Helen Eastman fell in love with Ancient Greek theatre at Bryanston, a Greek language summer school famous among classicists, where she played her namesake in Euripides’ Helen. Now she finds herself directing the triennial Cambridge Greek Play for a second time, following up on Agamemnon with a double bill of Prometheus, attributed to Aeschylus, and Aristophanes’ The Frogs.

When they say Greek Play in Cambridge they mean it: this is performed in the original language. Why bother? Because, Helen says, Greek is “the most extraordinary aural language”, which has such emotional power that it deserves to be brought back to life, if only for a couple of hours.

The actors – the majority of whom are not classicists – “work terrifyingly hard” to overcome the many challenges of learning lines and performing in an unknown language. Helen’s advice comes from her own Bryanston experience: “Just follow the rhythm and everything will make sense.”

Academic debates rage over the sights and sounds of the Athenian theatre, but an antiquarian reconstruction is not what Helen wants: “The real mark of respect is to make sure it’s brilliant.” Alex Silverman – who is “that rare thing, an ex-classicist composer” – has a crucial role to play in this. For Prometheus, Alex is tasked with creating a unique sound world, taking all the rhythms from Greek metre.

The deficiency in what tone, score and staging can convey is made up for by surtitling. Screens will display functional translations of the Greek, though far short of a comprehensive or performable translation. The surtitles are designed to carry the essential metaphors and illuminate the action, while allowing the audience to focus on the performance. Having felt guilt at butchering somebody else’s translation of Agamemnon to fit the screens, Helen is using her own this time round.

So is Atri Banerjee, director of the week two ADC main show, who was not content with any of the existing English translations of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore). All offered only stale, literal translations of 1920s Italian idiom, and often adapted the original far too liberally, overcomplicating an already complex play by adding another layer of authorial voice.

But being fluent in Italian, having lived in Florence for seven years, Atri could undertake the artistic challenge of translating the play for himself, while transposing just the relevant elements to the present day.

The original was set where it debuted, in the Teatro Valle in Rome. To retain the metatheatrical sense of the original, Atri set his adaptation in Edinburgh for his Fringe performances, and in the ADC for his Cambridge home run.

This illusion was more holistic at the Fringe, where the distinction between actor, performer, writer and audience member is blurred by the very nature of the festival and the mass of drama on show. But Atri believes this will transfer well to Cambridge’s thriving theatre world and the university city more generally.
Atri feels comfortable doubling up as director, since there is enough distance between Atri as adaptor and Pirandello as author; above all, this is “still Pirandello’s play”. Atri has been “very faithful to the Pirandello”, “riffing off” it at most, with every line and every update justified by a correlate in the original.

The same cannot be said of The Frogs, the second part of Helen Eastman’s Greek Play double bill. This comedy has also been transposed to the present day, but in an “irreverent and highly anarchic” way which aims to make it funny at almost any cost. Updating the satire has been difficult, with the target audience ranging from teenage public school girls to crusty emeritus professors. There is, however, a list of figures hoped to be universally recognised, with an especially buffoonish ex-classicist politician being particularly memorable.

Helen and the cast have built their original translation into the comedy. An extra screen is on stage in view of the actors, so that sometimes the surtitles are the gag, contradicting and misquoting the characters or displaying subliminal messages. The Frogs aims to demonstrate an awareness of the fact that translation and transposition are tricky tasks. Making fun of something is, after all, a great way of establishing the limitations of this complex process.

Prometheus & The Frogs runs at the Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday 19th October. Six Characters in Search of an Author runs at the ADC until 19th October.