The different lives of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off: an italian case study

In stage translation, the intercultural nature of drama and the varied addressees (actors and audience) of the target play demand a flexible strategy. Performability rightfully remains a fundamental feature, only recently legitimized, of any translation written for the stage. However, the relationship between translation, adaptation and rewriting is equally important in shaping the target play. This paper aims to introduce the director’s vision of the source play and of its possible dramaturgical improvements as a further reason behind the blurred boundary between translation and adaptation in theatre. Rumori fuori scena, the Italian version of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off, serves as the case study for a contrastive analysis which, in addition to the source text and its published translation, analyses the script currently being staged. The words of the translator and of the professionals involved are then essential to understand the practice of theatrical translation in all its steps, in order to truly devise a comprehensive theoretical framework of the issues involved in the operation