The dust is settling after a wonderful week at London’s Cervantes Theatre, where along with colleagues from Out of the Wings we shared rehearsed readings of five plays from Latin America, Portugal and Spain.  This was the second annual Out of the Wings festival of readings and the 2017 event was a great success, building on the work of 2016 and taking us to new audiences.

On Wednesday July 12 I directed my own translation of Cuzco, a world première by one of Spain’s most exciting emerging playwrights, Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez.  This two-hander, which will have its home première in Valencia in October, sends a Spanish couple to Peru in a bid to rescue their relationship, only for history, jetlag and the reality of their daily lives to conspire against them.  Richard Glaves and Denise Hoey (who also performed in The Sickness of Stone in 2016) performed the roles of the couple, and Gigi Guizado narrated.

A translator herself, Las Vegas-based actor Gigi Guizado was in London for the festival primarily for the reading of Symphony for Six Actors, four C20th radio plays written by her Colombian grandfather Rafael Guizado.  I was delighted to join the cast of Symphony for what was the final reading in our week of plays.  We were also joined by Richard, fresh from Cuzco (pictured below with me and Lanna Joffrey in rehearsals).

The other plays in the readings were The Real Mother of Marilyn Monroe by Armando Nascimento Rosa (Portugal), translated by Susannah Finzi; Double Panic by Virgilio Piñera (Cuba), translated by Kate Eaton, and Ready or Not by Estela Golovchenko, translated by Sophie Stevens.

Out of the Wings goes from strength to strength and there will be more to come from our collective as 2017 progresses.  In the meantime you can read more about the project in this article written by our founder, Catherine Boyle.

It’s also a good moment to remember that one year ago we shared Blanca Doménech’s The Sickness of Stone.  The play, which tackles the still-burning issue of Franco’s legacy, went on to be performed in Madrid and New York, and published in Mexico and Argentina.  (And there is more to come soon from this play…)

Last week also saw the release of Adapting Translation for the Stage, a volume published by Routledge and edited by Emma Cole and Geraldine Brodie.  The volume contains a fascinating selection of chapters covering the experiences of theatre translation across all periods and genres, and includes my chapter on translating three plays for the Royal Court Theatre’s New Plays from Chile season:  Camila Le-Bert’s Chan!, Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez’s Negra, the General’s Nurse, and David Arancibia Urzúa’s Ñuke.

And finally last week, it was exciting to see Guillermo Calderón’s B re-announced by the Royal Court Theatre as part of the forthcoming 2017/18 season.  Particularly thrilling is to see so many international plays and plays in translation in the line-up, including plays from Ukraine, Syria and Argentina.  Once again the Royal Court is setting an example to other spaces about how to engage audiences in international work with bold, outward-looking programming.