Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing

Author:Bloomsbury Publishing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Theatre

Bringing new life to classic plays

What makes a successful, comfortably well off, academic publisher chuck in a safe career and try his hand in the slippery and financially unrewarding world of theatre? Mike Poulton describes how frustration with the style and tone of English productions of classic masterpieces in the past, and persistent neglect of such fine works, drove him to make his successful move into translation and adaptation. He shares his personal golden rules, practical advice and insights.

Becoming an adaptor of classic plays – the motivation

I suppose I became an adaptor of classic plays because, as an avid theatregoer since late childhood, I became increasingly unhappy with what I was seeing and hearing. I had read a lot of Schiller at university and become gripped by it. Why did these powerful epic dramas never, or very rarely, seem to make it into our theatres? Theatre back then was still a going concern, comparatively speaking, and every proud provincial capital supported its producing house. I had also read a lot of Chekhov. On the rare occasions I did see English productions of these Russian masterpieces, they seemed slow, unfunny – sometimes even turgid. Yet in the audiences for them there was an apparent reverence, which seemed unrelated to all the very English over-emoting that was projected woodenly from the acres of silver birch forest on the stage. It was sometimes possible to believe you had wandered out of a Cherry Orchard and ended up in Brief Encounter . My discontent grew and grew. The material was so much livelier – so much more thrilling in the imagination. I felt cheated. And later, with the arrogance of youth, I deluded myself into a belief that I could do better.

At a rare performance of a Chekhov or an Ibsen play it would seem clear to me that what the actors on the stage were saying, and how they said it, bore very little relationship to how people spoke in real life – either now or at the time the plays were written. It was as if the theatre had a style of delivery it reserved unto itself – as did, say, the Church and the BBC. What’s more, in a cast of 20 characters, each of them, whatever their status, spoke in the same way. Generals, postmasters and small children all used the same speech patterns and vocabulary – unless they were clowns (who always spoke Mummerset). But for the most part the cast delivered lines with a single voice, and it wasn’t difficult to work out that that voice must be the translator’s voice. I didn’t have the same problem with English writers; Shakespeare, though of a different age, seemed real and immediate. It was just that, with the Greeks, the Russians and the European greats performed in translation, there was a middleman, an often dry and academic voice, getting in the way. The immediacy and drive of the original was lost – buried under the literalness of the English text.

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