theatreVOICE

One of the fringe benefits of my job as a translator is to see a play in a number of often completely different productions. After all, the quality of a text is defined by the variety of solutions it makes possible whilst still staying true to it. This was strikingly the case with […]

Usually there are two reasons for avoiding a play in future. Either you have seen it too often already and don’t care about it any longer or you are fortunate enough to have been at a definite production. At some time in my theatregoing life I decided I wasn’t too keen on spending […]

Ford Madox Ford quite rightly advised that one should not meet one’s life heroes. Luckily for me with Michael Frayn, who is celebrating his 75th birthday today, this wasn’t at all the case. When I was introduced to him whilst working on the German translation of Democracy, he couldn’t be more modest and relaxed. Already […]

Whilst even big names like Tom Stoppard, David Hare or Alan Bennett are only rarely performed over here, Martin Crimp and Simon Stephens earn a big part of their income from German royalties. Stephens in particular gets pushed by the influential monthly magazine „Theater heute“ which prints practically each of his texts and follows this […]

Even big successes in the British and Irish theatre sometimes tend to get lost on their way across the channel. My absolute highlight of last years’s Edinburgh Fringe was Enda Walsh’s „The Walworth Farce“. Whilst the press voiced a few nit-picking reservations, in the Traverse Bar even from colleagues who normally couldn’t agree on the […]