Performing Heteroglossia: The Translating Theatre Project in London

Abstract

London is home to more than eight million people, who speak more than three hundred languages, but the representation of this cultural richness and diversity in the theatre of the British capital is far from adequate. London theatre remains predominantly white, British, and middle-class, and performances use the standard London dialect and accent combination. In the first part of this article, I offer a contextualization and classification of types of heteroglossia available to London theatregoers. In the second part, I describe my research project “Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: ‘Foreignisation’ in Theatre Practice.” The aim of the project was to investigate new strategies in theatre translation that would enable us to disrupt audience expectations and challenge ethnocentrism. In the present article, I assess the difficulties we encountered and audiences’ responses to our experiments. The project offered many timely opportunities to interrogate perceptions of “foreignness” among London-based theatre makers, scholars, and spectators immediately following the Brexit referendum vote.