Created relation: the translated play in performance

Summary: The process of translation restores the materiality of time and space to a play. Performance, of course, takes place only within the here and now of an audience, but a play that comes from a different time or different place prompts an encounter with the conceptual and perceptual real from sometime or somewhere else. If we are to consider translation as an ethical practice, one concerned not only to present the dislocated other to the located self, but also to protect the other from wholesale assimilation by the self, then the translated play must in some ways prove resistant to such assimilation. But of course the retention of foreignness – or what Steiner called restitution – is problematic, not least because of the attendant danger of merely exoticising. The theatre of García Lorca in English presents an interesting case study in this regard.