Around the turn of the 2010s, publications by Alan Read (Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance, Theatre, Intimacy and Engagement: The Last Human Venue), Nicholas Ridout (Theatre & Ethics) and Helena Grehan (Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age) started asking important questions about the ways in which ethics, in the sense of both how to act and how to live with others, could be applied to theatre and performance. The edited volume Ethical Exchanges in Translation, Adaptation and Dramaturgy extends these questions to what could be regarded as secondary practices of theatre: translation, adaptation and dramaturgy, the main concerns of the working group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) out of which the publication grew. In their illuminating introduction, Emer O'Toole and Andrea Pelegrí Kristić identify those practices that already engage with the ‘Other language, the Other culture, the Other text, the Other's intention’ (p. 1) as prime sites for renewed ethical exploration. Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the face-to-face encounter with the Other connects most contributions, though discussions also evoke the philosopher's own reticence towards the arts as a place for the deployment of ethics, as well as ideas from several other ethicists.

Five sections address different practices, with adaptation in the second and translation in the fourth. Dramaturgy, on the other hand, is split across three units: the first, on representation and spectatorship in contemporary forms of theatre; the third, on performance-based collaborative research; and the fifth, on the ethics of postdramatic dramaturgy. This construction, the editors argue, ‘bounce[s] from dramaturgy to adaptation to trans/adaptation and back again, blurring boundaries, questioning taxonomies, and creating a sense that the critical questions attached to each discipline speak to each other in the now’ (p. 6). More importantly, this division contextualizes the theoretical imbalance between the disciplines involved. As Jenny Wong signals, translation studies have developed much stronger theoretical models to address the ethics of Self and Other than adaptation studies, to which we could also add dramaturgy. Conversely, theatre translation research often neglects preoccupations of performance genre and (post)dramatic form in its theorization of the ethics of translatability. While the volume does not provide explicit answers, it enacts a conversation over similar issues across disciplines and objects.

Case studies include examples from the theatre of the real (verbatim or documentary theatre) in the United Kingdom (Claire Bayley's The Container, Tim Crouch's The Author, David Hare's The Permanent Way, Robin Soans's Talking to Terrorists), the United States (Tectonic Theater's The Laramie Project), and New Zealand (Fiona Graham's Our Street and Stuart Young's Hush). The postdramatic ethics of montage in Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and those of ‘liveness’ in American dramaturg–director John Jesurun's Everything That Rises Must Converge reproduce the Western cartography of the contemporary theatre practices previously examined. Similarly, examples of ethical and unethical adaptations hail from Europe (Thomas Ostermeier's staging of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen; Peter Brook's intercultural 11 and 12, based on the biography of a Sufi mystic by Malian Amadou Hâmpaté Bâ; Graça Corrêa's theatricalization of the Portuguese novel Eurico o Presbitero), as well as Australia (Simon Stone's The Wild Duck, also from Ibsen). The section on translation helps round out the international scope of the book, focusing on Taiwan and China (in the case of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure) and on Greece (Penny Fylaktaki's self-translation of The Championship). This productive and theory-heavy unit also introduces issues of un/translatability within the semi-biographical play New Anatomies by experimental Basque–English translator, adaptor and novelist Timberlake Wertenbaker.

Throughout the volume, contributors complicate the import of universalizing ethics such as Levinas's with local performance-based knowledges. Fiona Graham, for example, builds her reflection around the ‘nomadic dramaturge’, whose role is to ‘constantly move … through multiple positions within the development process’ (p. 131), on her practice in a specific community theatre production in Auckland. Other contributors fruitfully engage with other disciplines. Among these, Suzanne Little's chapter on witnessing as an ethic of spectatorship linked to trauma studies promises a particularly exciting avenue of research. More generally, the book will provide food for thought for readers in theatre research and practice, as well as those interested in adaptation, translation and dramaturgy.