By Robert Viagas for Playbill, 15 October 2015
The massive project aims to make Shakespeare’s works more understandable for modern audiences, with all 39 plays ready for performance in three years. Reaction has been swift and widespread. A guest columnist for The New York Times called the project a likely “waste of money and talent.”
Claiming that his theatre’s commitment to traditional Shakespeare has included producing the “Shakespeare canon in its entirety four times,” Rauch writes, “I am not surprised that the project has generated both excitement and concern…. The concerns seem to be twofold; the first is that we somehow intend these new translations to replace the original texts, and the second is that we are ‘dumbing down’ the language.”
Rauch denied there is any attempt to replace the originals, saying, “The Play on! translations are not being commissioned because we despair that people will never understand the original language; the more than 300 Shakespeare plays we have staged since 1935, the three dynamic Shakespeare productions we are performing right now and the five scheduled for 2016 strongly testify to the contrary. Instead, the translation project is about creating a new body of work…. One or more of these translations may be produced at OSF in the years ahead, but they will be produced in addition to, not instead of, the entire original canon.”
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