OOTW2026 Workshop: Beyond Realism: Translating Heightened Theatre Through the Body

Join Out of the Wings on the final day of the 2026 Out of the Wings Festival for a practical two-hour workshop with translator and director Fran Olivares Medina and Chilean playwright Carla Zúñiga, who will join us remotely from Chile.

The workshop will take place at Omnibus Theatre on Saturday, 18 July 2026, from 3pm to 5pm. Register for free here.

This free workshop is aimed at anyone interested in theatre in translation and will explore the challenges of translating and working with heightened theatre language. Speakers of all and any languages are welcome.

Using Zúñiga’s writing as a central case study, we will look at what happens when theatrical meaning lives in words, rhythm, tone, humour, violence, contradiction and the body. How do we translate a line that is funny and brutal at the same time, that is tender and violent? What happens when a word carries cultural, political or gendered weight that has no direct equivalent? And how does a translation shift when it is spoken aloud, tested physically and placed in the actor’s body?

The session will include conversation with the playwright and translator/director, practical work with a short extract, and an embodied exploration of translation choices in performance. It is aimed at theatre translators, playwrights, directors, dramaturgs, performers, students and anyone interested in translating theatre beyond realism. Spanish is welcome but not required, as materials can be provided in both Spanish and English. The workshop is free to attend (register here).

About the Facilitators

Carla Zúñiga (she/her) is one of Chile's most prolific and acclaimed playwrights. She has written more than thirty plays, the majority of which have been staged, and her work has reached audiences across Latin America and Europe. A mentee of the late playwright Juan Radrigán, she writes with biting wit and a feel for the grotesque, putting women, queer lives and the people a society tries to ignore right at the heart of her plays. Her writing has twice been named best new play by Chile's Círculo de Críticos, and her play Yo también quiero ser un hombre blanco heterosexual (I Also Want to be a Heterosexual White Man) received the Ministry of Culture’s prize for the Best Literary Work. She took part in the Royal Court's writers' programme in Chile from 2016 to 2018 and the Next Stage programme at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2019. Her plays have been translated into French, Polish, German and English. The SAD Summers of Princess Diana, translated by Fran Olivares Medina, was published by Methuen Drama in 2025.

Fran Olivares (she/her) is a Chilean director and translator based in London, working across Spanish and English to bring contemporary Latin American writing to UK audiences. She moved to the UK in 2016 for an MFA in Theatre Directing at East 15 Acting School, and her practice joins directing with an embodied, feminist approach to translation. She has translated several plays by the Chilean playwright Carla Zúñiga, including The SAD Summers of Princess Diana, published by Methuen Drama in 2025, with I'd Rather Be Eaten by Dogs and The Rape of a Theatre Actress to follow. Her directing includes The Dream for SPID Theatre and the Latinx Actors UK Showcase at Soho Theatre, and she was assistant director on Julius Caesar at Southwark Playhouse. Fran is a regular collaborator with Out of the Wings, having directed several staged readings at its festivals over the years, and she develops her feminist translation practice through an ongoing collaboration with Dr Sophie Stevens.

Register for the workshop here (free to all).

The workshop is part of the Out of the Wings Festival, which features nightly rehearsed readings of plays in translation at Omnibus, from July 14 to 18, and the Out of the Wings Theatre Translation Forum at King's College London on July 14. For more information, visit ootwfestival.com.

Born out of a collaboration between its co-founders and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s acclaimed Spanish Golden Age season, OOTW has been bringing English translations of theatre from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds to the UK and beyond since 2008.