On Surtitles and Simultaneities: Reflections on the German Theatre Scene

No longer before, behind, or above the original, with surtitles, the translation is now parallel or simultaneous to it.

Lars Eidinger, playing Richard III, huskily whispers some German lines of Shakespeare into an amplifier, furtively glances up to the English surtitles, and spins round to berate a coughing audience member in French. This is theatre in a truly globalised arts scene. But the multilingual nature of many recent productions not only reflects the realities of our contemporary social conditions. It raises fundamental questions about the nature and role of the linguistic mediation of culture today.

A large number of German theatre productions, for example, are now being performed in their original language, with a native speaking cast, and merely translated in the surtitles. While the use of surtitles per se is in no way a novelty (and even the norm in the opera world), their more profound implications only become evident once we turn to the newer forms of experimental linguistic hybridity. Far from relegating translation to a subordinate rank, surtitles raise crucial questions about the boundaries between original and translation, written and spoken word, the live and the mediated, art and its boundaries. Attending to surtitles in all their complexities, then, is not only to reflect on what it means to make and share theatre, but also to think about how theatre mirrors contemporary habits within our multitasking, multimedia, and multilingual societies.

In London, the Barbican Centre is the go-to harbourage of foreign-language plays visiting from continental Europe and abroad. A recent example is a co-production of the London-based Complicité group and the Berlin-based Schaubühne ensemble, titled Beware of Pity and directed by Simon McBurney. An adaptation of a work by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, the play was performed in its entirety in the original language and furnished with English surtitles on two small screens suspended from the ceiling at each side of the stage. Enabling its bilingual performance, these digital props became indispensable elements of the play—yet in ways that are not entirely unproblematic.

What at first struck any bilingual audience member in Beware of Pity were the spatial and temporal constraints imposed by the surtitling screens: as it takes longer to read a sentence than to speak it, the written translation was often severely curtailed to meet these logistic requirements. What is more, there is no room for footnotes, commentaries, circumlocutions, or paraphrasing on stage. The surtitles are hence bound to focus less on rendering an equivalence in poetic form, but instead on the effective communication of content. While these difficulties are not dissimilar from those faced by subtitles in film or television, theatre surtitles additionally impose a pre-recorded script onto a live performance of actors. The possibilities for improvisation, chance and spontaneity—elemental aspects of contemporary acting—seem to be thwarted by the need to stick to the shorthand libretto running on the overhead panels. Technology and translation, rather than being merely useful tools, seem to dictate the bilingual performance of a play and limit its creative freedom.

On the one hand, these conditions play into the hands of an age-old chimera that casts translation as an inevitable decline in poetic density, complexity, freedom, imagination, and so forth. Seen through the lens of loss, translation appears to detract from the mythical authenticity of the original and is hence rendered derivative, secondary, and subordinate. The truncated, short-hand surtitles in Beware of Pity seem at first glance to confirm this preconception: it is a flawlessly coordinated, infinitely reproducible, almost automatized performance. No going off the beaten track—a track that is the translated script looming over the head of these human acting machines.

But let’s be wary of hasty conclusions and wholesale condemnations. For not only is translation usually granted more space (both physically and metaphorically), but the use of surtitles in fact has much more complex and paradoxical repercussions on the question of originality. And Beware of Pity, too, is more theoretically challenging and linguistically intricate upon a closer look. To begin with, in its bilingual constellation, the original is no longer implicit and invisible, nor prior to the performance of the play: the German original and translated English version are present on stage in different guises, yet at one and the same time. We hear the original while we read its translation. Equally, if to stage a play is to move from the written to the spoken word, then translated surtitles perform a subtle reversal of this move: they bring the text back onto the stage, lifting the veil that usually obfuscates a written script in theatre. Both the original text and the original language are made present in the performed and translated versions in ways that trouble any neat narratives of authenticity. Isn’t there something to be gained, after all, from hearing the sonority of the original words even if we don’t understand their meaning? Isn’t originality, then, even more faithfully conserved rather than being in any way lost?

Instead of trying to resolve this seeming paradox of fidelity, I find it much more interesting to regard it as indicative of a deep-rooted shift in the relationship between original and translation. No longer before, behind, or above the original, the translation is now parallel or simultaneous to it. And similarly, no longer standing invisibly behind the performance of a play, the text is now projected simultaneously with its performance. Surtitling, then, incites us to move away from traditional hierarchies that structure our thinking around originality, and towards a more lateral model of simultaneity and parity.

This is not to say that this conceptual shift does not have very tangible consequences. Not only does it question the mythical primacy of the original, but it also demands quite an amount of practical multitasking from the audience: in Beware of Pity we must read, watch and listen to the play all at once. Our eyes constantly dart back and forth between screen and stage. But what at first feels slightly inconvenient quickly becomes so instinctive that it soon goes unnoticed. Indeed, this simultaneous mobilisation of the audience’s perceptive capacities strikingly resonates with the constant sensory overload that has become our everyday reality in a smartphone-hooked generation. During much of our day, we are simultaneously immersed in a virtual and a physical reality. Contemporary theatre seems not only to reflect, but also to exploit these multitasking habits for its own purposes.

Translated surtitles in Beware of Pity hence have a much more productive role than detrimentally dominating the play’s action. Yet, we must further unpack the notion of simultaneity to fully understand the multiple roles of surtitles in theatre. What happens, for instance, when the two strands of “written translation” and “spoken original” are no longer merely kept parallel to one another, but begin to interweave? Or when two translations are present in one and the same play? This is the case in the highly-acclaimed and widely-travelled German production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, directed by Thomas Ostermeier and starring Lars Eidinger, which toured London, Paris, and New York. The text was again performed in German and furnished with English and—in the Parisian performances—French surtitles. This time, the play was hence already a translation, while the surtitles now contained both the source language script and yet another translation. Moreover, some crucial passages were recited in English, and performers frequently improvised audience interactions in French. The play hence jumped back and forth between three languages and the audience was taken on a joyride of linguistic multitasking. Admittedly, German speakers had a slight advantage in understanding all jokes. Yet, the play’s overall comprehensibility was not compromised, perhaps also due to the fact the plot is generally known to the average playgoer. In either case, it becomes clear that the notion of parallelism can no longer capture this complex interlacing of multiple strands of language.

To find a satisfying response to this problem, let us briefly diverge into the realm of the visual. Visual simultaneities are equally present in Richard III, created by an effect which has become almost iconic for Ostermeier’s theatre, his productive use of live video feedback on stage. In Richard III, an onstage video camera projects the actors’ faces in close-up onto the back wall. Not only does this make for highly visceral effects, but it quite literally layers the play onto several planes: background and foreground, screen and stage, surtitle and spoken language. What emerges is a multidimensional space, where the axes of several languages, of written and performed word, and of projection and reality cut across each other—and the boundaries that formerly ran between them are blurred. Where does the live end and the mediated begin, we ask ourselves. Where does original end and the translation begin? It is no longer possible to tell.

To experiment with surtitles on stage is hence much more than a pragmatic solution to a practical problem; instead, surtitles become an aesthetic element of the play itself. This form of theatre, then, sees its own translation no longer as a logistic appendage, but as a cultural and social issue to be addressed within the boundaries of the work. In doing so, it summons the audience to question the grounds from which they approach a cultural production and ask, what do we invest in originality, what do we expect of translation, and how are our presumptions thwarted by their multiple presences on stage?

This multilingual hybridity of surtitling experiments makes us question not only the hierarchies, but the very binaries between the translated and the original, the live and the mediated, the foreign and the familiar. Yet, rather than becoming enslaved to surtitling technologies, both Beware of Pity and Richard III demonstrate how theatre translation can use them for its own purposes, use them self-consciously and integrate them critically. It is not incidental that one might recognise in these theatrical simultaneities the multimedia, multilingual and multicultural spaces of our contemporary realities. What is theatre, after all, but a mirror to the world?

Photo credit to Gianmarco Bresadola.

Flora Brandl was born and raised in Salzburg, Austria. Having spent several years of her childhood in the United States and in France, she now lives and studies in London. She has an interdisciplinary background in literature, theatre and the visual arts, and recently obtained her Bachelor’s degree from University College London. Currently, Flora is enrolled in a Master’s program in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths College. She is particularly committed to bridging the theoretical and practical divides between literary, performance-based and visual forms of contemporary cultural production.

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