings inflicted and sustained’ in
order to avoid the horror of ‘the perverse recourse to a nar-
rative identity which is devoid of the important correctives
already noted, namely the examination of one’s own stories
and the entanglement of our stories with the stories of oth-
ers’ (9–10). Ricoeur’s model of a supranational ethics is
based on an idea of identity as a receptacle of the stories of
62
others, and translation as the mechanism that allows us to
practice the hospitality of others’ stories.
Derrida also discussed cosmopolitanism and hospitality
through the existing notion of the medieval ‘city of refuge’,
a historical institution balancing between the unconditional,
universal Law of Hospitality ‘which ordered that the bor-
ders be open to each and every one, to every other, to all
who might come, without question’ (18) and the condi-
tional laws of a right to hospitality, which could be contin-
gent and specific. Theatre could strive to be that city, a city
of refuge for artists and their stories from across the globe,
whoever they may be. Theatre could strive to offer uncondi-
tional hospitality to all newcomers, welcoming their lin-
guistic, racial, religious and cultural difference. In practice,
this would require challenging existing taste and exposing
audiences to substantially different ways of conceptualizing
theatre and the world.
Creolization, on the other hand, is a decolonizing concept
put forward by cultural theorists of the Caribbean world in
the second half of the twentieth century, such as Kamau
Brathwaite, initially with nationalist connotations. Current
uses are linked to Créolité, a literary movement founded in the
1990s by Martinican authors Édouard Glissant, Patrick
Chamoiseau, Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant in direct
opposition to what they saw as the inadequacy of Negritude, a
concept developed by diasporic African writers of the 1930s,
such as the Martinican writer, playwright and politician Aimé
Césaire, who stressed that diasporic black identities emerged
from their African roots. Creolization refers to a specific
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phenomenon of cultural hybridization that took place in the

Caribbean islands as a result of colonization, whereby cross-
cultural and cross-linguistic identities began to emerge, and
creole people began to identify with their distinctively mixed
creole heritage. Mimi Sheller stresses that the notion was ini-
tially developed to account for a culture of resistance within
diasporic communities of slaves. She argues that creolization
is ‘a conflictual process of re-homing or re-grounding, rather
than simply a playful uprooting and re-mixing of dislocated
cultures’ (Sheller in Ahmed et al. 2003: 282). But according
to many writers and thinkers who have adopted the term as a
‘master metaphor’ beyond the Caribbean region, such as Ulf
Hannerz and Glissant himself, the whole world is now in cre-
olization (Cohen and Toninato 2010: 5). While this semantic
expansion of the word ‘creolization’ does not please every
critic because of the fear that generalizing it may devalue its
specificity (see Sheller in Ahmed et al. 2003: 273–94), many
scholars, including Stuart Hall, have applied it to other con-
texts. Hall acknowledged the potentially subversive conse-
quences of creolization, especially in challenging nationalism
and its narratives of purity. He wrote:
Translation always bears the traces of the origi-

nal, but in such a way that the original is impos-
sible to restore. Indeed, ‘translation’ is suspicious
of the language of the return to origins and
originary roots as a narrative of culture. […]
64
Translation is an important way of thinking about
creolization, because it always retains the traces
of those elements which resist translation, which
remain left-over, so to speak, in lack or excess,
and which constantly return to trouble any effort
to achieve total cultural closure. (29)
Hall stressed how out of the three main cultures involved in

the process of Caribbean creolization – African, European
and American – emerged many other distinctive identities
and languages (known as creole or patois languages), formed
of fragments of all three but irreducible to any one of them.
Hierarchies and forms of oppression were, of course, at play
in this process of cultural interweaving and translation, but
none of the three initial national/linguistic/cultural identi-
ties can claim exclusive ownership of the resulting creolized
languages/cultures. This process, then, can perhaps inspire
a decolonial model for cultural encounters in which the
world of the translated play is fairly negotiated in a spirit of
reciprocal hospitality, of talking for/on behalf of/with oth-
ers, without having to assume the existence of a single host
and an owner of the house. Creolization, reconfigured as a
decolonial process, can support an ethics of difference based
on a conception of identity as always already made of the
stories of others, pursuing an aesthetics that complicates the
category of hospitality by establishing reciprocal practices of
hosting and guesting.
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Staging an Alien Spectating Experience

In my research project Translating Theatre (www.translat-
ingtheatre.com), I took inspiration from the debate on for-
eignization and attempted to rethink this from a theatre
studies perspective, at times consciously departing from
Venuti’s arguments and recommendations, which aim to
‘stage an alien reading experience’ (2008: 16) but do not
consider how the medium of performance complicates the
reception of a translated text. Encompassing unwritten
rules that are different in every culture yet codify expecta-
tions – concerning textual poetics, visual aesthetics, direct-
ing, casting, acting styles, accents, gestures, costumes, lights,
music and so on – theatre adds further interpretive layers
that need to be specifically examined. The live dimension of
performance requires the translator and the director/devis-
ing collective to strategically construct difference for the
target audience and speak on behalf of the writer. If the
choice of text and painstaking work of the interlingual trans-
lator is not accompanied by similar ethical, aesthetic and
political considerations in performance, the translated text’s
experimental potential may be neutralized by an entirely
conventional staging. Crucially, I am interested in how non-
standard performance forms and practices can be used to
reconfigure linguistic and cultural difference in the staging
of translations; how non-standard performance forms and
practices can support discursive and non-discursive strate-
gies in the pursuit of an ethics of difference in theatre
translation.
66
Translating Theatre was designed to address the lack of
foreign-language plays in the British theatre repertoire
(3.8% of all plays in the UK in 2013 were translations,
and 2.2% of all performances according to the British
Theatre Repertoire 2013). These figures are even more
disappointing if we compare them with the number of
foreign-born Britons and foreign citizens legally residing
in the UK. In Britain, the population is 14.4% foreign-
born and 9.5% foreign citizens, while in London the per-
centage rises to 41% foreign-born and 28% foreign
citizens (Migration Observatory 2018). Some of the most
represented migrant languages/cultures in the UK are, in
order of size: Polish, Punjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati,
Arabic, French, All Other Chinese (not Mandarin or
Cantonese), Portuguese and Spanish (ONS 2013). Why
should you care if migrant and/or foreign-language
authors don’t get a chance to be visible and audible in
countries other than their so-called ‘country of origin’?
Because monolingual/monocultural audiences have a duty
to learn to care about other languages/cultures that live
shoulder to shoulder to them. And because these demo-
graphic figures, read against the percentage of foreign-
language plays staged in British theatre, point to an issue
of social justice. The lack of translations on Anglo-
American stages could be seen as a form of discrimination
on the basis of cultural and linguistic difference, but the
issue is not yet perceived as such by public opinion.
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As Rustom Bharucha writes, ‘[h]ow can one presume to

talk about interculturalism … if one hasn’t begun to
encounter the diverse social and ethnic communities
inhabiting one’s own public space?’ (2000: 2).
The Translating Theatre project aimed to raise public
awareness of translation as an ethical imperative in a multi-
cultural society: the arts need to reflect the society they
serve by translating more stories from other corners of the
world, even if translation does not give us unmediated
access to other cultures or languages. This is why, at a time
when the UK’s relationship to Europe was (and still is as I
write) being collectively examined in the political arena, we
decided to translate from three of the four most spoken
European immigrant languages in the UK. Another key
objective of the project was to experiment with an approach
to translation for the stage that would be modelled on a
kind of cultural encounter in which both the guest and the
host practise reciprocal hospitality and must change in
order to meet one another. In this light, we set out to test
performative strategies that would challenge certain norms
of British theatre practice from within.
In the summer of 2016, a team of scholar-translators,
directors and performers came together in London under
my leadership to translate and perform in English three con-
tinental European plays written in Polish, Spanish and
French by Europe-based writers with a family history of
migration. We translated Denise Despeyroux’s Black
68
Tenderness: The Passion of Mary Stuart, a magical realist com-
edy about history and our relationship with its vestiges;
Marie NDiaye’s The Snakes, a symbolic drama about three
women – the mother, the wife and the ex-wife of a man we
never get to see – which keeps spectators hanging with its
motionless, suffocated atmosphere; and Piotr Peter
Lachmann’s Gliwice Hamlet, an autobiographical, anti-realist
rewriting of Shakespeare in which the author’s experience of
displacement during World War II brings up issues of mem-
ory and identity, written in Polish with hints of German,
English and other languages. These plays were presented as
staged readings at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill, London,
immediately following the Brexit referendum vote. The
project was developed to resist, and offer theatrical counter-
narratives to, the anti-immigration rhetoric gaining more
and more purchase in British political discourses.
Dominant theatre translation practices in the UK tend to
assimilate foreign-language plays by following the conven-
tions of transparency and performability. The project asked
how translation might be able to highlight, rather than
silence, linguistic and cultural difference, without falling
into the traps of assimilation or exoticization. Every effort
was made to select outstanding plays that would challenge
the perceived taste of British audiences and the conventions
of British theatre, questioning assumptions about what
should be translated and how it should be staged. Using
translation as an intervention in the existing ecology of UK
theatre – namely, as an opportunity to subvert existing dis-
courses that tend to exclude forms of theatre considered
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capable of confronting audiences with unfamiliarity – the

project sought to make UK theatre more inclusive and
representative.
The research teams – comprising scholars and theatre-
makers – came together for one week each to rehearse the
plays by Despeyroux, NDiaye and Lachmann, exploring how
the desired effect – to stage an alien spectating experience –
could work in performance terms. Each team put forward
different strategies to subvert existing expectations regarding
how foreign plays are translated and staged in the UK, but for
all three, at a discursive level, the desire to reproduce aspects
of the foreign-language syntax emerged strongly. Syntactical
borrowing was practiced as a pretext to shift the conven-
tional, standard dialect most commonly used on British stages
and create new conditions of ‘performability’. At a perfor-
mance level, all three teams experimented with accents and
one in particular, the team working on Lachmann, opted for
non-traditional casting practices (i.e. we did not seek to
match the actors’ ethnicity, age and accents with those of the
characters). After each rehearsed reading, post-graduate stu-
dents carried out audience feedback interviews. Examining
these, I began to evaluate the effects that the choice of text,
combined with discursive and performative strategies, had
provoked in our audiences (Laera 2018).
What I noticed from the interviews was that by far the
most perplexing practice had been that of casting two black
British actors to play the two parts in the Polish play, Gliwice
Hamlet, which explores how the ghosts of history haunt per-
sonal identities. Here, the two characters were interpreted
70
by regular and trusted collaborators of the director, one of
whom spoke in an idiosyncratic Zimbabwean-inflected
accent, and who could both draw on their own life stories to
connect to Lachmann’s themes. Lachmann’s play is a poetic
meditation on history and memory in which identity is con-
ceived as fluid and performers shift roles between those of
Hamlet and Gertrude, actors rehearsing a play, and the
author and his mother.The title encapsulates the play’s inter-
weaving of ‘particularity’, the author’s life story and the link
to his native village of Gliwice – a Silesian town which
turned from Polish to German in post-war border recon-
figurations – and the perceived ‘universality’ par excellence of
the story of Hamlet. Many respondents were concerned that
the representational gap between the Polish characters and
the actors on stage was too wide. Was it ethically and/or
aesthetically sound for these performers, who embody a dif-
ferent history and heritage, to be given the task to speak on
behalf of a white Polish-German author whose play investi-
gated his own childhood memories of displacement in the
German–Polish border region of Silesia during World
War II? On the one hand, many of our audience members –
a self-selecting group of (mostly white) drama students,
academics and theatre-makers – felt that this proposition
was not convincing, or that the production needed to be
framed as an African adaptation of Lachmann’s script in
order to fully embrace the performers’ African identity
without ambiguity yet were not prepared to see how the
actors’ ethnicity enhanced the story we were trying to tell.
The actors, on the other hand, spoke about their excitement
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at playing Lachmann’s story of displacement, which partly

mapped onto their own personal experiences and complex
mixed identities.
We knew that on British stages, performers of colour are
only offered parts that could ‘realistically’ be non-white, and
those parts are few and far between. Casting according to
‘realist’ concerns, however, often results in the reinforce-
ment of stereotypes: while Arab or Middle Eastern actors
are cast as terrorists or criminals (and, thankfully, many
plays have also been written to parody the industry for this),
black actors are selected for marginal or marginalized char-
acters of low social status. We need different stories that
empower people of colour and other marginalized constitu-
encies, but we also need casting practices that are consciously
challenging racism and society’s exclusions. What if, say,
social and geographical variations of English from outside
the British Isles and the US, or even English spoken as a for-
eign language, were not only allowed on stage to portray
characters that ‘plausibly owned’ that accent? What if these
non-standard accents were allowed to share what Quiara
Alegría Hudes calls the ‘luxury of neutrality’ (Hudes and
Sanchez 2019: 3) with standard Estuary English? Could we
conceive of an accent-conscious casting?
The conclusion I drew from this small-scale experiment
was that non-traditional and colour-conscious casts, along
with non-standard accents, which are seldom seen and heard
in British theatre – hence generated the most perplexity in
the audience – could be used as part of a set of performative
approaches aimed at strategically constructing cultural and
72
linguistic difference in a foreign-language play on a British
stage today. Strategically re-constructing (rather than trans-
porting) difference for us meant working towards building a
more world on our stages, offering more opportunities to
those that have been underserved by dominant practices.
Our aim to respect the source text’s difference drove us
towards challenging target-context ‘common sense’
approaches not only with regards to the selection of texts
and their textual translation, but also with their perfor-
mance. What other strategies would you use? How would
you practise translation in the theatre as an opportunity to
hold society to account? I believe those working on the cast-
ing, performance and mise en scène of plays in translation
need to think of themselves as guests, not only hosts, of that
play. Their practices, codes, norms and expectations need to
change too in order to respect their host’s difference – that
is the basic principle of reciprocal hospitality.
Chapter 3: Why? The Case for More Translations
In this last chapter I am going to argue that we need more,

and more types of, theatre translation, on the basis of three
main arguments.We need translations to: (1) expose theatre-
going audiences to the stories of others; (2) offer a voice/
visibility to those who are rarely heard/seen in the theatre;
(3) give access to those who rarely have access to the
theatre.
73
linguistic difference in a foreign-language play on a British
stage today. Strategically re-constructing (rather than trans-
porting) difference for us meant working towards building a
more world on our stages, offering more opportunities to
those that have been underserved by dominant practices.
Our aim to respect the source text’s difference drove us
towards challenging target-context ‘common sense’
approaches not only with regards to the selection of texts
and their textual translation, but also with their perfor-
mance. What other strategies would you use? How would
you practise translation in the theatre as an opportunity to
hold society to account? I believe those working on the cast-
ing, performance and mise en scène of plays in translation
need to think of themselves as guests, not only hosts, of that
play. Their practices, codes, norms and expectations need to
change too in order to respect their host’s difference – that
is the basic principle of reciprocal hospitality.
Chapter 3: Why? The Case for More Translations
In this last chapter I am going to argue that we need more,

and more types of, theatre translation, on the basis of three
main arguments.We need translations to: (1) expose theatre-
going audiences to the stories of others; (2) offer a voice/
visibility to those who are rarely heard/seen in the theatre;
(3) give access to those who rarely have access to the
theatre.
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The Stories of Others

In support of argument 1 above – that more translations are
needed to expose more spectators to the stories of others – I
maintain that the scarcity of stage translations in the reper-
toires of any cultural context is damaging because it sup-
ports an insular and autarchic understanding of identity: ‘We
don’t need to look beyond our language to know the world’,
the reluctant-to-translation theatre system communicates to
its end-users. But do you know what? No matter how local
or ‘global’ your language is – and English definitely is a
global language – everyone needs to look beyond their own
way of conceptualizing the world through theatre. In an
increasingly interconnected world, what people think or do
in other corners of the world matters to us here and now. As
citizens of multicultural societies shaped by migration and
transnational flows of capital, we must take responsibility for
how we engage with other cultures, because we simply can-
not avoid them or turn a blind eye to them: culturally distant
others are here to stay. However much we dislike how neo-
liberal capitalism and racism promote unequal exchanges
between people, it is not by furthering cultural chauvinism
and segregation that we will be able to address inequality or
end oppression. The argument that we can only resist cul-
tural imperialism by focusing on our own traditions and
communicating less with other cultures is anti-historical and
unrealistic. By engaging more people with the complexities
and processes of telling someone else’s story, it may be pos-
sible to find new shared meaning, rather than lament its loss
in translation.
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Telling other people’s stories is what translators and
theatre-makers do on a daily basis: they speak on behalf of
others. And that’s also what we do as readers, spectators,
auditors and interpreters when we share with our interlocu-
tors what we think we have seen, heard, read or understood
about these stories. The practice of speaking for, on behalf of
and with other people requires that we understand how to
handle the huge responsibility that is given to us. Empathizing
with others, who may be different from us, demands highly
skilled emotional and intellectual labour, for which most of
us – like athletes – require constant training through read-
ing, listening and watching. Imagining ourselves in other
people’s shoes nurtures our minds’ openness, hospitality
and flexibility, and is therefore an important part of demo-
cratic, anti-racist sociability. Engaging with others’ stories
whilst acknowledging the ethical issue of speaking on behalf
of another, the risks of appropriation and the complexities of
cross-cultural communication can play a crucial part in our
mental exercise for a more equitable, diverse and inclusive
world.
Fear and hatred of the other stem from ignorance, but
translation and performance can train us to meet other peo-
ple’s world views, to begin to see the world from a perspec-
tive other than our own, relativize our own beliefs and
practices and challenge ethnic absolutisms and essentialisms.
While there are things we may never understand of other
people’s experiences, we must keep trying and failing better
by getting attuned to the complexities, paradoxes and diffi-
culties of intercultural communication. This does not mean,
75
&
however, that any kind of translation will do. Only those

translations that remark themselves as translations can do the
work of uprooting and regrounding that is necessary to resist
cultural narcissism. The practice of writing, watching, read-
ing and listening to translations as translations – not as mis-
recognised sameness that disregards the process of
interpretation – can be instrumental in the training of hearts
and minds for a progressive ethics of fair exchanges and
reciprocity. We must learn to welcome the stories of others
with respect and openness, and a critique of transparency is
crucial in order to achieve this.
We must also recognise that this mechanism of cultural
exchange, of the hosting and inscription of others’ stories
into a shared cultural tapestry, is constitutive of human
history, and not just a phenomenon linked to modernity,
colonialism or globalization. Erika Fischer-Lichte has ded-
icated her entire scholarly career to the notion of ‘inter-
weaving cultures in performance’, whereby she argues
that the process of intercultural ‘interweaving’ is always
already at play through theatre, not just in so-called ‘inter-
cultural theatre’ (2014). On the other hand, Rustom
Bharucha has rightly pointed out that some cultural
encounters, such as that between Britain/Europe and
India, are not ‘two-way streets’ but rather ‘dead-ends’
dominated by appropriation and pillaging of the colonized
culture for the colonizer’s exclusive benefit (1993: 2–3).
From the point of view of Indian theatre-makers and audi-
ences, then, it may not make sense to push for more trans-
lated plays to be imported from abroad. Instead, it may be
76
more appropriate in this context to concentrate on trans-
lating ‘intraculturally’, as Bharucha suggests, from one
Indian language to another to further understanding
within the heterogeneous nation state. However, the risk
of ignoring, silencing and making others invisible is always
around the corner. No culture is immune from the dan-
gers of ethnocentrism. Using translation to decentre and
subvert current hierarchies and dominant ‘common sense’
can be beneficial in any context.
Visibility/Audibility
Which brings me to my argument number 2: more transla-
tions are needed to offer a voice and space to those who are
rarely heard and seen in the theatre. Bharucha argued that it
is pointless and even damaging to go and look for ‘novelty’
abroad, looting and cherry-picking from other people’s cul-
tures, when there is so much variety and heterogeneity
already at home. His argument may be taken in support for
the need to translate from those (migrant or autochthonous)
language/cultures that are present in the target context but
are often not seen or heard there because of marginalization.
For instance, in the United States, theatre-makers should
strive to make Latinx plays written in Spanish or English
more visible, given that Spanish-speaking migrants represent
over 12% of the population. However, as playwright Quiara
Alegría Hudes – who writes in English – has pointed out,
mechanisms of othering and exoticization are constantly at
play simply through the fact that staging her Latinx stories
with Latinx performers in commercial US venues
77
&
predominantly run and frequented by white, middle-class

audiences. This means that her plays are taken to be ‘per-
forming race’ rather than humanity (Hudes and Sanchez
2019: 3). Indeed, the theatre can do much more to make its
own space more inclusive and equitable, even if, as I have
argued, translation does not give us immediate access to the
‘original’. Translation remains our only tool: short of every-
one learning every other language in the world, we have to
make it work. So, the answer is not to give up, but to con-
stantly re-examine and critique translation as a practice and
as a process to foster intercultural understanding, and to
make more people aware of the complexities of translation
by, for instance, making language learning compulsory in
schools.
Widening Access
And here’s my last argument in favour of more translations:
that they provide access to the theatre for those that too
often are denied it. Subtitled foreign-language or multilin-
gual theatre can have a powerful and productive distancing
effect in which a spectator is made acutely aware of the sheer
effort required to communicate across language barriers –
but accessing theatre through forms of translation, such as
captions, audio descriptions and live interpretation may not
be one’s own choice. For D/deaf, hard of hearing, blind and
partially sighted spectators, these translation practices pro-
vide much-needed access to an art form that too often
excludes rather than include difference. I have started this
book with a description of a Graeae’s pioneering ‘aesthetics
78
of access’, which embraces translation in every aspect of
performance. But recent technological advances promise to
make accessibility techniques much more affordable and
potentially widespread. In 2017, London’s National Theatre
launched a set of pioneering captioning glasses that pledged
to improve the experience of D/deaf and hard of hearing
spectators. This new gadget alone does not solve the prob-
lem of widening theatre’s accessibility, which needs to be
considered more holistically and embraced aesthetically, but
technology can play a vital part in making theatre more
inclusive in the future. Maybe one day AI will help solve
most people’s accessibility problems, but until then it is up
to us to raise to the challenge. Sometimes, for instance,
hosting a subtitled version of an original foreign-language or
multilingual production may be preferable to the translation
of a script and the reconfiguring of it in the target language
through a local cast – this is because for some, like parts of
the D/deaf community, subtitled foreign-language produc-
tions may result in the performance being more, rather than
less, accessible. The experience of not understanding the
words being spoken on stage and having to read slides on a
screen may not be everyone’s idea of a good night out, but it
is a powerful reminder of the labour of translation, and of
the existence of another language/culture beneath the sur-
face and illusion of transparency.
In the autumn of 2018, I attended a production by exper-
imental Flemish theatre collective Needcompany, The Blind
Poet. This was a multilingual performance in Dutch,
Indonesian, French, Arabic, Norwegian, Tunisian and
79
&
English, performed by cast members speaking in both their

native and non-native languages, which was subtitled every-
where it was presented. Every member of this Brussels-
based intercultural group of theatre-makers told the
audience about their family tree going back a thousand years,
mixing historical facts with pure invention and imagining
how the company members’ ancestors would have met at
some point in the past. The Blind Poet managed to create on
stage a multilingual, utopian space in which to rethink his-
tory, subjectivity and belonging; any claim of purity in any-
one’s background was hollowed out, and identity
reconfigured as a permanent border zone. The subtitles,
making translation visible, were an integral part of a moving
performance that questioned the limitations of our current
models of identification, and the urgency of reframing the
paradigms of how we conceptualize who we are, where we
are from and where we are going.
Interpreting is at the basis of our everyday dealings with
difference and otherness – not just with languages/cultures
in the sense of national/regional identities and practices, but
in our encounters with people of different backgrounds,
attitudes, gender, age, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
religion, ability, political affiliation, and so on. In this sense,
then, even when strictly speaking, we share the same lan-
guage, we are all ‘translators’ of the wor(l)ds of others. How
will you pay your respect to the others you wish to repre-
sent? How will you be a good host, and a good guest? And
how will you speak with, not only for them?
80
&
further reading
Here are some recommendations – by no means exhaus-

tive – for what to read next. If you are interested in trans-
lation studies, the guides by Baker, Bassnett and Munday
are excellent introductions to the theory and practice of
translation; anything by Venuti is also highly recommended.
For translation and postcolonialism, see also Robinson;
Wakabayashi; and Tymoczko. For translation and gender: see
Castro and Ergun. For cultural translation, see Maitland.
For the theory of theatre translation, the best place to
start is Aaltonen’s Time-Sharing on Stage, which unfortu-
nately is out of print. Other key general texts on theatre
translation are the volumes by Anderman; Baines, Marinetti
and Perteghella; Bigliazzi, Kofler and Ambrosi; Brodie and
Cole; Frigau Manning and Karsky (in French); Johnston;
Krebs; Upton. For studies on specific contexts, see: Aaltonen
and Ibrahim (Egypt); Boyle and Johnston (Spanish Golden
81
&
Age in English); Brodie (London); Chan (Hong Kong);

Curran (Japan); Nolette (francophone Canada, in French).
The field of adaptation studies is currently dominated by
the seminal book by Hutcheon, where she discusses theatre
alongside other art forms. Books edited by Reilly and Laera
focus on theatre and adaptation more specifically. Countless
volumes have been published on adapting classical authors
around the world, but Desmet, Iyengar and Jacobson’s col-
lection on Shakespeare appropriations and Clayton and
Meerzon’s on Chekhov adaptations offer important method-
ological lessons for the discipline as a whole.
Aaltonen, Sirkku. Time-Sharing on Stage: Drama Translation in Theatre and

Society. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2000.
–– and Areeg Ibrahim, eds. Rewriting Narratives in Egyptian Theatre:Translation,
Performance, Politics. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2016.
Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London;
New York: Routledge, 2000.
–– Claudia Castada, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller, eds. Uprootings/
Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. London: Berg, 2003.
Alcoff, Linda Martín. ‘The Problem of Speaking for Others’, Cultural
Critique 20 (1991), 5–32.
Anderman, Gunilla. Europe on Stage:Translation and Theatre. London: Oberon,
2005.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in aWorld of Strangers.
London: Penguin, 2007.
Baines, Roger, Cristina Marinetti and Manuela Perteghella, eds. Staging and
Performing Translation:Texts and Theatre Practice. Basingstoke; New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Baker, Mona. In OtherWords: A Coursebook on Translation. 3rd edn. Abingdon;
–– and Gabriela Saldanha, eds. The Rutledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies.
Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2011.
82
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 2000.
–– Image Music Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 1977.
Bassnett, Susan. Translation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2014.
–– ‘Translating for the Theatre: The Case Against ‘Performability’’, TTR 4.1
(1991): 99–111.
Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice:Thinking Through Theatre in
an Age of Globalization. London: Athlone, 2000.
–– Theatre and theWorld. Performance and the Politics of Culture. Abingdon;
Bigliazzi, Silvia, Peter Kofler, and Paola Ambrosi, eds. Theatre Translation in
Performance. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2014.
Billington, Michael. State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945. London:
Faber & Faber, 2007.
Boyle, Catherine, and David Johnston, eds. The Spanish Golden Age in English:
Perspective on Performance. London: Oberon, 2007.
Brodie, Geraldine. The Translator on Stage. London; New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018.
–– and Emma Cole, eds. Adapting Translation for the Stage. Abingdon:
Routledge, 2017.
Carlson, Marvin. Speaking in Tongues: Languages at Play in the Theatre. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Castro, Olga, and Emek Ergun, eds. Feminist Translation Studies: Local and
Transnational Perspectives. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2013.
Chan, Shelby. Identity and Theatre Translation in Hong Kong. Heidelberg;
New York: Springer, 2015.
Clayton, J. Douglas, and Yana Meerzon, eds. Adapting Chekhov:The Text and Its
Mutations. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2013.
Cohen, Robin, and Paola Toninato, eds. The Creolization Reader: Studies in
Mixed Identities and Cultures. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2010.
Curran, Beverley. Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary
Japan: NativeVoices, Foreign Bodies. Manchester: St. Jerome, 2008.
De Andrade, Oswald. Cannibalist Manifesto. Trans. Leslie Bary. In Latin
American Literary Review 19.38 (1991): 38–47.
Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Abingdon; New York:
Routledge, 2001.
83
&
Déprats, Jean-Michel, and Antoine Vitez. AntoineVitez, le devoir de traduire.

Paris: Actes Sud, 2017.
Desmet, Christy, Sujata Iyengar and Miriam Jacobson, eds. The Routledge
Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. Abingdon; New York:
Routledge, 2019.
Escobar Varela, Miguel. ‘Wayang Kontemporer: Innovations in Javanese
Wayang Kulit’, unpublished, 2014, available at <http://cwa-web.
org/dissertation/wayang-dis/index.php>.
Frigau Manning, Céline, ed. Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to
the Digital Age. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.
–– and Marie Nadia Karsky, eds. Traduire le théâtre. Saint-Denis: Presses
Universitaires de Vincennes, 2017.
Harnish, David, and Anne Rassmussen, eds. Divine Inspirations: Music and
Islam in Indonesia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Hudes, Quiara Alegría, and Gabriela Serena Sanchez. ‘Pausing and
Breathing: Two Sisters Deliver the ATHE 2018 Conference Keynote
Address’, Theatre Topics 29.1 (2019): 1–13.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge,
2006.
Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden. An Octoroon. London: Nick Hern Books, 2018.
Johnston, David. Stages of Translation:Translators on Translating for the Stage.
London: Oberon, 1996.
Kenny, Mark. This Is Not forYou: An Elegy. Unpublished script, 2018.
Knowles, Ric. Theatre & Interculturalism. London; New York: Red Globe
Press, 2010.
Krebs, Katja. ed. Translation and Adaptation in Theatre and Film. Abingdon;
Laera, Margherita, ed. Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat.
London; New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2014.
–– ‘Performing Heteroglossia: The Translating Theatre Project in London’,
Modern Drama 61.3 (2018): 380–410.
Lecoq, Jacques. The Moving Body (Le Corps Poétique):Teaching Creative Theatre.
Trans. David Bradby. London; New York: Bloomsbury, 2009.
Lobitinère-Harwood, Susanne de. Re-Belle et Infidèle/The Body Bilingual:
Translation as Re-Writing in the Feminine. Toronto: Women’s Press of
Canada, 1982.
84
Maitland, Sarah. What is Cultural Translation? London; New York:
Bloomsbury, 2017.
Migration Observatory. ‘Migrants in the UK: An Overview’, 2018.
Available at <https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/
briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-an-overview/>.
Munday, Jeremy. Introducing Translation Studies:Theories and Applications.
Nolette, Nicole. Jouer la traduction:Théâtre et hétérolinguisme au Canada franco-
phone. Ottawa: Presses Universitaires d’Ottawa, 2015.
Office for National Statistics (ONS). ‘2011 Census: Detailed analysis –
English language proficiency in England and Wales, Main language and
general health characteristics’, 2013. Available at <https://www.ons.
gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/language/
articles/detailedanalysisenglishlanguageproficiencyinenglandan-
dwales/2013-08-30>
Pavis, Patrice. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture. Trans. Loren Kruger.
–– The Intercultural Studies Reader. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 1996.
Rebellato, Dan, and David Eldridge. ‘British Theatre Repertoire 2013:
Report by the British Theatre Consortium, UK Theatre, and the
Society of London Theatre’, May 2015. Available at <http://brit-
ishtheatreconference.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/British-
Theatre-Repertoire-2013.pdf>.
Reilly, Kara, ed. Contemporary Approaches to Adaptation in Theatre. Basingstoke;
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Ricoeur, Paul, and Richard Kearney. Paul Ricoeur:The Hermeneutics of Action.
London; Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 1996.
Robinson, Douglas. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained.
Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). ‘Press Release: RSC in China’,
6 October 2015, <https://www.rsc.org.uk/press/releases/
rsc-in-china>.
–– ‘Chinese Classics Translation Project’, no date given,
<https://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/our-work-in-china/
chinese-classics-translation-project>.
85
&
Simons, Gary. ‘Welcome to the 22nd Edition’, 19 February 2019, in

Ethnologue.com, <https://www.ethnologue.com/ethnoblog/
gary-simons/welcome-22nd-edition>.
Svich, Caridad. ‘Caridad Svich Interviewed by Margherita Laera’.
Unpublished email. 25 November 2018.
Susmono, Enthus. Dewa Ruci [The Resplendent God], 2008. Trans. by
Miguel Escobar Varela and Indraswari Kusumanigtyas. Singapore:
Contemporary Wayang Archive. Available at <http://cwa-web.org/
en/DewaRuci>.
Tymoczko, Maria. Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators. Abingdon;
Upton, Carole-Anne, ed. Moving Target:Theatre Translation and Cultural
Relocation. Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2000.
Venuti, Lawrence. Translation Changes Everything:Theory and Practice.
–– The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd edn. Abingdon;
Wakabayashi, Judy. ‘Secular Translation: Asian Perspectives’, in The Oxford
Handbook of Translation Studies. Ed. Kisten Malmkjaer and Kevin
Windle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011: 23–36.
–– and Rita Kothari, eds. Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond.
Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2009.
Weaver, Simon. ‘The “Other” Laughs Back: Humour and Resistance in Anti-
Racist Comedy, Sociology 44.1 (2010): 31–48.
Weng, Shihui. ‘Shihui Weng interviewed by Margherita Laera’. Unpublished
conversation. 20 July 2018.
86
index
&
accent, 38, 66, 70, 72
access, 17, 19, 26, 40, 68,
73, 78
aesthetics of, 4, 78–9
accessibility, 29, 79
Black Tenderness:The Passion of Mary
Stuart, 68, 69
blackface, 34
Blind Poet,The, 79, 80
Boal, Augusto, 23–5
adaptation, 18, 25, 26, 28, 29, 32, Boucicault, Dion, 33–7
37, 54, 71 Brathwaite, Kamau, 63
Ahmed, Sara, 57, 64 Brook, Peter, 53
Alcoff Martín, Linda, 6 Brossard, Nicole, 6, 11
anti-racist, 34, 57
Appiah, Kwame-Anthony, 61 Carlson, Marvin, 53, 54
appropriation, 6, 31, 32, 34, 46, Castellucci, Romeo, 47
48, 75–77 casting, 33, 34, 50, 66, 70–3
assimilation, 48, 50, 53–9, 69 Césaire, Aimé, 63
audibility, 67, 77 city of refuge, 63
authorship, 18, 20 cosmopolitanism, 58–63
Créolité, 63
Barthes, Roland, 14, 17, 18 creolization, 58, 59, 63–5
Bassnett, Susan, 48
belle et infidèle, 11 dalang, 29–31
Bharucha, Rustom, 68, 76, 77 D/deaf spectators, 78, 79
87
&
De Andrade, Oswald, 11 Hudes, Quiara Alegría, 72, 77, 78

decolonial theory, 40, 63, 65 Hwang, David Henry, 54
Derrida, Jacques, 59, 60, 63
Despeyroux, Denise, 68, 70 identification, 80
Dewa Ruci, 31, 32 Image Theatre, 24, 25
difference (cultural and linguistic), inclusivity, 5, 55, 70, 75, 78, 79
16, 26, 39, 49–51, 56, 58, 63,
66, 67, 69, 73, 78, 80 Jacobs-Jenkins, Branden, 33–37
director (as translator), 12, 17–20
discrimination, 67 Kacimi, Mohamed, 16, 17
Keffyeh/Made in China, 38
empathy, 27, 75 Kenny, Mike, 2
essence, 19, 22, 23, 52 Knowles, Ric, 54
ethics, 3–7, 27, 39, 46, 49, 50, 54,
55, 59–62, 65–71, 75, 76 Lachmann, Piotr Peter, 69–72
ethnicity, see race Lecoq, Jacques, 21–25
equivalence, 13–16, 20, 22, 36, 37, Lobitinière-Harwood, Susanne, 11
49, 50
exoticization, 56, 58, 59, 69, 77 Mahabharata (Hindu epic poem),
29–31
familiar vs foreign, 53–56, 60, 70 Mahabharata, see Brook, Peter
fidelity, 19, 26 marginalisation, 6, 48, 50, 58, 72,
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 76 77
fluency, 50–2 McBurney, Simon, 19
foreignization, 50–2 migration/migrant, 5, 8, 56–8,
67–9, 74, 77
Glissant, Édouard, 63, 64 mimodynamics, see Lecoq, Jacques
Gliwice Hamlet, 69–71 mise en scène, 19, 20, 48, 73, 78
Godard, Barbara, 6, 11 multiculturalism, 27, 56, 57, 74
Graeae, 1, 4, 78 multilingualism, 23, 25, 31,
guest and host, 28, 55–60, 65, 68, 79, 80
73, 80
nation/nationalism, 56–68, 77
Hall, Stuart, 64, 65 NDiaye, Marie, 69, 70
hospitality, 53–75 Needcompany, 79, 80
House of the Spirits,The, 37 Negritude, 63
88
Ninagawa,Yukio, 53 ‘spirit’ of the original, 22, 50
Noh, 21, 53 standard/non-standard, 29, 31, 38,
43, 48–52, 66, 70, 72
Octoroon, An, 33–7 subtitles, 78–80
Octoroon,The, 33 Susmono, Enthus, 29–32
Oedipus der Tyrann, 47 Svich, Caridad, 37, 38
Oedipus Rex, 47
original, 10–12, 17–22, 27, 49 Taha, Dalia, 38
other(s), 6, 7, 26–9, 55–63, 65, Tarchetti, I. U., 51, 52
73–7, 80 target text, 5, 12, 15, 18–20, 28,
otherness, 49–52, 80 44, 46, 48–52, 55, 56, 73, 77
Theatre of the Oppressed, 24, 25
Pavis, Patrice, 48 This Is Not ForYou, 1–5
performability, 46–50 translation
and adaptation, 25–9
race, 33, 34, 56, 68, 70, 71, 75, and ‘equivalent effect’, 14, 15
77, 80 and metaphors, 10, 11
Ramayana, 29, 30 as creative authorship, 19, 26
readability, 50, 51 as historically/socially
repetition, 21 determined, 25, 28, 29
representation, 4–6, 24, 25, 36, 40, as intercultural communication,
46, 57, 70, 71, 77 12–18, 32, 39, 46, 53–55, 68,
Ricoeur, Paul, 62 75, 76, 78, 80
Romagnoli, Ettore, 47 as interpretation, 7, 12, 14, 18,
Royal Shakespeare Company, 41–46 19, 22, 25, 28, 48, 75
as performance, 18–21
Said, Edward, 40 as relocation of content, 10, 16
Sealey, Jenny see Graeae Chinese and Japanese etymology,
Sheller, Mimi, 64 12, 13
sign language interpretation, 2, 4, 13 English etymology, 8–10
simpatico, 49, 50 post-colonial approaches,
Snakes,The, 69 11, 44
social justice, 67 transparency, 20, 38, 39, 50, 69,
soft power, 40–2 76, 79
source text, 6, 12, 17–22, 25, 26,
28, 30, 32, 34, 44, 46, 48, 49, universal, 23, 25, 61, 63
51, 54, 73 vs particular, 17, 71
89
&
Venuti, Lawrence, 16, 49–52, 66 wayang kulit, 29–32

visibility, 72, 77 Weng, Shihui, 43, 46
Vitez, Antoine, 19 Wilson, Robert, 47
Wakabayashi, Judy, 12, 20
90
&
acknowledgements
T he author and publisher would like to thank the following

for the use of copyright text material in this book:
Mark Kenny and Graeae, for an extract from the unpub-
lished script ‘This is Not for You: An Elegy’, used in the
Introduction.
Caridad Svich for extracts from personal correspondence
used in Chapter 1.
Nick Hern Books and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins for the extract
from An Octoroon used in Chapter 1.
Shihui Weng for extracts from an interview with the author
used in Chapter 2.
The author would like to thank many colleagues who have
offered their comments on this book along the way: Diego
Pellecchia for his insights into the Japanese etymology of
‘translation’ and Rossella Ferrari for her guidance on the
Chinese etymology. Miguel Escobar Varela for his expertise
91
&
on Javanese wayang. Clare Finburgh Delijani for her gener-

ous feedback on Chapter 2.
Last but not least, Dan Rebellato for his skillful and illu-
minating editing and representatives of the publisher, Sonya
Barker and Emily Lovelock, for their support throughout
the process of writing this book.
92

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For Eva and Elena, with all my love

T he theatre is everywhere, from entertainment districts

Theatre & is a long series of short books which hopes to

Jen Harvie and Dan Rebellato

E l mundo es un pañuelo, my mother would often say in lilt-

subject, the political, artistic and aesthetic frameworks that

Introduction: For/On Behalf Of

On a scorching summer day in July 2018, I walked from

conflicts – Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq, Kuwait and

somebody else? Who exactly do/should performers per-

LGBT+ character, because homosexuality has been rou-

theatre translator, and an Italian migrant who writes and

Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation

theatre translator, and an Italian migrant who writes and

Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation

meaning across to a different location.This etymology brings

is never about simple and unproblematic ‘transfers’; and ‘lit-

What’s in a Cup of Tea? The Mirage of Equivalence

such a sentence suggests in a British English context (because,

notion will vary widely in different contexts: a Guardian-

Barthes argued that oppressive western notions of author-

Translation as Performance, Performance as Translation

In western traditions, both theatre and translation have

art through what he called ‘mimodynamic’ processes, or

With the word ‘prendre’ [to take], for example,

Lecoq here seems to elevate performance, or rather mimo-

theatre practices oppressed spectators because they did not

We must not forget that words are only vehicles

Boal then describes an exercise called ‘Image of the world:

which turns ‘fidelity’ into a questionable notion. Translation

us to relativize our own perspectives and train us in becoming

Translating/Adapting Cultures in Performance

Wayang kontemporer artists are known to have brought

attacks in 2002 and 2005 (Susmono 2008). The production

critique of racism through the introduction of an external

represented the height of the plot in Boucicault’s melo-

decided to mix idioms from different Latin American coun-

 hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics

 hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics

colonies in ways that have only recently begun to be fully

goods and services, but the Chinese will have more

translating team, but only one, the official translator,

of the source culture. However, that is not always the case

‘Performability’ and the Ethics of Theatre Translation

The debate on the concept of ‘performability’ erupted in

consonance of ‘spirit’ between the author and the translator,

and their link to bourgeois ideology – a gesture that Venuti

 e My Guest? Practising Reciprocal Hospitality

and becomes familiar, such as Italian opera in England. Stage

are of western ‘classics’, such as works by Brecht and

southern Italian shores one day became the majority of

Two Paradigms: Cosmopolitanism and Creolization

impossible to host any guest at all; at the same time, a kind

Hospitality is culture itself and not simply an eth-

Living together on this planet will necessarily mean finding

Each person you know about and can affect is

Appiah suggests mindsets need to change – so what role do

transition? Paul Ricoeur grappled with this conundrum in

phenomenon of cultural hybridization that took place in the

Translation always bears the traces of the origi-

Hall stressed how out of the three main cultures involved in

Staging an Alien Spectating Experience

As Rustom Bharucha writes, ‘[h]ow can one presume to

capable of confronting audiences with unfamiliarity – the

Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation

Chapter 1: What? Defining Translation

What’s in a Cup of Tea? The Mirage of Equivalence

Translation as Performance, Performance as Translation

Translating/Adapting Cultures in Performance

hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics

hapter 2: How? The Practice and Politics

‘Performability’ and the Ethics of Theatre Translation

e My Guest? Practising Reciprocal Hospitality

Two Paradigms: Cosmopolitanism and Creolization

Staging an Alien Spectating Experience

The Stories of Others