This roundtable discussion explores the role of translation in theatre on both page and stage, from practical and academic perspectives: Why is translating drama so important? What are its particular challenges? How do we approach translating a play differently if we think about it for readers, for the classroom, or for performance? How have previous translators approached this, and have priorities and methodologies evolved over time?
Dr Minna Jeffery, Stephen Bailey (RSC IF 2024-25), and Tzen Sam discuss how these and other questions relate to their own work on theatre translation, followed by a Q&A and open discussion.
No need to book, just come along.
About the panellists
Dr Minna Jeffery is a Junior Research Fellow in Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her research centres around theatre translation, women’s playwriting, queer and feminist theatre, and Finnish theatre. She completed her PhD by practice as research at the University of Kent in 2023, where her doctoral research proposed and examined strategies for feminist theatre translation through translating Minna Canth’s The Worker’s Wife (1885) from Finnish to English. In addition to her research and translation work, Minna is a theatre-maker producing work with her company Good Friends for a Lifetime.
Stephen Bailey is an award-winning theatre director and currently Interdisciplinary Fellow with the Royal Shakespeare Company and Oxford TORCH. His credits include The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man (Nottingham Playhouse), Self/Other (HOME), Autistic as F*ck (The Barbican Centre), Surfacing (Clapham Omnibus) and Who Plays Who (London Liberty Festival). Stephen is not a linguist but is fascinated by translation and transmission of stories across cultural barriers. This has included significant work with British Sign Language and they will be exploring new translation approaches during their fellowship at Oxford. As Artistic Lead at Vital Xposure they have led on a series of workshops considering translation, captioning and multi-lingual performance in the context of South Asian languages.
Tzen Sam is a doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford. She graduated from Peterhouse, Cambridge, with a First in English before completing an MA at University College London. At present, she is undertaking research, under the supervision of Professor Kirsten Shepherd, on Henrik Ibsen's first female English translators, the women who played an important but largely unacknowledged role in the transmission and reception of Ibsen's plays in late-Victorian England. Alongside this, Tzen has been working as the Research Assistant on the TORCH-funded collaboration between Professor Kirsten Shepherd and Breach Theatre to devise an original play on Laura Kieler, the Danish model for Ibsen's A Doll's House. The forthcoming production, Burning Down the House, was awarded a prestigious Ibsen Scope Award in 2024 and will premiere in England in 2025. Tzen is also a co-editor on the forthcoming edition of Laura Kieler's play, Men of Honour, translated into English for the first time by Gaye Kynoch. Men of Honour will be published by Oxford World Classics alongside new translations of Ibsen's A Doll's House and When We Dead Awaken in autumn 2025.
This event is organised by Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation. It is publicised by the Performance Research Hub.
