When The Opportunity of Efficiency was performed at the New National Theatre in Tokyo last year the play was written, in reality, by two people.

I was given the credit – my name on the posters outside the hulking theatre that sits near the busy Shinjuku area of Tokyo – but I was always keenly aware that the translator, Kaku Nagashima, had written the actual words spoken on stage.

Writing the play for a foreign national theatre, having it translated into Japanese and then performed in Japanese has, of course, led me to reflect on the process of translation. I was going to use words such as “challenges” and “pitfalls” in the last sentence but I really do think it’s a process more than anything else – a fluid, changing process that has a myriad of paths to navigate.

While thinking about this I came across the following quotation (from William Carlos Williams in a letter written to the art critic and poet Nicolas Calas):

If I do original work all well and good. But if I can say it (the matter of form I mean) by translating the work of others that also is valuable. What difference does it make?

The work on the Tokyo stage was mine but was also Kaku’s. I had not fully appreciated the role of the translator until late in the process – and maybe only until after the play had been performed.

I believe that one of Kaku’s main aims is to true to the spirit of the original and to my intentions of what the play has to say (of course, the story would remain the same). But the difficult task for him was in the nuances of the writing – not only what people were saying but how they were saying it and the intentions behind those words.

Dialogue is an obvious place to start when looking at translation. I made an effort in the writing of The Opportunity of Efficiency not to include too many colloquialisms or slang. The play is set in a rather neutral place – a research facility on the edge of a town, part of the many anonymous industrial units used by all sorts of industries (including in this case, research scientists looking into new drugs and their applications). Of course, when Kaku had a draft to translate there were a slew of queries about individual words (though, admittedly, the query would be more about the use of the words rather than the meaning of the word itself). One word did slip through to the final performance that remained literally translated wrongly – the word “pants”. One of the main characters in the play is a man called Ken, an efficiency expert who is called in to scrutinise a team of scientists and their work and who is extremely organised. He lives only in hotels (more efficient) and has seven vests and seven pairs of pants. Of course, in Wales, we mention pants and vests and we know what that means – in Japan, through translation, the sentence ends up as Ken being a man who owns seven vests and pairs of trousers.

The bigger nuance to conquer was the reasons people say things and how they say them to each other. I know very little about Japanese culture – average, I’d say for a Western resident who likes Japanese cartoons and the work of certain Japanese film directors – and I wasn’t about to write a play set in Japan. But, of course, this was a play for a Japanese audience and that’s where the art of the translator shone through most brightly.

This was illustrated when we (myself and director John McGrath) travelled to Tokyo for auditions. The play was not finished at the time and I was asked to provide some short scenes so we could audition the actors. The play contains three generations, two young research scientists, their immediate boss Iffy and Ken, and the manager of the unit Mr Grant and his wife, Mrs Grant. The auditions for the younger cast members were fine – John held workshop sessions with all the young actors and then we got some back in to do another session before casting. The scene I had provided for them was between the two young characters, Jenny and Jasper, and that all seemed fine. The more interesting developments came when I provided a scene that contained a conversation between Ken (a middle-aged character) and Mr Grant (a more senior figure in both years and status). Kaku translated two versions of my text – one that was true to the way I had written it and one that would be more true to how these people would speak to each other – with the emphasis on the linguistics/deference/respect – in Japanese society. There followed, of course, conversations with Kaku around this subject and, I think, we found a way through it – if Kaku knew the reasons why Ken was not being so respectful of Mr Grant and his position then that was okay, we could get away with it.
Those scenes did not necessarily make it into the final draft of the play but it made me very aware of the way people speak to each other in other societies – we do it, of course, in this society but there are large shifts when you leave the UK.

The other great challenge was of tone. I think, as playwrights, we work very hard to get the tone of the piece right – it seeps into every sentence we put into a play – and I think once Kaku knew the intentions of the characters that helped a great deal. At one point I mostly receiving queries about the way people were saying things (or not saying them) and so went through the play looking for those words/sentences/actions that could be ambiguous and I compiled a “glossary of intentions” for Kaku. It’s not a bad way to pull apart your work.

There’s an interesting article, written in 2011, here in which Kaku explains more about his work as a dramaturg and translator:

http://www.performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/1101/1.html

The Opportunity of Efficiency is being read of the first time in English next Thursday, June 11 at the Sherman (7.30pm). It’s the first time I will have heard the play in English. I know this is the case for the director as well (we were going to hold some workshops in Wales before going out to Japan but at the time, felt there was no need). It will be an odd experience after seeing the show performed in Japanese in Tokyo sitting in a Japanese audience. I suppose it might be like having a prized possession that you have loaned out for a good while returned to you. But, I think, even though I can say I wrote this play there will always be part of it that will be Kaku’s – the Japanese filter that it has been poured through before returning to Wales.