Alternative Voices in an Acquiescent Society: Translating The New Wave of Russian Playwrights (2000-2014)

Abstract

This doctoral project proposes a new paradigm of dramatic translation, through a practice-based investigation into non-conformist contemporary Russian playwriting, between 2000 and 2014, as produced in Russia and in the UK. In Chapter One, I depict how a Russian ‘fringe’ was developed from the mid-1990s in Russia to challenge predominant theatrical conventions and offer alternative ideologies to mainstream thinking. In Chapter Two, I investigate the hyper-naturalist aesthetic, which informed many works of contemporary playwriting and offered a radical departure from the mimetic realism prevailing in Russian theatre at that time. In Chapter Three, I distinguish between two ‘schools’ of writing – New Drama (in Moscow) and the Urals School of Playwriting (in Ekaterinburg). I also undertake a detailed analysis of four case study theatres: the Moscow Arts, the Sovremennik and Teatr.doc (in Moscow) and the Kolyada-Theatre (in Ekaterinburg), in order to document how contemporary playwriting fares at repertory theatres as well as on the ‘fringe’. In Chapter Four, I examine how contemporary Russian plays have been incorporated into the British theatre landscape between 2000 and 2014. Chapter Five provides my four annotated translations of Russian plays by a post-Soviet generation of playwrights: Dr. by Elena Isaeva, Joan by Iaroslava Pulinovich, Grandchildren. The Second Act by Mikhail Kaluzhskii and Aleksandra Polivanova and The War Hasn’t Yet Started by Mikhail Durnenkov. This project’s non academic partner Theatre Royal Plymouth, in association with my theatre company Sputnik, produced these plays as rehearsed readings in English at the Frontline Club (London) in January 2016. Overall, I argue that dramatic translation should respond creatively to the ‘material’ theatre, from which the playtext originated, rather than limiting its focus to the linguistic text. This broader act of translation can circumvent the rigid approaches to programming, directing and translating contemporary foreign-language texts, which are currently practiced at most British theatres.