Playwriting from the countries known once as the so-called Eastern bloc has been occupying the margins of Anglo-American theatre scholarship. Jozefina Komporaly – an accomplished London-based translator who works across Romanian, Hungarian and English – is in a unique position to argue for a shift in awareness. In fact, Komporaly has been doing it for years, both in her publications on Romanian Matei Vișniec (2015) and Hungarian András Visky (2017) and in her theatre work, such as collaboration with Foreign Affairs (London). Foreign Affairs is a London-based theatre company committed to intercultural exchange and staging translations. Therefore Komporaly's recent edited collection of plays from Romania continues her deterritorializing of theatre within Anglo-American theatre scholarship. Additionally it is really helpful to see both the current book and her broader efforts through the framework of deterritorializing dramaturgies, following Eckersall et al.'s 2014 definition of the term: specifically making and seeing expanding connections between the theatre and social world and between the individual, the local, and the global. Plays from Romania is underpinned by and benefits from such an approach, and in this sense its subtitle ‘dramaturgies of subversion’ is an excellent and layered choice.
Komporaly translates and presents six plays written by authors who work in different languages and within a broadly defined landscape of Romanian theatre, including migrants and minority artists. Komporaly says she selected them to reflect the diversity of Romanian stages but also to argue for ‘theatre as transnational and de-territorialized art form’, and Romanian drama within it as ‘an area of intersections and geocultural connections that re-evaluates the local and the global’ (p. 6). This broad focus will help the volume to appeal to diverse readers and their experiences. The plays offer an impressive thematic and formal range, including verse and chorus-based works, and works that speak to their immediate contexts, as well as to broader human experiences. Every play gets a contextualized synopsis, and Komporaly provides the number of characters and production history with footnotes clarifying details. Short biographies of the playwrights also feature (pp. vii–viii). Together with the productions’ posters introducing each play, these elements root the texts in Romanian theatre's ecosystem. Such an informative and powerful foreignizing strategy contrasts with the fluent translation style of the plays.
The volume is dramaturgically organized. The introduction explains Komporaly's choices and roots them in the broad ecosystem of Romanian theatre, its historical and political underpinning (pp. 1–3), and its multilingual landscapes (pp. 3–5). It also positions itself in a dialogue with Romanian Literature as World Literature (2017) (p. 1), which speaks to the text-based tradition of Romanian theatre and how Komporaly seeks to problematize them. In the acknowledgements, Komporaly evokes her collaborators, indirectly reflecting how the migrant voices bring enrichment to the UK and European theatre (p. ix). This shows how layered the book's deterritorializing strategies are. Looking at it as a Polish-born performer and scholar with an interest in theatre translation, I would have loved to read about Komporaly's translatory approach to the plays and how she engaged with performance written within them. Regardless, this is accomplished and important work. It will appeal to practitioners and scholars of theatre, and it will enrich courses on dramaturgy, directing, theatre translation and European theatre and culture.
