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.
Reviewed by Kathleen Jeffs
Here is an engrossing and troubling play in a translation crying out for contemporary performance.
Reviewed by Gregary Racz
Kudos to all involved in introducing English-language audiences to Guillén de Castro’s overlooked play and in salvaging it, thus, from the limbo of unmerited oblivion.
Reviewed by Vladimir Zorić
The common thread in all these comedies, regardless of their time of composition or their particular plot, is Serbia’s precipitous, never accomplished transition from a staunchly patriarchal society, driven by bonds of family kinship and the sacrificial myth of Kosovo, to a modern nation-state, marked competitive entrepreneurship, where success is reserved for individuals.
Reviewed by Penny Black
This book, through the prism of ten plays, opens up an understanding of translation as well as the workings of theatre for translators, theatre makers and laypeople alike.
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