theatreVOICE

As Dominic Cavendish asked me to put the text up on the website, I’ll renege on my announcement not to write another blog and am posting as the last one for the road a short speech I gave when awarded the journalism prize of the Anglistentag at Klagenfurt this week:
When I still thought […]

Trends in Edinburgh this year were more or less self-indulgent autobiographical ramblings, a mind-numbing tendency to camouflage by meta-theatrical devices that you didn’t have much to say in the first place and a predilection by some dramatists to venture onto the territory of the musical.
With David Greig’s Midsummer and Che Walker’s Been So […]

When German critics write about new British drama they almost invariably only refer to the Royal Court. This is partly due to the strong exchange ties between the Court and the Berlin Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz. The latter’s Thomas Ostermeier in an interview went as far as to proclaim Patrick Marber a product […]

In the German theatre currently there is an unfortunate tendency for interpolations. One young director is on record maintaining: “I let the actors speak text of their own which is true to the core of the play and often far more beautiful than the author’s words.” Accordingly when she directed Gregory Burke’s Gagarin […]

Jürgen Gosch was the most important German director of the decade. He trained as an actor in the former GDR and left the country after his early productions there were met with official hostility. Particularly contentious was Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena” at the Berlin Volksbühne in 1978 which was staged as an artistic and poetic […]

British dramatists are not exactly fêted in the German-speaking theatre at the moment. A notable exception is the way the Volkstheater Vienna accompanied the German première of Lee Hall’s “The Pitmen Painters” with a whole series of events. Not only did they bring over the team of the successful original production at Live […]

Next week I’ll be off to Vienna for the German-language première of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters which I translated. As the director is Max Roberts who already did the first production at Live Theatre Newcastle, moving on successfully first to the Cottesloe and then to the Lyttelton, I am rather optimistic. Hopefully […]

In England it is common practice for an actor to count the number of laughs he can get when first reading a text. With Laurence Olivier this was the case even when he played King Lear. (A famous German Lear like Bernhard Minetti would seriously have contested the notion that the play contains […]

When I uploaded my last theatreVOICE posting its title was: “Who pissed against Melbourne city gate?” – a job for Harold Pinter’s ghost. Mysteriously on the website the first half was missing. Naturally I assumed that the system was programmed to remove “offensive” words like “pissed”. Immediately Dominic Cavendish reassured me that the […]

As a translator you should not sound too flippant about colleagues. We all make mistakes, and I know myself only too well the feeling of sitting in a first night and flinching at some turn of phrase because you only then realize how stilted it sounds. Paradoxically, in many cases this is because one tends […]