Retranslating Strindberg: adaptation, (re)location and site-related performance

Abstract

This essay offers a practitioner’s perspective on the experience of adapting, devising and co-producing A Dream Play for a northern British audience at an art cafe during the Manchester Festival Fringe in 2015. It explores how the process of re-versioning A Dream Play provides insights that might be of relevance to the fields of adaptation and translation studies. Starting from the position that translation is ‘rewriting’ — an ‘active form of interpretation whose cultural impact is extensive’ (Loffredo and Perteghella) — the essay argues that the adaptation of August Strindberg’s text to a devised, site-related performance amplified that ‘cultural impact’ through its ‘retranslation’ to a non-traditional theatre site. In shaping the responses of cast and audience to the physical performance space, the production created a ‘poetics of the collective’, which permitted a new engagement with Strindberg’s canonical text. The piece concludes with some reflections on the constraints of the writer-adaptor in the re-visioning, particularly in an iconic text such as A Dream Play.