An Absence of Ghosts: cultural and theatrical translation in the British Reception of The Mysteries-Yiimimangaliso

Mark Dornford-May’s widely-acclaimed adaptation of the medieval English Chester “mystery” plays, The Mysteries-Yiimimangaliso, reveal the extent to which theatrical translation, if it is to be intelligible to audiences, risks trading in cultural stereotypes belonging to both source and target cultures. As a South African production of a medieval English theatrical tradition which subsequently plays to an English audience, The Mysteries-Yiimimangaliso enacts a number of disorientating forms of cultural translation. Rather than facilitating the transmission of challenging literary and dramatic traditions, The Mysteries-Yiimimangaliso reveals the extent to which translation, as a politically correct - and thus politically anaemic - act, can become an end in itself in a globalised Anglophone theatrical culture.

The Death Cults of prehistoric Malta:Mysteries of the Ancient Ones

reprinted

The Politics of Observation:Radical Psychiatry and Social Documentary

How did the counter-cultural aims of Radical Psychiatry coincide with those of documentary filmmaking in the 1960s? Where the forms and structures of new approaches to the documentary necessarily complicit in promoting the clinical and anti-clinical practices, and wider political agenda, of Radical Psychiatry? How did the documentary deal with the ethical, aesthetic, and audience-related issues associated with filming personalities and environments associated with Radical Psychiatry? How did Radical Psychiatry and the documentary shape postwar discourses on trauma, especially within conflict and post-conflict (PTSD) contexts? What is the legacy of Radical Pschiatry today, and how has it been explored by contemporary documentray film?

This article addresses these question by examining a range of documentaries dealing with the radical and 'anti-psychiatric' ideas and methods of figures such as R.D.Laing, David Cooper, Jan Bastiaans, Timothy Leary, and Franco Basaglia. Films analysed include Peter Robinson's Asylum (1972) and Psychiatry and Violence (1973); Ah, Sunflower (Klinkert and Sinclair, 1967); Anatomy of Violence (Davis, 1967); Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Robin Clarke, 1967), W. R. - Mysteries of the Organism (Makavejev, 1971); Raymond Depardon's San Clemente (1980) and Urgences (1988); and Louis van Gasteren's trilogy Now Do You Get it Why I am Crying (1969), The Price of Survival (2003), and There is No Plane to Zagreb (2012). 
The article concludes with a discussion of Nicolas Philibert's Every Little Thing (1997) within the context of the French documentary tradition and the film's more immediate subject - the famous clinic at La Borde established by Jean Oury, and associated with the methods and theories of figures such as Jacques
 Lacan, Francesc Tosquelles, Franz Fanon, and Félix Guattari.