I spent my New Year’s Eve curled up with Tony Kushner’s masterpiece Angels in America, in honour of my theatre highlight of 2017 (and possibly ever), the production of this truly great play at the National Theatre here in London.  I can’t think of a better message to start a new year with:  ‘More life!’

I look forward to new projects for 2018 but first a quick round-up of the end of 2017.

Early in the month I joined Trine Garrett of

[Foreign Affairs] to deliver a theatre and translation workshop for the winners of the German Academic Exchange Service’s annual creative writing in German competition in association with the Institute of Modern Languages Research.  We were hugely impressed by the standard from the winners in all three characters:  secondary school, undergraduate, and other.  The winners had all been set the task of writing dialogues between Martin Luther and a 21st-Century person of note, so we enjoyed conversations between this leading figure of the Reformation and JK Rowling, Vivienne Westwood, Jacob Ree-Mogg and even Donald Trump (via Twitter, of course).  We worked with the winners and two German actors to stage the dialogues, before working on a translation from German into English, imagining the thoughts of Luther’s long-suffering wife.

Also in December we opened the submission window for the Arcola queer collective’s Global Queer Plays project.  In March we will present four rehearsed readings of LGBT+ plays from around the world.  I am so delighted to be co-curating this initiative and we are thrilled to have received close to 100 submissions to select from (the window is now closed for this year).  The project is an opportunity to showcase voices and stories that might not otherwise be heard on the London stage and brings together the worlds of theatre, translation and LGBT+ culture in what we hope will be an exciting forum for sharing and discussion.

Looking forward to January and I am so happy to be translating a new play by Spanish playwright Julio Escalada.  Julio is the author of the first play I ever translated, and thanks to support from Spain’s Ministry of Culture I will be translating his new work, On the Edge, for publication later in 2018.  Set in one of Spain’s little-known North African enclaves, On the Edge follows the inhabitants of this multi-ethnic and marginalised bordertown where corruption, the fight for economic survival and a feeling of neglect from both Madrid and Brussels lead to a dog-eat-dog struggle to stay on top.  It recently ran at Madrid’s Umbral de Primavera theatre and will be returning in 2018.

Also in January I will be working once again with one of Chile’s most exciting contemporary playwrights, Bosco Cayo, whose brilliant Negra, the General’s Nurse I translated for the Royal Court in 2013.

Bosco’s recent play The Lady of the Andes won Chile’s national literature award in 2017 and as a continuation of my collaboration with the British Council I will be translating it.  In Bosco’s typical dark-comic style, the play delves into the painful atrocities of the Pinochet regime as seen through the lives of the aging volunteers at a rural hospital.  As the lead volunteer herself falls prey to dementia, the remaining members of this dwindling band of well-meaning ladies discover some horrific truths about the past actions of one of their number.

Also for Bosco I am supplying the English subtitles for the Santiago run of Dylan at the forthcoming Santiago a Mil international theatre festival.  Dylan is a powerful and vital study of a brutal transphobic attack in one of Chile’s central provinces.  Just as Chile moves towards equal marriage, better LGBT+ visibility and greater minority rights, a mother in a town not far from the nation’s capital finds it impossible to win justice for the horrific murder of her beloved child.  Speakers of Spanish can see a video of the production here.

There will I’m sure be yet more to come this year, not least from [Foreign Affairs], whose theatre translation showcase takes place on January 19 and 20, and from Out of the Wings, who celebrate a 10-year anniversary this year.  But for now, a Happy New Year to everyone.  More theatre, more translation, more life!