On Thursday 6th and Monday 10th March, the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow Dr Minna Jeffery and award-winning director Stephen Bailey (RSC IF 2024-25) organised practical workshops on the art of translating drama for performance.
Stephen is currently working on a new translation and adaptation of the Spanish Golden Age play Life Is a Dream (first published 1636) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.
In the workshops, participants looked at extracts of a number of previous English translations of this play, covering academic translations and performance texts in both verse and prose. Gregary Racz’s Penguin Classics version (2006), José Rivera’s adaptation, entitled Sueño, first performed by the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford, Connecticut in 1998 and published in the 2003 anthology References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot and Other Plays (Theatre Communications Group, New York), Helen Edmundson’s adaptation for the Donmar Warehouse in London in 2009 (published by Nick Hern Books, 2009), and Michael Kidd’s 2004 translation for the University Press of Colorado were all discussed for their sonic qualities, characterisation, ease of performance, interest for a modern audience, and “faithfulness to the original text” – though this concept was critiqued in depth (see our earlier Theatre & Translation Roundtable)
The workshops were attended by undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and post-holders from a range of faculties, with varying levels of knowledge and experience of Life Is a Dream. Monday’s workshop group were treated to hearing the play read aloud by the generous Spanish-speakers in attendance. Speakers of many languages, some who already knew the play, some who’d never encountered it before, all contributed to the discussion, bringing perspectives including linguistics, youth work on legislative theatre, and verse drama in various languages.
Stephen’s adaptation of Life Is a Dream imagines the character of Prince Segismundo as a disabled character and interrogates the play through the lens of disability. In the second half of the workshop, Stephen shared his version of the scene we’d been examining, and participants greatly enjoyed exploring what this interpretation offers both to the original play and to audiences who will encounter Life Is a Dream for the first time in Stephen’s version. Everyone was very excited to be involved in the development of this radical new vision for the play, and look forward to seeing it onstage!
