ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dramaturgical operation of verse in theatre translation and adaptation, showing how verse is particularly suited to these inter-contextual and multi-contextual processes. The chapter builds its arguments through performance and text analyses of American, Irish, Polish, and Spanish-British contemporary stagings of classical plays. The first section looks at Seamus Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes: Sophocles’ Antigone and its two separate productions: the inaugural 2004 version at the Abbey Theatre (Ireland), directed by Lorraine Pintal, and the 2011 production, directed by Marcela Lorca, for the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis (USA). Thereafter, the focus is on the Polish Radosław Rychcik’s bilingual stagings of two Polish classics: the 2014 Dziady (Forefathers’ Eve), by Adam Mickiewicz, at the Nowy Theatre in Poznań, and the 2016 production of Stanisław Wyspiański’s Wesele (The Wedding), at the Śląski Theatre in Katowice. Finally, the works of the transnational company Teatro Inverso illuminate how verse works in the process of their bilingual and devised translation-adaptation Rosaura, from Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream).
