Rencontre avec Tim Crouch et sa traductrice Catherine Hargreaves
Abstract
This is a transcript of a conversation with British playwright Tim Crouch and French stage director and translator Catherine Hargreaves, on the occasion of two of Crouch’s plays being performed at the Festival d’Avignon in July 2023. The interview took place on July 18, 2023 at the Café des Idées, a venue where debates, conferences, workshops, and radio shows were held during the Festival. The event was co-organised by the research centres EMMA, LERMA and CAS, and the Festival. We were accompanied by an interpreter who translated into French everything that was said in English for the benefit of a French-speaking audience.
We decided not to translate everything into one of the two languages, so as to keep the bilingual quality of the conversation, which is at heart a conversation on bilingualism. We trust our readers will like traveling back and forth between French and English as we did.
Index terms
Keywords:
Festival d’Avignon, Contemporary British theatre, Tim Crouch, Catherine Hargreaves, TranslationAriel's Corner:
TheaterOutline
Top of pageFull text
Websites
1Recording of the conversation: https://festival-avignon.com/fr/audiovisuel/rencontre-avec-tim-crouch-et-sa-traductrice-catherine-hargreaves-347456
2Tim Crouch’s official website: http://www.timcrouchtheatre.co.uk/
3Catherine Hargreaves’s company: https://www.les7soeurs.org/catherine-h
Conversation
4Déborah Prudhon (DP): Tim Crouch (TC) is a British playwright, director and actor. He is performing in two of his plays which are on at the Festival: An Oak Tree which was written in 2005, and his latest play, Truth’s A Dog Must to Kennel (Truth).
5Tim’s first play, My Arm (2003), is currently being performed by Théophile Sclavis as part of the Off Festival, and a reading of Beginners, one of Tim’s plays for young audiences and translated by Catherine, will take place at the Chartreuse d’Avignon next Sunday.
6It is important to underline that Tim has not only written plays for adult audiences, but also plays for young audiences, including the series I, Shakespeare (2012). Each of the 5 plays in the collection is a one-man performance centred around a secondary character from a Shakespeare play.
7Marianne Drugeon (MD) : Catherine Hargreaves (CH) est metteuse en scène et traductrice, membre de la Maison Antoine Vitez, une association qui a pour but de promouvoir la traduction théâtrale et en particulier la traduction de théâtre contemporain depuis une trentaine du langues du monde entier vers le français. Elle a co-traduit avec Adèle Gascuel ses pièces pour la jeunesse, cet ensemble de 5 pièces réunies sous le titre Moi, Shakespeare, publiées à l’Avant-Scène en 2018. Elle a également traduit Beginners, sous le titre Débutant, ainsi que Truth sous le titre À la niche, chienne de vérité, texte publié début juillet 2023, et a fait les surtitres pour le spectacle à Avignon. On notera aussi que d’autres pièces de Tim sont traduites et ont paru en français dans la traduction de Jean-Marc Lantéri : Un Chêne et L’Auteur (2016) ainsi que Mon bras et Adler et Gibb aux Solitaires Intempestifs. Catherine Hargreaves a également mis en scène un certain nombre des pièces de Tim Crouch, raison pour laquelle il a fait appel à elle lorsque deux de ses pièces ont été programmées à Avignon, afin qu’elle en produise le sur-titrage. C’est l’occasion de redire l’importance du travail au plateau : il faut appréhender les pièces de Tim sur la scène afin de les comprendre et de les traduire.
Première partie : Discussion avec Tim Crouch
DP: All your work – for adults and young audiences – appears as a reflection on and a celebration of theatricality. You explore in particular the relationship between the stage and the audience. As your plays are staged in Avignon for the first time, and as you perform in two of them, how is this relationship you experience with the audience here different to the UK and elsewhere?
TC: I will answer the last question first, about the experience of performing in front of a French audience. This question is asked often because I tour internationally and I usually say that every audience is different regardless of what country I am in. And my intention, I suppose, is to meet the people who are in the room and not to walk on stage with a preconception of who those people are. But having said that, I think there is a quality in a French audience that I enjoy greatly, which is a respect and an engagement with ideology, with ideas, which I see at different levels as I travel internationally. In the UK we are not very amenable to theatre of ideas, but it feels like in France there is an understanding of philosophy – I think theatre is an idea in action. I mean, even if it is a piece of naturalism, there is still a profound idea there, but I think the English audiences forget that and don’t go deeper into what they watch. I feel like something deeper is happening here.
You said that my work is a celebration of theatricality; I actually feel like it is in opposition to an idea of theatricality. I think in Truth, there is the model of another play, another production that is taking place inside my production. In An Oak Tree, the presence of an actor who doesn’t know the play is a kind of opposition to the rigorously predetermined nature of a lot of theatre that I see in the UK and which I kind of want to challenge. It is subtle because I don’t want to make propaganda. You know, I don’t want to make a heavy-handed ideological work, and so I rely upon narrative, and I think I rely upon emotion, to make the ideas more digestible, if that makes sense. To enter an audience more successfully, it needs to operate not just in the head, but also in the body and in the heart.
But it is also a celebration, I think it is important to say it. A celebration of what I think is the unique quality of theatricality really. We (myself and one of my co-directors) were commissioned once to write a book, and the title of that book was going to be Theatreness. What is the “theatreness” of the work? And I think “theatreness” is not around spectacle, but it is around a kind of conceptual engagement with an audience, where transformation takes place, but it takes place à deux, instead of just on a predetermined transformation on the stage.
DP: One of the key features of your work is that it really carves a place for the audience and the spectators are asked to actively and imaginatively contribute to the play: could you expand on that?
TC: One of the inspirations of Truth is a scene in King Lear which I hold as the apogee of theatrical exchange: it is a son engaging with his blind father’s imagination to convince his blind father that he is at the edge of a cliff and that, if he steps forward, he will kill himself. This is an act of imagination that takes us past despair and back again. So imagination is profoundly important in the work and you cannot engage in imagination without an engagement with the person you are inviting to imagine with you. Theatre is an act of collective imagining, I think; it needs to be. And there is a danger that theatre – more mainstream or traditional theatre – has done all the imagining already, before the audience arrive. So I try and make a work that is open to an audience’s imagination by leaving as much undone as I possibly can.
I am not usually inviting audience members up onto the stage; it is not that kind of participation. I think the word that I cling to in my work is the thought of the audience as an audience, which is an audience who is a listening entity. And so the imagination to some degree enters the ears. So I invite the audience to listen, and to be present in listening. Listening is great. If you are genuinely listening, you are only here in the moment. You know, you can’t be thinking back or thinking forward, you are present. And if an audience doesn’t listen, I will do everything I can to help them listen. Because listening is an old art, an ancient art, so I am trying to encourage the art of listening back into the theatre.
MD : Si je peux juste rebondir et commencer à parler traduction, une toute petite parenthèse : c’est intéressant de remarquer qu’en anglais le terme privilégié est ‘audience’ et qu’on s’adresse donc à l’oreille des spectateurs, alors qu’en français le spectateur est là pour voir. C’est peut-être une différence entre deux façons d’envisager le théâtre.
TC: I don’t know if there is a cultural difference or a national difference in terms of how a French audience “sees” a play. In Shakespeare’s plays the invitation was to “hear” a play, and I am sure that would have been the case in that same period here, perhaps, and I don’t know when the separation took place between seeing and hearing. I do also need an audience to see, but what I am enjoying in my work is presenting a contradiction between what the audience sees with their eyes and what they see with their ears. Otherwise, it would be radio, or a podcast, or a theatre in the dark. These things exist, but I think in theatre there is the interplay between the visual and the aural.
DP: Not only do you write plays, you also stage them, and you act in some of them – which is the case for An Oak Tree and Truth. What strikes me as a spectator is that, often, you embody tyrannical characters. This is the case in An Oak Tree, in which the character of the Hypnotist is a controlling figure, at times cruel towards the father. It is also the case in The Author (2010), in which you embody a fictional abusive Tim Crouch, and in Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation (2019), in which you play an oppressive guru. Your plays are full of figures of authors and authoritarian characters, and yet they still manage to empower the audience. So, is this a paradox?
TC: I find it strange that it is unusual that there should be a writer who also performs in their work. There has been – or maybe there always was – an understanding of a separation between the creative inceptor and the interpreter. This is a journey that usually happens in a rehearsal process, where the inceptor (the author) sits with the director who then helps the actors understand how to interpret the inceptor’s idea. It feels like it takes a long time, and it is much easier to reduce that journey by having the inceptor also be the interpreter. We are playwrights, we are not fiction writers. We are writing not fiction or literature but we are writing into the idea of a performance, and so I find it easier as a writer to envisage this. When I write, I think into the moment of transmission between the performance and the audience.
And then I would also like to talk about the idea of authority. Because to some degree an audience historically is subdued, and I want to challenge the subjugation of the audience, and for that challenge to take place I place images or ideas of authority on the stage for them to be challenged and abused and dismantled.
CH : Cela nous aide à récupérer du pouvoir en tant que spectateur en mettant de la distance, parce qu’il n’est pas forcément sympathique, le type qui est en train de rentrer dans notre tête aussi. En créant des personnages peu sympathiques Tim met une distance, donc on devient maître de ce qui peut se passer dans notre tête.
TC: In this traditionally liberal milieu, there is abuse, and we forget that – abuse in rehearsal, in casting, in how the actors are treated, in how the audience is treated as well as in terms of entering the exchange. It is not separate to life, it is part of life, and all the problems in life are also the problems in art. So I want to try and have the audience understand that this is not a separation, this is also part of you. So the difficulties exist in here, and exist in you, in us. It is super important for me.
In The Author I play a character called Tim Crouch and he is hugely abusive, not only to the actors that he works with, but also to the audience for whom he makes his work. But also in The Author I am the writer who wrote the play, who is submitting you to listening to the play, to being in the play.
I also wanted to respond to the suggestion that the Hypnotist in An Oak Tree is abusive and controlling: yes, I take an actor through the play. I, to some degree, control the actor’s journey through the play. But I think I am less controlling than in traditional theatre where this controlling process is taking place in rehearsal and then when it is presented to an audience, it is perceived to be an act of spontaneity.
The Hypnotist in the narrative of the play is a broken man, he has no authority. He thinks he is being abused, and his response to this thought is to abuse back. So yes, in the fiction he attacks someone who he thinks is attacking him. I think it is clear to the audience why this is happening. I don’t think the character of the Hypnotist is innately an overwhelming and domineering character. And I hope that Tim Crouch in An Oak Tree is not an overwhelming and domineering author to the second actor in the play.
DP: So you make the controlling process visible to the public.
TC: Yes, completely, because usually it is a process of subterfuge, and I am trying to make everything visible.
DP: Truth is a play that you wrote out of the pandemic and the various lockdowns. It feels like a eulogy addressed to a dead theatre, and yet there is hope as well, as it reaffirms the pleasure of being gathered in the same place and time. It feels like a celebration of liveness.
TC: There is an image of deadness in Truth, which is the blinding that takes place with the performer wearing a virtual reality headset, and for me this is the antipathy to liveness, and the antipathy to community, because we place these objects on our eyes and we go into a private world. My sense with theatre is that it is a public world, that we all contribute our responses to, so I use this as a kind of image for the death of theatre. There is nothing in those headsets that I wear. It is a trick to some degree, although I take it off and I show that there is nothing; I say there is nothing. But I don’t also say that I can see out of it, because I am working a conceit in the play, and I need to give only so much information and not necessarily everything – this is the game in the play.
The headset goes on and inside the headset there is another production taking place, a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. And for me this is the model of a dead production, partly because in the course of the narration of this other production, a member of that audience suffers an immense chaos and the art does not incorporate it, it sits separately from that. There is a moment of great tragedy that takes place in the audience, there is tragedy in King Lear, but it is understood that the tragedy in King Lear is more important than the tragedy that takes place in the community of its audience and this is problematic for me.
It feels like I am always trying to make work that we can meet, that the audience can look at from a distance. This is a good thing for me because then it generates a kind of critical relationship with what we look at. That is definitely happening in Truth, and then there are moments when I engage directly with the audience, and there is a sequence at the end when the headset is gone, the microphone is gone and I just talk directly to you: trying to remove these layers of mediation so that when we have an exchange, it is unimpeded, unmediated.
DP: I would like to go back to the place of Shakespeare in your plays and your interest in characters from the margins. In Truth, as you said, you embody the character of the fool who has decided to leave the performance of King Lear. And the series I, Shakespeare revolves around secondary characters. Why are you exploring Shakespeare in this way? What is it that interests you about Shakespeare and his role in British culture? And do you think it has spoken differently to a French audience?
TC: There is a kind of unquestionable cultural capital in Shakespeare which I want to shake and challenge. Not challenging Shakespeare himself but challenging how he has become such a central immovable force in the culture and how we think about drama and how we process the structure of plays. We are still, 430 years later, thinking we need to write plays like Shakespeare wrote plays. It is no criticism of Shakespeare because he was doing his thing then, but it feels like there is like a leash on us that keeps us bound to Shakespeare in an unhelpful way. This is particularly true for young people. There is a heavy Shakespeare wall that exists in the UK, and maybe also in other countries as well. Having toured those pieces, there are countries that kind of lionize Shakespeare as the cultural apogee. He is a genius, it is incredible what he does, but I think it can be damaging if we become too subservient to his genius. In the same way that I feel about virtuoso actors, stars, celebrities, it becomes about capital, and not about the live relationship of the moment. You bring too much to it and I want to remove those preconceptions. I don’t think you can ignore him, because I think he generated an idea of being human that still influences our understanding of humanity now. There was the beginning of a movement away from a religious-based dramaturgy into a sense of non-celestial motivations in characters. For young people, it is a good thing to understand that connection, understand that it relates to how we think about ourselves now, and why.
You are very lucky because you only have Shakespeare in translation, genuinely! In the UK it is a terrifying archaic language which, in some areas of theatre culture, people believe it shouldn’t be changed, it should be held as it is, that our job is to honour it at every moment, and I think that is very damaging. And what happens with translation is that there is a contemporaneity into the language. Even if you still attempt to honour the archaic language, you are doing it form a contemporary stance. That does not happen in the UK and it is problematic.
Deuxième partie : Discussion avec Catherine Hargreaves
MD : Shakespeare a été traduit à de multiples reprises, et toute la question de remettre constamment sur le métier la traduction est pour moi la transition toute trouvée pour poser une première question à Catherine : vous avez traduit le texte de Truth en vue d’une publication, mais vous avez également produit les surtitres français de cette pièce. De même, An Oak Tree était déjà traduite et publiée par Jean-Marc Lantéri, mais vous en avez créé les surtitres à l’occasion de la programmation de cette pièce au festival. Avez-vous des exemples précis de la façon dont traduire pour des surtitres a représenté une difficulté supplémentaire, d’ordre technique, concernant l’ordre des mots, la longueur des phrases, le moment où lancer les répliques, en termes, aussi, d’organisation de l’espace pour disposer les écrans ?
- 1 Les représentations de An Oak Tree ont eu lieu dans le Cloître des Célestins, lieu classé, dont on (...)
CH : La disposition de l’écran c’est quelque chose qu’on a vu avec Tim qui a déplacé l’écran pour An Oak Tree. C’est un théâtre de l’oreille mais il est aussi indissociable du visuel, et si l’on est tout le temps en train de regarder l’écran en hauteur on rate tout parce qu’il y a chez Tim une science du moment. Il déplie un moment qui peut paraître très simple mais il arrive à rentrer dans l’atome de ce moment, et il faut que l’on soit vraiment avec le comédien : si l’on perd une seule seconde on passe à côté. Donc on a enlevé l’écran pour An Oak Tree et on a projeté sur les arcs1 parce qu’on ne pouvait pas accrocher un écran plus bas car c’est un monument historique.
MD : Qu’en est-il du topage, l’action de lancer les répliques au fur et à mesure ? Cela demande un rythme très particulier, surtout avec un acteur différent chaque soir, qui découvre le texte.
CH : Pour An Oak Tree ce n’est jamais le même rythme puisque c’est un comédien différent chaque soir donc il faut être présent. Les moments où l’on va anticiper, ou bien envoyer trop tard, font que c’est un art vivant. Mais il n’y a pas eu un soir où je n’ai changé les surtitres pour le lendemain : je change le rythme, c’est comme lorsque je mets en scène ses pièces, j’écoute le public aussi parce qu’il intervient extrêmement fort par son écoute, cela change ma perception, et cela me conduit à couper les phrases différemment.
Comme Tim travaille beaucoup à ce que le pouvoir soit partagé de façon égale, si on envoie les surtitres exactement au moment où Tim commence à parler, on donne un pouvoir et une connaissance supplémentaires au spectateur puisque les surtitres dévoilent plus rapidement la suite du texte, donc j’essaie de décaler un petit peu, quitte à ce que l’on pense que je suis en retard. C’est comme chez Shakespeare, les spectateurs anglais disent qu’ils comprennent 70% des textes, et cela passe par l’oreille, il y a un sens conféré par le rythme, et Tim a un rapport au rythme et aux sonorités de la langue anglaise qui envoie du sens par les sens et pas par l’intellect. Si j’abîme cela en envoyant les surtitres trop tôt, on passe à côté.
Des exemples très simples : les Français genrent les termes avec « la » et « le », et donc lorsque Tim écrit « this director », « this chancer », on peut imaginer un homme ou une femme, mais on est obligé de choisir en français. Quand un comédien dit sur scène « cet opportuniste » on peut imaginer « cet » ou « cette », mais si je l’écris en tant que sur-titre, et je n’ai pas eu le droit d’utiliser l’écriture inclusive, je suis obligée de choisir et d’imposer au spectateur un homme ou une femme dans son imaginaire.
MD : Je voudrais partager ici ma propre expérience de spectatrice de Un chêne joué en français à Paris il y a quelques années et de An Oak Tree, joué en anglais avec les surtitres à Avignon. Même si, lorsque j’avais vu la pièce en français, j’avais entendu le comédien dire au début que tout était écrit, que rien n’était improvisé, je pouvais ne pas le croire, je pouvais imaginer qu’à un moment, l’acteur qui découvrait le texte ce jour-là allait prendre de l’initiative et réécrire quelque chose. Avec les surtitres je réalisais constamment que tout était effectivement écrit et cela changeait mon rapport au texte et à la représentation.
CH : Effectivement, au début de An Oak Tree, Tim dit « Everything is scripted ». En tant que spectatrice j’ai fait la même expérience : on oublie, et on se demande si tout a été écrit. Au départ j’ai tout traduit puis j’en ai parlé avec Tim et Karl James, le metteur en scène, au bout de 3 ou 4 représentations en proposant de ne pas traduire certaines choses pour que le public se demande si c’était vrai ou pas, pour laisser planer le doute.
Je voudrais faire une autre remarque, sur le tutoiement et le vouvoiement : il n’y a que le « tu » en anglais, et donc on ne sait pas si c’est l’hypnotiseur ou si c’est Tim qui s’adresse à l’acteur ou au père. C’est très troublant dans le texte original : dans les surtitres, j’ai alterné entre le « tu » et le « vous » selon les différents rapports entre les personnages, pour garder ce trouble.
TC: There is an element of ambiguity in the work, between me and the Hypnotist and the Father and the second actor, particularly when the second actor is female and the character is male. There are other plays, like Beginners, where I invite the audience to think that the characters are adults, and then gradually you understand that they are not adults, they are children. But they are children who are initially performing in a very adult way. And maybe in English there is a greater possibility for this ambivalence than there is in French.
CH : La façon d’écrire de Tim est très précise, elle se fait par petites touches, petit à petit, pour laisser une certaine liberté au spectateur. C’est très dur de retrouver cela en français parce que le français détermine très rapidement ce que l’on voit. Il faut trouver comment rester dans le flou sans être dans le général, et avancer petit à petit. C’est parfois un choix de terme, parfois un choix d’ordre des mots.
Dans Truth on m’a dit que je ne pouvais pas mettre « cet ouvreur, cette opportuniste etc », que ce n’était pas naturel, qu’il fallait utiliser des articles définis, « l’ouvreur »... Mais même en anglais ce n’est pas si naturel, c’est bien le démonstratif qu’il fallait conserver !
TC: This is the great skill of the translator, not to literally translate but to understand what the author is attempting and make a French version of that attempt.
MD : Nous souhaitions montrer, à l’occasion de cette rencontre, à quel point le travail de traduction et le travail de mise en scène allaient de pair. Je voulais aussi revenir sur les échanges et discussions qui ont eu lieu autour de la traduction du titre Truth, cette fameuse référence au Roi Lear, qui n’est peut-être pas si transparente pour un public britannique : qu’en fait-on en français, peut-on revenir rapidement sur les différents titres qui ont été envisagés, et sur les critères de choix qui vous ont guidée ?
CH : Je voulais aussi parler des surtitreurs : c’est un métier que j’ai découvert et qui est vraiment sous-évalué. Ce sont des heures et des heures de travail. Je voulais d’ailleurs mentionner le surtitrage de All Of It : c’est un vrai travail d’écriture et de création.
Pour ce qui est du titre, on a beaucoup discuté avec Tim, échangé au sein du comité anglais de la Maison Antoine Vitez : à quel point fallait-il conserver le fait que c’était une référence shakespearienne ? Tim m’a répondu que ce n’était pas du tout nécessaire puisque beaucoup d’Anglais ne sauraient pas qu’il s’agit d’une citation du Roi Lear. Ensuite, c’est un titre très long : fallait-il le conserver ainsi ? J’ai commencé par chercher les traductions de ce vers par différents traducteurs de Shakespeare, dont cela donnait « La vérité est un chien que l’on renvoie à la niche », avec un certain nombre de variations. J’ai ensuite proposé à Tim « À la niche, la vérité ! », ce qui lui plaisait beaucoup, puis j’ai ajouté « À la niche, chienne de vérité », qui d’ailleurs était l’une des traductions de la citation de Shakespeare. Le terme « chienne » veut aussi dire, comme « bitch » en anglais, plusieurs choses en français. Quoi qu’il arrive en traduction on doit trahir en choisissant.
8We would like to thank the Festival d’Avignon, our research centers CAS (Toulouse Jean-Jaurès), EMMA (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) and LERMA (Université Aix-Marseille) for making that meeting possible, and our special thanks to Catherine Hargreaves and Tim Crouch for their enthusiasm and their thought-provoking dialogue.
Notes
1 Les représentations de An Oak Tree ont eu lieu dans le Cloître des Célestins, lieu classé, dont on peut voir une photographie sur le site du festival : https://festival-avignon.com/fr/lieux/cloitre-des-celestins-36634.
Top of pageReferences
Electronic reference
Marianne Drugeon and Déborah Prudhon, “Rencontre avec Tim Crouch et sa traductrice Catherine Hargreaves”, Miranda [Online], 28 | 2023, Online since 19 October 2023, connection on 20 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/57541; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.57541
Top of pageCopyright
The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.
Top of page

