Behind You

A week of serious actors in serious comedy… On Tuesday we went to see Sir Ian McKellen playing Dame Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Old Vic. Marvellous fun, with all the panto prerequisites of excruciating jokes, saucy cheekiness for the adults, boos, jeers, cheers, silly singalongs, “Oh, no it isn’t”s and “Behind you!”s. Bad guy Roger Allam was in his element, finally being allowed to ham it up beyond any typically reasonable dramatic boundaries. Sir Ian was part Barbara Cartland, part Edith Piaf and a lot Les Dawson, of course brilliantly good, though he didn’t really indulge in his audience or go with the flow like other dames I’ve seen. The greatest I've known to date was Berwick Kaler, the York Theatre Royal’s stalwart Mackem dame, unknown outside of his two decades of pantomime stardom there, who would ad lib so beyond the script that he’d leave his cast standing with their mouths open – making it all the more hilarious for his audience.

Then on Friday (the 13th, eegads) we went to see Richard Griffiths, John Hurt and Ken Stott in Heroes, managing to get the last two (restricted view) seats in the house. Despite the actors having a tendency to go and sit in the one corner of the stage we couldn’t actually see, this was simply one of the most wonderful plays I have seen in a long time. A single act, the funny but poignant script had been lovingly translated by Tom Stoppard at his absolute best, and he’d laboured the language into perfection. What a joy it is to see something worked into such beautiful English that you’d never guess it had been written in anything else. No translators I’ve worked with have ever had the luxury of time that Stoppard had clearly been awarded for his oeuvre, which made me sad. Linguists are all too often under appreciated, underpaid and under pressure, and so much about that isn’t right. The translators I work with love the fun and imagination of translating films, but they are continuously expected to meet ridiculous deadlines when clients demand stupidly tight turnarounds for their DVD releases. Yet translators have also had their pay slashed by 30% by subtitling companies in the last two years. Hence most find themselves having to return to translating washing machine manuals simply to be able to make a living. Though maybe Widow Twankey has one of their manuals in her laundry. You never know.

REBECCA