It’s amazing to see that in my last post rehearsals for Guillermo Calderón’s B had barely begun at the Royal Court, and to suddenly realise we are almost through with the run, which ends on October 21.  It’s been a real pleasure to work again with this fantastic and unique Chilean playwright, and with such a talented team at one of the English-speaking world’s finest theatres, and certainly one which champions international playwriting and translation more than any other I know.

An added pleasure is that the translation has also now been published, by Oberon Books.

B will be followed up by world premieres of plays from Syria and Ukraine in this Royal Court season, and below you can read a fascinating article by Royal Court International Director Elyse Dodgson on the long-term processes and commitments that have led to these three plays reaching the London stage.

While B has been running in Sloane Square, over in East and South London the CASA Festival of Latin American theatre has also been sharing international plays with London audiences at the Arcola and Southwark Playhouse theatres, and I have been delighted to be involved as both a translator and an actor in three of the festival’s play readings.

On September 30 at the Arcola, new company Latin American Voices presented my translation of Pig Woman by leading Argentine playwright Santiago Loza.  This powerful monologue follows one woman’s quest to acheive sainthood, even at the greatest of costs to both her body and her mind.  The performance, by Phoebe Batteson-Brown and directed by Ali Wright, will be reprised at the Argentine Embassy in London on November 9.

One week later at the Southwark Playhouse I performed in Sophie Stevens’ translation of Dancing Alone Every Night by Raquel Diana.  This Uruguayan play is based on the true-life events of the discovery of Joyce Vincent, a Londoner found dead in her Wood Green flat in 2006 two years after she had died.  In this reimagining, Diana explores the two-year period between death and discovery, taking in themes of urban loneliness, domestic abuse, and the fate of all those who die but have not yet been discovered.

And on October 7th, Cat Robey directed Weathered, a Cuban play by Abel González Melo commissioned in 2016 by HOME MCR.  Originaly performed in Manchester as part of HOME’s Viva! festival, we were thrilled to reprise this drama of Cuban family life across two generations and are excited to see where this powerful piece by one of Cuba’s most successful playwrights will go next.

And as if all this weren’t enough, October 2nd marked International Translation Day at the British Library.  I have attended this event on several occasions and this year found the whole day inspiring, with discussions ranging from issues of translating gender and sexuality to the role of translation in our multicultural communities and in our schools.

My personal highlight though was sharing the stage with Trine Garrett and a company of actors from international theatre company

[Foreign Affairs] to run the plenary session, culminating in a mass translation session that saw over 100 translators all translating extracts from plays from multiple languages, to be performed by the actors and, unbeknownst to them, by the translators themselves.  This was an important moment for me:  it was a joy to see theatre so firmly embraced into the translation fold, and more joyous still to see so many translators who had perhaps never tried theatre before seeing that it is something that they could, and should try.

Also this month I took delivery of my contributor’s copy of Adapting Translation for the Stage, a new anthology published by Routledge, taking in themes of theatre transltion in all its forms.  It was fascinating to read the contributions from the other writers, and to have this book as a reminder of working in 2013 with Camila Le-Bert, David Arancibia, Claudia Hidalgo and Bosco Cayo on the Royal Court’s New Plays from Chile week.  (You can see a full list of my published work here.)

I continue to edit the Translation section of The Theatre Times, and much recommend this article by actor-translator Lucy Phelps.  When not working at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Lucy translates from French, and earlier this year translated The Pulverised at the Arcola Theatre and York Theatre Royal.

And last but not least, I am so excited to see that Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez’s Cuzco has opened in Valencia, and am very much looking forward to seeing it later this month.  This play was for me the greatest discovery from my trip to Madrid last year and I am proud to have translated it for Out of the Wings earlier this year.  This is a writer to watch and I can’t wait to see what he does next!