About theatre

I really enjoy going to the theatre. I like my entertainment live. Theatre and concerts bring with them that special relationship between audience and performers, that buzz of living creation in which all present participate. It is a very ancient human function, essential to community and society. Researchers understand it to have grown out of older ritual forms of being together to experience in some way collectively a representation of the mystery of life. Even if in some way I am not satisfied with the show, the experience of having been there compensates for that in a way that I will never get from say seeing an indifferent film at the cinema. I’m sure those who attend large sporting events would argue the same. But that’s not my thing, I like the theatre.
I like to see proper plays. I mean by that works which authors intentionally wrote for the theatre. I don’t care much for adaptations of novels and the like (unless the author himself has made it as in Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men”). I also think monologues are a bit of a cop out, though they are often put on these days as they are obviously cheaper to perform. They are a version of the tradition of the story-teller, which is fine and there are some good monologues by Dario Fo, for example, where basically the actor has to do several different parts. But for me the soul of theatre is in the interaction between different characters and the tensions that creates.
The lyric is in the first person - the subjective poetry of feelings; the dramatic is in the second person - what two people say to each other on stage; the epic is in the third person - the narrative of the novel. Brecht of course had a concept of “epic theatre” to describe his intended descriptive presentation of socially determined human relationships; but whatever his theories, he is a first rate dramatist in the cut and thrust of his exchanges. The beauty of the dramatic is to transcend the one dimension of the lyric by placing us at the heart of human interaction where we can see two opposing views simultaneously from within, without the distance of the epic. Of course modern narrative technique from point-of-view Flaubert onwards has led to a progressive fragmentation of the discourse seeking to reproduce the same effect, though rarely with the same immediacy.
Theatre is about the spoken word. The text has to be made to live and can by itself bear the weight of the play. That is why you can listen to drama on the radio. Some of the greatest pieces of language in certainly any Western culture can be found in its theatre, most obviously in the case of Shakespeare for English. As a linguist I find one of the most challenging and rewarding comprehension exercises is going to the theatre in a language other than my own and I always try to do it when away in a big city. Films, which are largely about image, aren’t a patch on the theatre for that: frequently there is little dialogue of little merit, and poorly spoken at that, against a lot of background noise. Also in the theatre you’re hearing the language live: it’s direct communication.
But what really makes the theatrical experience of course is, in addition to the spoken word, the acting, the stage business. You can of course have theatre without any text. When I used to be a leader on international youth camps, I used to run a group activity where with the teenagers we would put together a theatrical production telling a story with no text (eg the outline plot of Macbeth) so as to overcome the language barrier. But while such productions can be interesting they rarely achieve the profundity and effect of a play with text (though I hasten to add that I have seen some quite moving mime productions in my time).
In the theatre the results are best when the full resources of gesture, physical expression and movement are placed at the service of the text.
I think you will have understood that after the speaking and the acting, to me the staging, the set, the costumes, the make-up, the lighting, the additional sound effects and music, the technical wizardry of speclal effects are largely secondary, though they can contribute to some memorable moments, “coups de théâtre”. They considerably enhance the experience and give it its flavour but for me they are not its essence. Again, there are exceptions: when in Cluj I saw a wonderful production of Ionesco’s “le Vicomte” in Romanian (not a language I would claim to understand) where as a piece of absurd theatre fully understanding the text was perhaps not necessary and it was a gloriously visual show with some giant puppets shadowing the gestures of the actors and generally lots of colour and mime.
Generally I am an easy audience to please, as I am happy already that someone is going to the trouble of putting on a work. I enjoy the work itself as much as the performance. You would have to do something pretty awful to Shakespeare to prevent me from enjoying it. This is doubtless because I studied literature. To dismiss a play because you don’t like some aspects of the performance, which is often what theatre critics do, suggests to me a rather superficial approach. However, If a performance is so bad that it prevents the text from having any effect on you, then there clearly is a problem. The acid test of any production is whether it grips you, engrosses you, moves you, makes you laugh or cry at the right times, illicits some emotional response, makes you think. If it does, it’s working, even if not everything is perfect.
Recently in Brussels I have seen a few good plays in productions that have worked for me.

Pirandello’s “Six characters in search of an author” (in French) by the Théâtre des Martyres.
As the title says, six characters interrupt the rehearsal of a play because they are looking for someone to put their story on stage. The director does his best but it’s really the characters who unfold their own story. Usually I find art about art (as in novels about authors suffering from writer’s block, or films about directors trying to make a film) a bit too much like navel-gazing. Pirandello’s play, which I had not seen before, manages to transcend that and poses some interesting questions about the nature of theatre and its relationship to life, the relationship between the immortal unchanging characters of literature and the mortal changing actors who attempt to put them on the stage. That sounds potentially abstract, but thanks to the characters’ story, dramatic interest is maintained. It was a thoughtful and well acted production.

Büchner’s “Wozzeck” (in German) by the Monnaie.
Actually this was an opera. The point is that Berg didn’t change Büchner’s text, he just set the play to music. Many in the German speaking world feel that if Büchner hadn’t died in his twenties, he would have gone on to be one of the giants of German literature. The text is very powerful with lines like “He runs through the world like an open razor” and “Man is an abyss, it makes me dizzy to look into him”. Wozzeck is a soldier living in a world of barrack discipline but subject to hallucinatory visions. He hovers on the verge of disorder and despair and is tipped over by jealousy into murdering his lover and later drowning. The story unfolds in a series of fragmentary almost Brechtian slices of life, though it was written in the 1830s. I’ve seen Wozzeck in three theatrical and two operatic versions and this for me was the best one dramatically. Personally I don’t particularly like Berg’s music and I certainly wouldn’t want to listen to Wozzeck in my living room. But I thoroughly enjoyed this production as it was totally effective as musical theatre, which has caused me to reconsider what the nature of opera is. In “Wozzeck” the opera, you basically get the text in a sing-song way with atmospheric musical backing. With the action played here realistically in period costume in a dark minimalist setting, the overall effect was devastating. The drowning of Wozzeck at the climax was actually staged - he was seen to disappear into a pond of water leaving his cap floating on the surface. Great stuff!

Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” (in Icelandic) by the National Theatre of Iceland.
Ibsen is one of my favourite playwrights, but “Peer Gynt” is quite unlike his other plays. It’s more an investigation into the nature of human identity than an exploration of man’s relation to society. Ibsen at first wrote it as an epic poem with no immediate intention to stage it. Therein lie many problems, with the scene ranging across many places (Trolls’ cave, frozen wastes, Sahara, somewhere after life etc) and the whole text running to nearly four hours. There’s a great line in “Educating Rita” where she has been asked the essay question “How would you overcome the problems of staging Peer Gynt?” and she answers “I would put it on the radio”. The National Theatre of Iceland have, however, valliantly put it on the stage. Their option was essentially to have the whole action in the ward of a hospital/lunatic asylum, and to cut some of his exotic adventures. The production was in Icelandic with surtitles in French and Dutch (this is Brussels!) which tended to jerk forward rather erratically not always leaving you enough time to read them. Although this was far from satisfactory it was still possible to follow the action and enjoy the very varied scenes evoking events taking place elsewhere. There were some highly original ideas and it made for an interesting if sometimes challenging evening. The Trolls’ cave scene was suitably scary and the death scenes of Peer’s mother and himself were particularly moving.

Gogol’s “The Government Inspector (Revizor)” (in French) by the Théâtre Varia.
The corrupt officials of a provincial town have been tipped off that a “revizor” is coming incognito from the government to inspect them. They mistake an impoverished young St Petersburg nobleman at the tavern for the revizor and shower him with unexpected liberal hospitality. Gogol exploits the comic situation relentlessly in a political and social satire that has lost none of its relevance today. Especially in the light of his other writings (eg “the Nose”) I think caricature and the grotesque are the best approach to this play. I saw a great, almost Pythonesque production at the National in London in the 1980’s with Rick Mayall. The approach at the Varia was in the same vein and I thought it worked well, it certainly made me laugh. I particulalry enjoyed the scene where the governor, for the benefit of the man he thinks is to inspect him, gives a speech saying how untiringly and selflessly local officials work for the benefit of their citizens: here he stepped up to a microphone like a crooner giving a half spoken half sung sentimental ballad.

Racine’s “Andromaque” (in French) by the Bouffes du Nord.
Oreste loves Hermione who loves Pyrrhus who loves Andromaque who loves Astyanax the son of her dead husband Hector. These frustrated passions engender cruelty in the characters towards each other and this is the mainspring of Racine’s tragedy. It’s all about sex and violence, but only implicitly: that is it’s about the emotions that are thus physically expressed, but they are presented in polished noble verse. I’ve always wanted to see if Racine can work on stage, so I was interested to see what Declan Donnellan would make of him, but I was a little disappointed. Racine, I think has to be done on his own very clearly defined terms and you deviate from them at your peril. That seems to be an incredibly tall order, especially to the modern sensibility: you are meant to do the whole thing dead straight with no humour and no violence on stage for two hours plus. Directors always want to sex Racine up and maybe by making explicit physically what is implied in the text it is easier for a modern audience to follow. Donnellan went so far as to put Astyanax on-stage and give him lines, whereas he is never seen in the original. Quite a big liberty but it does make the plot clearer. A lot of good vocal effort and gesture was put into bringing the text alive, but it didn’t always click. Nick Roche, who directs theatre himself and was watching with me, put his finger on it: performing on a larger stage than usual for them, the actors had spread themselves out too far so the action lost focus, you often couldn’t see both actors in the same glance during their exchanges so you lost the tension between them. Which was a shame. It was nonetheless a fascinating production even if it still hasn’t solved for me the conundrum of how to perform Racine.

These are the plays I have seen most recently at the theatre.
My favourite dramatist though is of course Shakespeare. I’ve managed so far to see 27 of his plays (not all of them in English - but they work fine in translation) and I hope one day to have seen them all. That’s plenty years of theatre-going still ahead of me.

About interpreting

This week marks twenty-five years that I have been working as an interpreter.
I started in March 1983 having completed my six month training course (stage) with the European Commission’s Joint Interpreting and Conference Service (SCIC). The SCIC provides interpretation at meetings organized by both the Commission and Council of Ministers. It is, by the number of languages it provides, the meetings it services and interpreters it employs (staff and freelance), by far the biggest interpreting service in the world. I was trained by professional working interpreters who would soon be my future colleagues. It was very effective hands-on training tailored to the needs of SCIC. They paid for your training, and if you were successful you had to work for them for at least a year. It was a golden opportunity that now belongs to a past era: free training and a guaranteed job! I don’t think I would have stumbled into the interpreting profession otherwise.
I had actually interpreted before, without knowing it, while being a leader on international youth camps where somebody had to repeat the announcements in another language. So I took to it fairly naturally, I have a good ear and a good memory, and discovered I rather liked it. And here I am still twenty-five years later.
A lot has changed of course over the years. When I started there were 10 member states and 7 languages (French, German, English, Italian, Dutch, Danish and Greek). Now there are 27 members and 22 languages (I won’t list them). I hasten to add that not all the languages are spoken in all the meetings, most often far fewer. For that reason, in the 1980’s I spent most of my time interpreting non-native French, now I spend most of my time some days sitting listening to non-native English - a somewhat frustrating experience to say the least. That’s because when they speak English in the meeting room we don’t interpret in the English booth. I work into English, my mother tongue, from French, German, Italian and Spanish. I started with French and German, which I had studied at university, and added Italian around 1990 and Spanish in 1995. I haven’t felt the need to learn another language to professional level (although it would please my boss), I find it enough to do keeping on top of the four I have. As part of my job I also teach and test would-be interpreters, which gives me an opportunity to reflect on the nature of what we do.
Most of our interpreting is in simultaneous. We sit in a sound-proofed booth with a window onto the meeting room. When someone speaks into a microphone in the room we hear him over a head-set and interpret that straight into our microphone with a delay of a few seconds. The delay represents the time necessary to understand a complete unit of meaning (phrase or sentence) and to process it (translate/edit/rephrase it into natural sounding English). As you start to speak your version, you are already at the same time listening to and processing what comes next, which you then start to speak and so on. There are three things going on in your head simultaneously. That’s not something that comes naturally and it’s a trick you have to learn.
Occasionally we interpret in consecutive. This usually is the case where the complicated infrastructure of the booths and sound system is not available, eg in the middle of a field (that’s not a joke, I’ve done it on agricultural trips), or where it’s not really worth the effort to set it up, eg for a short after dinner speech in a château. In consecutive, first the speaker speaks (sometimes for several minutes) and then the interpreter. That might sound easier, but you’ve got to remember everything he’s said. So we take notes that will help us reproduce the speech, but we are largely dependent on our memory and if we’re out of practice (which is usually the case, given how little we do it these days) it can be nerve-wracking.
Either way, interpreting is about communicating. In effect we have to become the speaker and give his message with as much conviction, humour, emotion or whatever. There’s a bit of the ham-actor in many an interpreter, but you mustn’t overdo it. You must be true to the orignal, so if the original is bland and boring, then so are we.
People nearly always ask the same questions about interpreting, so I’ll answer a few FAQs for you.

What do you do if you don’t know a word ?
You leave it out. Golden rule n°1 is “If in doubt, leave it out”. You should only say what you’re sure you’ve understood - otherwise you could be in deep trouble if you make something up. Sometimes of course you just mishear a word thinking it’s another and say something rather stupid in the context. Oh yes - we’ve all been there and laughed about it afterwards! The chances are the word you didn’t know, you actually did but didn’t recognize it. If it’s important, it will come round again; speakers tend to repeat themselves and you may get it the second time. If it persists and you still don’t know it, like the name of a fish species, you better track it down fast in the document you’re discussing or in your specialized glossary, if you’ve got one. And if all else fails you’ll have to admit and say you don’t know it, adding what it is in the source language. If it’s really technical the delegate probably has heard of it, foreigners for example use English technical words the whole time (often that’s the word you didn’t understand in the first place as it was mangled in a foreign pronunciation - but oddly enough that’s always the one word your delegate did recognize in the original). Usually the odd word you don’t know here or there doesn’t matter. Interpreters, after all, are in the business of communicating the ideas rather than the words. The worst kind of interpretation is a never-ending string of words that may each individually equate to what’s in the original but don’t actually hang together in a coherent message that enables your customer to follow what the other delegate’s point is and allows him to react to it. In fact that’s not really an interpretation at all, but a rather poor literal translation.

Could a machine do your job?
No. I think I’ve just explained why. The day they replace the interpreters with machines, they will have replaced the delegates with robots the year before. You need a human being to understand the vagaries of the human thought process, as reflected in the speech of most mortals.

What do you do if you make a mistake?
All interpreters make mistakes, they are only human. If you realize you have and it matters then you should correct it as soon as possible. If you've not realized, maybe because you translated in good faith something you misheard and didn't get a chance to put it right, then you will have to apologize.

Can you alter what a speaker says to change the outcome of a meeting?
Why would you want to? People aren’t daft, when the chairman sums up, they’d just say “No, I didn’t say that”. You’d have to keep on inventing the whole time like a bad liar, and believe me you’ve got enough to do as it is. Anyway, in a multilingual meeting with several parallel versions, you’d have to make sure everyone was doing the same - impossible. Just stick to the truth.

What do you do if someone says something rude or that you strongly disagree with?
The same applies. Stick to the truth Your customer has a right to know just how objectionable the speaker is.

Isn’t it tiring ?
Well it is. That’s why we have a whole series of time rules that meetings have to respect so the interpreters get sufficient breaks to stay on form. Generally speaking, there are at least two interpreters in a booth and you change over after half an hour. The tiredness creeps up on you insidiously, in the adrenalin rush of interpreting you don’t notice it, it hits you afterwards. It’s not a job you can do 9 to 5 every single day of the week, week in week out. Having said that, staff interpreters at the SCIC probably do work more days in the booth in a year than anywhere else. I myself arrange to take a month of unpaid leave in the summer to fully recharge my batteries.

How can you cope with all those languages ?
In meetings with a large number of languages, there are three of us (each having say four languages) so that we stand a better chance between us of covering more languages directly. Inevitably even then, there are some languages we don’t know and we have to use relay, which is polite for double translation or Chinese whispers (eg someone does Finnish into French and then we do that French into English). That first step with all the new and little known Eastern European languages often takes the form of a “retour” eg a native speaker of Lithuanian putting their own language into eg non-native French. Most of these retours are into English. However, most interpreters still work most of the time into their mother tongue (in my case that’s all I do). As a corollary of all of this, when delegates can’t listen to their own language, they tend to listen to English instead. In a recent survey we discovered that only 15% of those who listen to the English booth are native speakers. Even in a meeting with all the languages, our colleague non-English interpreters will be listening to us to take a relay. This has meant that in the English booth we have had to clean up our act for foreign consumption. Even without dumbing it down too much, we must try to e-nun-ci-ate and cricket metaphors are definitely out (not that I ever used many anyway). It’s sad really, but that’s our demand, no cozy two way relationship for us as between the Danish booth and their delegates.

Have you ever worked for anyone famous ?
Over the years I’ve worked for everyone from trades unionists to prime ministers. I’ve worked for many of the famous European politicians. and public figures Though confidentiality rules forbid me from sharing any tasty titbits with you, I can tell you that it’s interesting to see these people in the flesh and you soon develop your likes and dislikes. But most of the time I work for civil servants, that is people who represent their country at European level meetings, which is why we loosely call those attending meetings “delegates”.

Do you understand all the subjects you interpret ?
Yes, superficially at least, if not fully. SCIC interpreters are expected to do meetings on any subject. Over the years it’s not just the number of languages in the EU that has increased but also the areas of business. We have to do everything from setting fish quotas to checking countries’ budgets meet their euro obligations, to classifying footwear for customs purposes, to stopping foot and mouth disease from spreading, to agreeing how to use the European arrest warrant in practice, to working conditions for lorry-drivers, to whether or not to recognize Kosovo’s independence etc etc. Just about anything and everything you can think of. It’s safe to say you learn something new at work every day and have to, if you’re going to grasp the point someone’s trying to make. It’s one of the aspects of the job that keeps it interesting. I always say there are three levels to understanding what’s happening in a meeting: linguistic - you understand the words; technical - you understand how what they are talking about works; political - you understand what is at stake and why countries are taking the positions they do. You have to understand linguistically to do the job and can sometimes get away just with that, but it makes everything much easier if you also understand technically. Sometimes from your background knowledge and even from what more candid delegates say, you may understand politically and that can make a meeting very interesting to observe.

It’s not actually one of the FAQs but I’ll answer this one:
What’s the best thing about the job?
The answer is quite simply - the colleagues. Interpreters are by definition people who speak several languages, have experience of several different cultures, have lived abroad and travelled widely. They come from many different countries and backgrounds and have a wide range of interests. They frequently have many hidden artistic talents. It’s a privilege to work alongside so many interesting and gifted people. Also you work with different colleagues every day so you don’t get bored with them. In fact, my wife is a colleague and so are many of my best friends in Brussels. Interpreting also requires teamwork: in the booth itself the three of us have to agree how to divide the work fairly and help each other find documents and equivalents of technical words; then all the booths together have to work as a team in the meeting, especially with many relays. That teamwork brings an “esprit de corps” which is further enhanced when we have to travel together, not always in easy conditions.

All in all, even after twenty-five years, I still enjoy the job. Of course, like any other job, there are a fair number of dull days for one reason and another, but the good days more than make up for that. It’s never easy, I can never do it just on auto-pilot. Moreover, there is no such thing as a perfect interpretation, which is humbling. In fact it’s one of the most challenging intellectual exercises I know and as such fun. But it also serves a purpose, which is to allow people to communicate and when I see that I have enabled that, it gives me great satisfaction. It’s not a job that would suit a lot of people, being no more than a glorified parrot, but it’s fine with me. Being on the job requires maximum concentration. It’s also a performing art with the special adrenalin that brings.
The big advantage is that when it’s over, it’s over: I’m free to get on with the rest of my life. I don’t require the illusion of self-importance that comes with some jobs in which in reality you’re only a small cog in someone else’s big machine, though exhausting your life energy doing it. I definitely work to live, not the other way round.
It also happens to pay well, but I think I’d do it anyway for the stimulus and the company.