Theatre Translation
Never Say Never, Alfred de Musset
Take Alfred de Musset's Romantic comedy 'Il ne faut jurer de rien', notice how the opening scene reminds one of Bertie Wooster's confrontations with various aunts on the subject of marriage, translate 'Il ne faut jurer de rien' into English giving the 19th-century sentences a trim, set it in the roaring 20s and voilà!
"Hartley transports this nineteenth century French comedy into the 1920s with sharp suits, motor cars and the Charleston, and surprisingly not a line of it jars. In fact what the production seems to grain through this integration is an incredible depth and variety." Megan Lynch for The Oxford Student (2012)
"Hartley transports this nineteenth century French comedy into the 1920s with sharp suits, motor cars and the Charleston, and surprisingly not a line of it jars. In fact what the production seems to grain through this integration is an incredible depth and variety." Megan Lynch for The Oxford Student (2012)
The Mountain Giants, Luigi Pirandello
A very strange, ambitious ... and, consequently, rarely performed play. ‘The Mountain Giants’, perched somewhere between fairy-tale and bitter realism, is a story about the place of theatre, and by extension art and the human imagination, in an increasingly money-driven world. Characters, music, lighting, set, costumes, all was put to use in Pirandello's “feast for the mind and the eyes”.
As I was translating the script with a view to direct it, I changed one character's gender and cut a minor role. Apart from these changes, my aim in translating Acts I, II and III was to be faithful to the original. This concern was also exemplified by our staging: set, costumes, music and lighting were all created following Pirandello’s stage directions. The Mountain Giants is an unfinished play and the absence of a last scene is a means for every director of ‘The Mountain Giants’ to set the seal on their vision of the play. I chose to write a new scene basing myself on Marta Abba’s vision of the play and following Strehler’s famous statement “We are the Giants”.
"You must not reason. This is how we live. Deprived of everything, but with all the time in the world for ourselves: an indecipherable richness, bubbling with dreams. Objects around us speak and they only make sense arbitrarily, changing every time we are exasperated. Well, exasperated is a big word! We’re rather calm and lazy; we sit and conceive preposterous thoughts, how can I put it? Myths, that are all too natural to our way of life. It’s a continuous celestial drunkenness. Angels can descend among us in the bat of an eyelid; and we never cease to be amazed at the things that are born within us."
As I was translating the script with a view to direct it, I changed one character's gender and cut a minor role. Apart from these changes, my aim in translating Acts I, II and III was to be faithful to the original. This concern was also exemplified by our staging: set, costumes, music and lighting were all created following Pirandello’s stage directions. The Mountain Giants is an unfinished play and the absence of a last scene is a means for every director of ‘The Mountain Giants’ to set the seal on their vision of the play. I chose to write a new scene basing myself on Marta Abba’s vision of the play and following Strehler’s famous statement “We are the Giants”.
"You must not reason. This is how we live. Deprived of everything, but with all the time in the world for ourselves: an indecipherable richness, bubbling with dreams. Objects around us speak and they only make sense arbitrarily, changing every time we are exasperated. Well, exasperated is a big word! We’re rather calm and lazy; we sit and conceive preposterous thoughts, how can I put it? Myths, that are all too natural to our way of life. It’s a continuous celestial drunkenness. Angels can descend among us in the bat of an eyelid; and we never cease to be amazed at the things that are born within us."