ABSTRACT
After the productions of Highway's plays, Rakutendan turned its attention to Australia and the dramatic works of Aboriginal playwrights, such as Wesley Enoch and Deborah Mailman, Jane Harrison, and Roger Bennett, whose play Up the Ladder is the focus of this chapter. Sawada Keij translates primarily for the purpose of performance, so he approaches his translations as stage dialogue rather than texts for readers and distinguishes between theatre translation and translation theatre. The chapter reviews the limits he recognizes in its translation and performance in Japanese. It explores consideration of how Sawada attended to the issues in his translation of Bennett's Up the Ladder and how Rakutendan responded in the performance of the translated play. The Playlab text of Up the Ladder also reproduces the 1997 programme, which identifies all Aboriginal members of the cast and crew by tribal and/or language group.
