Casting, Adaptation and Translation as Interculturalism-From-Below

Abstract

In this chapter, queries the politics of form in the work of Arambe Productions, Camino Productions and Polish Theatre Ireland (PTI). Arambe, Camino de Orula and PTI have been committed to staging African and Polish works in Ireland respectively but do so not only to showcase this drama in an Irish context. Rather, these companies use these plays in order to elucidate the racial and ethnic complexities of Ireland now through casting or changes to setting. Their staging choices call into question the distance between Irish and other cultures represented in these plays. This chapter compares Arambe’s production of Jimmy Murphy’s Kings of the Kilburn High Road (2006) (as well as Bisi Adigun’s two rewritings of the play The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013) and Home, Sweet Home (2010)), Camino’s production of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead (2008) and PTI’s production of Radosław Paczocha’s Delta Phase (2013). Through my examination of these works, the possibilities of casting, adaptation and translation as aesthetic strategies in Ireland today become elucidated through an engagement with histories of diaspora, apartheid and colonialism, as well as the politics of translation, linguistic and otherwise.