Plays from Contemporary Hungary: ‘Difficult Women’ and Resistant Dramatic Voices. Edited and translated by Szilvi Naray. Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2024. 257 pp. Prah by György SpiróPrime Location by György SpiróSunday Lunch by János HáyThe Dead Man by János HáyThe Bat by Krisztina Tóth Reviewed by Jozefina Komporaly This welcome addition to the Methuen Drama Play Collectionsseries…
Romina Paula. Fauna and Other Plays. Ed. April Sweeney and Brenda Werth. Trans. April Sweeney, Brenda Werth, and Jean Graham-Jones. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2023. 164 pp. Reviewed by May Summer Farnsworth Fauna and Other Plays, edited by April Sweeney and Brenda Werth, offers four plays in English translation by Argentine playwright Romina Paula. The editors,…
Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology, 1987–2007. Ed. Alexa Alice Joubin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. 303 pp. Reviewed by Zhixuan (Mia) Zhu Sinophone Adaptations of Shakespeare: An Anthology, 1987–2007 (2022), edited by Alexa Alice Joubin, consists of an introductory chapter by the editor and seven English translations of Sinophone Shakespeare adaptations in different performance genres between…
Jacqueline Goldfinger and Allison Horsley. Writing Adaptations and Translations for the Stage: A Guide and Workbook for New and Experienced Writers. London: Routledge, 2023. Reviewed by Lindsay Webster and Jane Barnette Jacqueline Goldfinger and Allison Horsley’s recent guide and workbook is a slim volume of 125 pages that intends to serve as a user-friendly “community…
Massimiiliano Morini. Theatre Translation: Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. Reviewed by Emma Pauly Massimiliano Morini’s Theatre Translation: Theory and Practice opens with a metaphor borrowed from Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall, the story of a civilization subjected, every two thousand years, to a consuming total eclipse that plunges the populace into madness, ruin, and the…
Reviewed by Adele Lee
As the author puts it herself, “Asian Shakespeares” are much more than “curiosities or colonial remnants,” but matter to Western readers because of their impact on American and European performance cultures and their significance to global culture studies.
Reviewed by Beverley Curran
Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan: Staging the resistance covers a lot of ground in its selective but superb tracing of a century of political performances in Japan in theatre and other media to show both the translation of approaches to history and the shifting meaning of the imported terms “liberty” (jiyuu) and “revolution” (kakumei) in different Japanese cultural contexts.
Reviewed by Rebekah Maggor
The ideal of theatre as social project, with the potential to mobilize the masses against a sectarianized and unequal society, remains very much alive in the Arab world.
Review by Neil Blackadder
University of Michigan Press’ African Perspectives series has provided the opportunity for a kind of publication that all readers of The Mercurian wish would happen far more frequently: a collection of translations of plays by an important contemporary playwright.
Reviewed by Jean Graham-Jones
Staging the Spanish Golden Age serves as a detailed, critical record of an important translation event for the English-speaking stage and as an insightful provocation for future theatrical-translational collaborations.
The Mercurian 