September 2018:  First Update Since…  March?!

I can’t quite believe where the months have gone.  But before catching up I must celebrate the fact that I’m writing this on the day when India’s Supreme Court quashed the homophobic, colonial-era Section 377.  In March this year I was proud to be closely involved as co-curator and talks chair for the Arcola’s Global Queer Plays, which opened with Danish Sheikh’s Contempt, a play about the courtroom and personal trials around the fight for LGBTQ equality in India. Danish has been part of the huge effort to change the law in India and I am so pleased at this outcome.  Look out for his play, alongside the other six we shared at the event, in an anthology from Oberon Books later in 2018/19.

I’m also delighted that Global Queer Plays inspired producers Lora Krasteva and Rach Skyer to take on the ‘global’ theme and create Global Voices Theatre, showcasing international writing from a different perspective at each of their events.  This has included Global Female Voices already and in October will mark their first Global Black Voices event.  All being well, Global Queer Voices will return in 2019.

Back to the world of Spanish and Latin American plays and a quick update of what I’ve been up to since the spring.  First, yet another outing for Mar Gómez Glez’s unstoppable Numbers.  It’s not exactly something to celebrate that the Mediterranean migrant crisis, which the play first tackled in 2009, remains unresolved, but it did prompt Dash Arts to select the play to feature at their Eurosquat event at this year’s Latitude Festival.  This was the first return to the UK for this play, which started life at the Royal Court’s international residency and has since been shared in New York, Washington DC, New Jersey, Los Angeles, Munich, Salzberg and Mumbai.  You can read more about the play here.

The summer began with the wonderful news that my translation of Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez’s wonderful play Cuzco was selected for full production at Theatre 503 in January 2019, produced by Kate O’Connor and Daisy Hale in association with Theatre 503.  I loved this play from the moment I read it in 2016 and immediately volunteered to translated it.  It is such a thrill for this insinct to be vindicated and to see such an important new writing venue programme this intense and moving comedy travelogue, in which a couple flies all the way to Peru to try to fix the problems in their relationship.  Tickets are already on sale!

Cuzco‘s English version first met an audience at the 2017 Out of the Wings festival, and in 2018 we were back with another packed week of play readings from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world.  My contribution this year was a translation of The Widow of Apablaza, an absolute classic of Chilean theatre by the renowned writer Germán Luco Cruchaga.  Despite being written in 1926 and considered as one of the most important plays in Chilean theatre history, this was the first time the play had ever been performed in English.  We had a wonderful cast, led by the mighty Lanna Joffrey in the lead role, and directed by Kate O’Connor.  You can see a gallery in the link below.

The Out of the Wings Festival was our biggest and most successful yet, with a sell-out performance on our closing night and a string of additional events including a one-day forum on theatre translation and a series of theatre translation workshops.  I had a great time delivering the Directing Translation workshop at the Jerwood Space alongside Kate O’Connor.  We play to run the festival in 2019, so watch this space!

Also this summer, in a departure from my theatre work, I had the good luck to be asked to translate the beautiful poetry of the Mapuche writer and visual artist Faumelisa Manquepillán for an art installation by the Chilean artist Male Uribe.  This was the first time Faumelisa’s poems had been translated in to English and Male we are currently exploring options for their publication.

For the London Spanish Theatre Company’s series of play readings by Spanish playwrights, I translated Lucía Carballal’s An American Life, directed by Lilac Yosiphon.  Set in a campsite in Minnesota, the play follows one Spanish family in their attempts to find their long-lost father figure.  As well as exploring the relationship between the US and Spain, the play delves deeper into the comedy and tragedy in every search for identity, stability and love.

For the British Council and the Chilean Arts Council, I am once again translating a series of contemporary plays by Chilean playwrights this year and the first of them hot off the press is the beautiful, intimate three-hander Cassandra, Sandra, by Gabriela Aguilera.  In this touching study of loneliness, the meaning of home and family, and the kindness of strangers, Aguilera throws three unsuspecting characters together when one man is forced back home to Santiago following his mother’s unexpected passing.

One of the plays I translated in 2017 as part of the same project was Juan Radrigán’s powerful drama in the classical style, The Desolate Prince, in which Lucifer himself is forced back to Eden in an attempt to save the life of his wife Lilith.  In the spring, as part of the project Making New Worlds from Old, I had the absolute privilege of working on this text with the MA Classical Acting students from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. The dedication and engagement of the students and their tutors Ben Naylor and Anna Healey were an absolute gift and I hope I will have the chance to work with them again.

Making New Worlds from Old also featured a rehearsed reading by the international theatre company