In conversation with her English translator Chris Campbell, playwright Magali Mougel broaches two main issues dominating theatre in France today. With regard to identity politics, she remarks that theatre-makers from communities that have historically been minoritized owing to gender, ethnicity, ‘race’ or other protected characteristics tend to prefer not only to write plays but also to direct and perform them in order to have control over the images portrayed and to ensure that discriminatory clichés do not creep back onstage. Mougel’s reflections transition from representation to the material conditions of theatre-making as she describes a sector beyond the main national theatres, which is increasingly underfunded and where burnout for the part of artists, technicians and administrators is a real concern.

This chapter critically explores the implications of including: surtitles in live performance; a multilingual performance archive; and live streaming of a live performance. Drawing on the subjective experience of translation through a live forum theatre piece, Exit (2018) by Drama Box (Singapore), online video recordings of Macbeth (2007) by Tainaner Ensemble and Li Er Zai Ci (2001) by Contemporary Legend Theatre, and both a live staging and YouTube streaming of Beware of Pity (2017) by Complicite and Schaubühne Berlin, the chapter considers how audience members access language through both hearing and seeing them as surtitles. This extends to how textual display and spoken language can combine to determine the subjective experience of a multilingual performance. Hearing affects what one sees on stage, and vice versa, particularly in a context where translation plays an important role.