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Dateline:18th December, 2005
Switch Triptych by Adriano Shaplin had its UK premiere at the Assemnly Rooms during this year's Edinburgh Fringe and it then transferred to the Soho Theatre in September. Now it is being performed in Vienna by far cry international theatre, a UK-based company whose aim is to "create comptemporary theatre in international collaborations". The Viennese production of this play is an ECHO transcreation. The ECHO process was developed by the company in 2004. Its aim is the cultural and linguistic transfer of dramatic texts from one nation to another. For the German-speaking version Switch ECHO, the author and translator used the Viennese context to inspire their rewriting of this play. Switch ECHO thus transfers the characters and actions of the original work into the history and culture of its translation. The ECHO work takes its cue from the year in which the American version is set. In 1919, when the automatic switchboard was introduced in New York, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire had died of exhaustion. In wartime Vienna, food had become the make or break of daily life and survival. The Empire had just ended with a fizzle, and the first Republic's old new capital was bursting with hundreds of thousands of refugees from all parts of its former domain. The telephone, however, was thriving. At the beginning of World War I, Austria had sported one of the most extensive telephone systems in Europe. In 1918, while Vienna was at the brink of starvation, the sixth hundred Viennese subscriber joined the network. The ECHO version of Switch Triptych uses these contexts not to add artificial historical colouring to the production, but to unlock the text and infuse it with the stories, obsessions and ramifications of Viennese culture. Jacques Tati's film Playtime and George Lucas' THX-1138 merge with the figures of Maria Theresia, Robert Jentzsch and other elements to inspire Switch ECHO and place its characters and actions into an artificial space at the heart of the modern metropolis. Avoiding all attempts at period patina, Switch ECHO aims at showing a particular moment in the history of the 20th century that is of recurring and lasting significance: the moment in which the dream image of a new technology, along with its real potential, turns into a de-humanising, disobedient force. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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