Chapter 2 considers the limits of performance translation, drawing from the author’s experiences working with three internationally acclaimed Argentinian theatre artists. The chapter first examines the potential “over-translatedness” of Claudio Tolcachir’s global sensation, La omisión de la familia Coleman (The Coleman Family’s Omission), in which audience identification seemingly transcends cultural difference and risks “over-translatability.” Considerations of the “local” underscore the translational limitations of “American realism” and challenges in staging plays bearing a culturally bound performance style for which there is no obvious US or UK equivalent. A case in point is the grotesco criollo, a tragicomic genre and acting style developed in 1920s Buenos Aires and still informing local theatre making. To illustrate, the chapter discusses the author’s and Rafael Spregelburd’s collaborative search for countering anticipated “under-translatedness” when bringing his plays to US stages. At the same time, the “untranslatable” can function as a productive performance strategy, thus the chapter concludes with an examination of Lola Arias’s Campo minado/Minefield, in which three Argentinian and three British ex-combatants reenact their 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War experiences. While translation is built into the multilingual production through projected supertitles, the untranslatable asserts itself at nearly the play’s end in a provocative moment of untranslatability.

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.