David Whiteley should be congratulated for his translation of one of the world’s great theatre classics.

Theatre translation, as an art form, has not been given the attention it deserves, from people who analyse  plays in this country, given the need for translations between the two official languages that allow all plays to circulate from one linguistic group to the other.  The Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD) in Montreal even works regularly with Mexican translators to encourage exchanges between  plays from Quebec and from Mexico, an important initiative that was highlighted by a special issue on Canadian Theatre (English and French) published by the  Cuban theatre review Conjunto in 2009. A group of us contributed articles about the theatres in this country for the benefit of Hispanophone readers throughout the Americas. 

Behind this activity there exist a vast number of theories of translation that guide and orient the translators according to their intentions.  Are they trying to remain as “faithful” as possible to the original?  Are they trying to capture what the author “intended”?    Does the translator try to capture something “universal”. Is the translator  responding firstly to the expectations of a contemporary audience even if it means changing the original radically?  Because of all the different possibilities,  translations easily slide into adaptations.  All of these are of course acceptable and nothing is really “wrong” as  long as the translator is aware of his or her own particular process.

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There’s a famous scene in the first act of Cyrano de Bergerac when the play’s long-nosed hero delivers an elegantly witty speech on the virtues of his proboscis. He then subjects an insolent young cadet to a duel in which he punctuates the humiliating cuts and thrusts of his blade with the composition of a ballad.

It should be a defining moment in Rostand’s play — a moment which seduces the audience into embracing not only its spirit of unfettered romanticism and unabashed theatrical excess, but also the tragic-comic figure of the poet Cyrano himself.

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When leaving the theatre after watching Peter Hinton’s rendition of Peter Anderson’s “Creation,” I heard a lady commenting on what she had just seen: ”It’s unbelievable how someone can take a few bits and pieces,” she said “ and make them into a well-rounded story!” This is exactly what Peter Anderson’s play is: fragments of several Old Testament stories from the Bible put together and made into a tale about the creation of the world. Starting from an empty darkness, there was the word, then came light, water, and so on – all the way to humans. God gave life and the chance to live in paradise to everybody and everything.

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When  I first heard that the Gladstone was putting on Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac under a new translation, I immediately got flashes to awkward “modern” dialogue, too much emphasis on slapstick and, worst of all, random, misplaced attempts at song. Talk about not judging something before seeing it. David Whiteley’s version of the classic play manages to be modern and funny without sacrificing the eloquence and poignancy of the original script.

Richard Gélinas’ Cyrano is an audacious, nuanced hero. He will fight (and defeat) a hundred men, as much with his sharp tongue and poetry as with his sword. He is energetic and boisterous with his fellow soldiers, but is plagued by insecurity about his goodly-sized nose. Cyrano falls in love with his cousin Roxane, a strong and passionate woman, portrayed by a somewhat flat Élise Gauthier. Roxane, however, falls in love with Christian, a handsome, but dense young man in Cyrano’s company.

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