When translating a play is about more than just language

While the piece lay dormant, Mnouchkine, who had seen Nelson’s work in New York, approached him about creating something for Théâtre du Soleil. He told her he happened to have a show about an acting company and sent it to her. She read “Our Life in Art” overnight and decided to edit it, under his direction, as he often does in productions of his plays in the United States.

Mnouchkine quickly translated the text, she said, “while he was already rehearsing” with her actors, over a luxuriously long ten weeks last spring. “I had to go quite fast, but I needed a very high-level, subtle ease, which seems easy to say, but isn’t easy. And I wanted to have the same rhythm as Richard.”

The translation was not without complications. Nelson does not speak French, and not everyone in the Théâtre du Soleil company speaks English. A translator was an essential intermediary. He told the actors what was happening in a scene, and if they responded, “That’s not quite what the text says here,” they worked together on a more accurate turn of phrase. They talked about complicated idioms, untranslated figures of speech and, most difficult of all, the difference between pronouns, a non-issue in English: when should characters who are close but still colleagues address each other with the informal ‘tu’ or the formal ‘ vous’?

It helps that, after more rehearsals this fall, Nelson spent fourteen weeks with the actors, spending that time at the company’s home, La Cartoucherie, in the rural Bois de Vincennes on the outskirts of Paris, where he watched them behaved like a real company. . “There are no stage managers, there are no real designers,” he said. “The actors do everything: they clean toilets, they move furniture. This is their house and this is their property.”