Plays In Translation

[Guest]

Last night, I went to see a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, performed in the original Russian under the aegis of the British company Cheek By Jowl. The cast were Russian/East European and surtitles were available for those unfamiliar with the play (though I can't think that many in the audience will have been first-timers).

All in all, it was worthwhile, though I have to confess that a play that I've always found almost unbearably moving didn't really move me at all in this performance.....that may have been something to do with the way I was feeling, though it probably had more to do with the fact that this was 'real Chekhov', not A.C. seen through a British/western filter. Chekhov's own strictures on performance (quoted in the programme) had been rigorously adhered to.....he wanted long sections of the play to be 'played for laughs' and for his actors to evince 'anger but no sadness'. This flies in the face of our received thoughts on how the play should be done......Masha declared with a beaming face 'My life is a failure' and Andreyushka played his withering 'denuniciation' of small town life in the provinces almost like a stand-up routine. Which made it refreshing (there is nothing more alienating in the theatre than a lot of moaning), if somewhat jarring.

It was, though, a great pleasure to hear the Russian text spoken: I don't speak the language, but no one could deny that its a beautiful one to listen to.

All of which made me wonder whether I would actually want to see a foreign classic in translation ever again......particularly with the recent fashion for 'adapting' the classics, transplanting them into new surroudings and 'Anglicising' the characters ( a recent Three Sisters was transplanted to inter-war Liverpool). Worse is the fashion for making the language 'contemporary', with all the gratuitous swearing and 'yoofspeak' that that implies (the National Theatre seems determined not to perform Russian classics unless they're 'adapted' by Andrew Upton - which means I won't be seeing their Cherry Orchard, after the mess he made of Gorky's Philistines a few years back).


Any thoughts on translations of plays?

[aeolium]

It is not a realistic or practical proposition to put on plays in foreign languages, except as an occasional one-off 'special', such as the Peter Stein production of Faust in the Goethe 250 commemoration, so as a choice between having classic and modern foreign language plays in translation on the stage/TV/radio here or not at all, I'd rather have the former. I think the loss to the playgoer in hearing translations is less than it is for poetry or opera, though perhaps for plays where there is a high poetic content it is just as unsatisfactory (the NT production of Phèdre really didn't work at all for me, not least because the translation was so different in character from the original).

I agree with what you say about Chekhov - I simply have not been able to appreciate any production of his plays and I can only think this is because they simply don't translate well (I'm learning Russian in part to be able to find out for myself). Perhaps some languages, and some playwrights, are more amenable to English translation than others - Ibsen for instance seems to come across quite well, though I would like to hear a Norwegian's opinion as to how effective the translation is. I'm not sure about the ancient Greeks - their thought world always seems to me to come from another planet almost.

[hackneyvi]

Last night, I went to see a production of Chekhov's Three Sisters, performed in the original Russian under the aegis of the British company Cheek By Jowl.

It was, though, a great pleasure to hear the Russian text spoken: I don't speak the language, but no one could deny that its a beautiful one to listen to.

All of which made me wonder whether I would actually want to see a foreign classic in translation ever again......particularly with the recent fashion for 'adapting' the classics, transplanting them into new surroudings and 'Anglicising' the characters ( a recent Three Sisters was transplanted to inter-war Liverpool). Worse is the fashion for making the language 'contemporary', with all the gratuitous swearing and 'yoofspeak' that that implies (the National Theatre seems determined not to perform Russian classics unless they're 'adapted' by Andrew Upton - which means I won't be seeing their Cherry Orchard, after the mess he made of Gorky's Philistines a few years back).

Any thoughts on translations of plays?

Not exactly, but I'm still going to try to squeeze an answer in. Have you ever seen an American film called 'Clueless', Mandryka? It's a modern version (1995) of Emma set in Beverley Hills with much transposition of character and is absolute charm itself. It is in often very modern (though clean) American English. Some of these modernisations really can be marvellous.

There seem to have been several performances in major London theatre venues of plays in Russian by Russian companies lately. I wonder if anyone here saw Cheek by Jowl's version of The Tempest at the Barbican earlier this year? I was intrigued by the idea but in the end felt I didn't know the play itself well-enough to want to see it with surtitles - powerful though the reviewers described it.

I'm currently lining myself up for my fourth recent exposure to A Midsummer Night's Dream. I encountered both the story and Britten opera for the first time at ENO a fortnight ago. It was a story I didn't know beyond the bare bones and read the text the following week. The Olivia de Havilland / James Cagney movie is at the BFI this month and I look forward greatly to seeing that. And the Hackney Empire is putting on a modernised version for midsummer itself.

The Britten / Pears version of the text, I was surprised to find, did a considerable editing job on the text, with material not just omitted but quite reordered, also. The Christopher Alden production at ENO transposes it to a boy's school and has Oberon as a paedophile headmaster desiring Titania's "little changling boy". It has awkward moments of contemporary cliche (a line of boys perform a tiresomely slow kind of sleepwalk around the set on several occasions) but the translation of 'intention' does work pretty well.

I don't know how oppressive the music is but the production makes the opera seem quite a dark affair. I can understand that this might offend some enthusiasts for the play but there clearly are shadows in AMND, as well as light; Willard White is excellent as Bottom - his tranformation convincingly achieved simply by darkening the stage and lighting him from below, as I remember it - and the farce of Pyramus and Thisby is still played as broad comedy (though so many good lines are lost that it's much funnier on the page than it was on the stage).

Am I making a point? Do I have one? I think the point I'm trying to make it that I like variety and shall follow your lead and take the opportunity to see a familiar play in its indiginous language to hear its natural, verbal music. But also I look forward to hearing a French/Russian/Portuguese version of one of our own plays to see how much of the English verbal 'music' is audible in their translations.

The original versions of these plays were contemporary, 'street fashion' at one time and I do think that to show them as fixed to that history can be leading audiences away from those plays and leaving the plays themselves to their deaths.