ABSTRACT
There were conflicts between translation and how it was going to be performed: the location was ‘Greece’, the Nurse and Tutor are called ‘slaves’, ‘Zeus’ became ‘God’, but other Greek figures are mentioned by name. Medea is the only one of translations and adaptations which has been published. This chapter looks at various stagings involving others’ translations/adaptations, and focuses on authenticity and experience as both practitioner and theoretician to evaluate the meaning and value of the scripts and their staging. Every single decision made in a production – mise en scene, casting, blocking, movement, costumes, and sound – is part of the translation, as recent theoretical works have made clear. Practitioners, namely translator, director, and actors, of ‘expressive’ authenticity express values important to them, and/or awareness of the ‘emergent value’ or larger artistic potential of the performance text. In ‘critical’ authenticity, observers/scholars attempt to understand the social goals of performers and evaluate the whole process of development of the response.
