Dancing in translation: Irina Brook's mise en scène of Danser à Lughnasa, Jean-Marie Besset's translation of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to debates about theatre and cross-cultural encounter through an analysis of Irina Brook's 1999 Swiss/French co-production of Irish playwright Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa in 1990, in a French translation by Jean-Marie Besset. While the translation and Brook's mise en scène clearly identified the source text and culture as Irish, they avoided cultural stereotypes, and rendered the play accessible to francophone audiences without entirely assimilating it to a specific Swiss or French cultural context. Drawing on discourses of theatre translation, and concepts of cosmopolitanism and conviviality, the article focuses on the potential of such textual and theatrical translation to acknowledge specific cultural traces but also to estrange the familiar perceptions and boundaries of both the source and target cultures, offering modes of interconnection across diverse cultural affiliations.