Uruguayan Plays in Translation: Two Events in March

Section from the cover of The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays designed by Megan Wilson

Following the recent publication of The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays, two events in London this March will invite translators, theatre-makers, researchers and anyone with an interest in creativity across languages and cultures to explore and respond to the six plays in the anthology. 

On March 6 at Senate House, Creative Practice and Collaboration: Giving to Gain will take these contemporary Uruguayan plays as one of its starting points for an afternoon of creative collaboration to celebrate International Women’s Day, while on March 13 at Omnibus Theatre, Out of the Wings: Plays from Uruguay will share readings from all six plays, followed by a discussion of Uruguayan theatre today and its journeys to the English-speaking world. 

Both events are free to attend. See below for more details about each of them.

The plays featured are: Ana Versus Death by Gabriel Calderón, translated by Stephen Brown; They All Sleep at Siesta Time by Leonor Courtoisie, translated by William Gregory; Basic Principles for the Construction of Bridges by Jimena Márquez, translated by Catherine Boyle; Prelude to Anne by Sandra Massera, translated by Rachel Toogood; I Will Give You Verses, Not Children by Marianella Morena, translated by Kate Eaton, and Emotional Terror by Josefina Trías, translated by Sophie Stevens.

Creative Practice and Collaboration: Giving to Gain

Senate House, London, 1pm, Friday March 6 2026

FREE TO ATTEND, BOOK HERE

Creative Practice and Collaboration: Giving to Gain will celebrate International Women’s Day 2026 by bringing together researchers, practitioners and translators to explore and share methodologies for collaboration between academics and creative practitioners. 

The event consists of three elements: a translation and creative writing workshop, a roundtable discussion on empowerment and self-representation in film, and a reading and discussion to share new work in translation. The six works in translation from The Methuen Drama Book of Contemporary Uruguayan Plays will be the starting point for several of the afternoon’s activities.

The event is free to attend but please book in advance at this link, where you can also find full details of the programme. A small amount of funding has been allocated for freelance translators, actors and creative practitioners to cover expenses and/or lost earnings due to attending this event. Please contact the event organiser about this, or about any other queries: sophie.stevens@sas.ac.uk.

The event is hosted by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies and is supported by funding from the The John Coffin Memorial Fund.

Out of the Wings: Plays from Uruguay

Omnibus Theatre, 7:30pm, Friday 13 March 2026

FREE TO ATTEND: BOOK HERE

Join Out of the Wings at Omnibus Theatre, Clapham, for Plays from Uruguay, an encounter with contemporary Uruguayan playwriting. 

Plays from Uruguay will present rehearsed readings of extracts, in English translation, of six Uruguayan plays, by writers whose work has won widespread recognition at home and beyond Uruguay’s borders. Rooted in their experiences in Uruguay, while also looking out to the world beyond, their plays encompass styles ranging from realism to autofiction, and engage with themes including the challenges of parenthood, the search for identity, the legacies of Uruguay's literary giants, the processes and risks of making art, the limits between fiction and reality, and violence against women in contemporary society.

The extracts will be followed by a panel discussion, chaired by Dr. Jozefina Komporaly (University of the Arts, London) on Uruguayan playwriting today, its place in the English-speaking theatre landscape, and the role of publications like the Bloomsbury anthology in the journeys of plays across borders and onto stages, syllabuses, and bookshelves.

Tickets to Plays from Uruguay are free of charge, but please book in advance online at this link. The event has been made possible thanks to support from the Baroness von Schlippenbach endowment.

Featured Artists and Contributors

Playwrights

Gabriel Calderón is a playwright, director and actor. He has written over 30 plays and has twice received the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture National Literature Award. His plays have been translated into French, German, English, Italian, Catalan, Greek and Portuguese. In 2022, Ana contra la muerte won the Florencio Awards for Best Production, Best Direction, Best Leading Actress and Best Supporting Actress. In recent years he has worked increasingly in Europe, with productions at the Théâtre des Quartiers d’Ivry (Paris), and becoming the first Uruguayan playwright to have productions at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona) and the Teatro Nazionale di Modena (Modena, Italy). He has been the Director of the Instituto Nacional de Artes Escénicas (National Performing Arts Institute), Director of the Executive Office for the Uruguay Bicentenary, and Coordinator of University Programmes in Playwriting at the Universidad de la República, the state university of Uruguay. Between 2022 and 2025 he held the role of Artistic and Managing Director of the Comedia Nacional, the national theatre company of Uruguay.

Leonor Courtoisie is a theatre artist and writer. She is a graduate of the Escuela Multidisciplinaria de Arte Dramático Margarita Xirgu and the Universidad de la República, Montevideo, where she completed a BA in Playwriting, and of the Diploma in Creative Writing at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 2019 she received the Premio Molière, awarded by the French Embassy in Uruguay. She was resident at the Cité International des Arts, Paris, in 2022, and has been a member since 2019 of the Directors Lab at the Lincoln Center, New York. Her credits as a playwright and director include Estudio para La mujer desnuda (Study for The Naked Woman, Comedia Nacional, Montevideo, 2022) and Casi sin pedir permiso (Almost without Asking Permission, Montevideo, 2019), among others. Her published works include the play Corte de obsidiana (Obsidian Cut, 2017), the poetry collection Todas esas cosas siguen vivas (All Those Things are Still Alive, 2020), and the novel Irse yendo (Leave, Going, 2021).

Jimena Márquez is a standout figure in Uruguayan theatre. A professor of literature, playwright and theatre director, she has received numerous awards throughout her career. In 2022, she won the Florencio Award for Best Solo Performance by an Actress for her own play, El desmontaje (The Deconstruction). In 2019, she received the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture National Literature Award for La sospechosa puntualidad de la casualidad (The Suspicious Punctuality of Chance) produced in 2017 by the Comedia Nacional. She has directed and written over 15 plays and represented Uruguay at numerous international festivals. She has directed plays on four occasions for the Comedia Nacional and has staged performances for the Montevideo Symphonic Band and for the Montevideo Philharmonic Orchestra. She has written for the Uruguay Carnival since 2008 and was voted as one of the Carnival’s People of the Year in 2022. She has taught at numerous educational establishments and currently runs Teatro en el Aula (Theatre in the Classroom), a programme of theatre for young people run by the regional government of Montevideo. She is a columnist for the national newspaper, La Diaria.

Sandra Massera is an actor, playwright, educator, and theatre director. She has directed numerous plays and one opera: Rashomon. The writer of 32 plays and the libretti for four operas, she has been the recipient of Uruguay’s major playwriting awards including the Florencio Award for Best Playwright on a number of occasions, the Ministry of Education and Culture National Literature Awards, the Juan Carlos Onetti Literary Awards, the COFONTE (National Theatre Foundation Commission) Award, the Museo Vivo del Títere (Living Puppet Museum) Award, the Centro Cultural de España (Cultural Centre of Spain) Award, and the FEFCA (Fund for the Promotion of Artistic Creation and Training) Award for Artistic Excellence. Her plays have been produced, translated and published in countries including Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and France. She is the founder, director and producer of the theatre company Teatro del Umbral, a team of artists who for over 25 years have represented Uruguay at international festivals, round tables, and masterclasses in several countries in Europe and the Americas.

Marianella Morena is one of Uruguay’s most internationally successful theatre artists, whose work has been produced throughout Latin America and Europe. Her many international awards include the Premio Molière (awarded by the French Embassy in Uruguay), the Centro Cultural de España (Cultural Centre of Spain) Award, and the University of Buenos Aires Award (Argentina). Writer of over 30 plays to date, her works include Don Juan, El lugar del beso (Don Juan, The Place of the Kiss), Las Julietas (The Juliets), Antígona Oriental (Eastern Antigone, staged with an on-stage chorus of 20 former political prisoners), No daré hijos, daré versos (I Will Give You Verses, Not Children), Ella sobre Ella (Her on Her), Bicentenaria (Bicentenary, an intervention staged by 200 women in the public square in Lima, Peru), and Naturaleza Trans (Trans Nature, a documentary piece featuring trans women from the Uruguay-Brazil border). Published in several countries, she was in March 2024 the first-ever Latin American artist to direct at the Suomen Kansallisteatteri (Finnish National Theatre, Helsinki). As an artivist, she stages performative interventions in public spaces to call out social injustices in relation to the environment, femicide, and the sexual exploitation of minors.

Josefina Trías is an actor and playwright. She trained as an actor at the Instituto de Actuación de Montevideo (Montevideo Institute of Acting) and has performed in more than 25 plays. She is Programme Manager of the Las Piedras Cultural Centre in Comuna Canaria. Her play Terrorismo emocional (Emotional Terror) has had over 124 performances in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. In 2020, the script won the Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture National Literature Award. In 2018, she received the Florencio Award for Best Solo Performance for her role as the protagonist, Clara. In 2021, she premiered Llamaste a Walter (You Called Walter), a prequel to Terrorismo emocional which won third prize in the 2022 Uruguayan Ministry of Education and Culture National Literature Awards. Her work as a screenwriter includes the short film El mundo se ha terminado (The World Has Ended) supported by the audiovisual production fund of the Instituto Nacional de Artes Escénicas (National Performing Arts Institute), Tiempo de Amigas (Time for Friends) and, as co-writer, the second season of Encierro Demente (Crazy Lockdown).

Translators

Catherine Boyle is Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at King’s College London. She was a co-founder of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. She is the director of the Ibero-American theatre and translation collective, Out of the Wings. She is a translator of Spanish and Spanish American theatre and poetry. Her translations have been performed internationally and she has published widely on questions of Latin American cultural and gender studies and translation. She is the Director of the Centre for Language Acts and Worldmaking which is dedicated to regenerating and transforming approaches to teaching and research in Modern Languages.

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Stephen Brown translates from German, French and Spanish into English and completed the MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia with Distinction. He is interested in translating contemporary fiction, including theatre plays, as well as non-fiction. His translation of Luis Edoardo Torres’s play On the Edge (En la margen del río) was performed at the 2022 Out of the Wings festival (Omnibus Theatre, London) and published in 2023 by Inti Press. He currently translates alongside his full-time job as a technology manager for a London-based charity.

Kate Eaton is a UK-based literary translator, theatre practitioner and researcher. She has been a member of the Ibero-American theatre and translation collective, Out of the Wings, since 2016, and has translated a wide variety of plays from Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, and Spain amongst other countries, including multiple works by the renowned twentieth-century Cuban playwright Virgilio Piñera. She holds an MA in Literary Translation from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in Collaborative Translation Practices and Cuban Theatre from Queen Mary, University of London. She participated as a translator on the 2022-24 Royal Court-Autonomous University of Mexico new playwriting project, and is currently co-editing an anthology of Cuban and diasporic adaptations of Ancient Greek theatre.

Productions of William Gregory’s translations include A Fight Against… by Pablo Manzi (Royal Court, London), B by Guillermo Calderón (Royal Court), The Bit-Players by José Sanchis Sinisterra (Southwark Playhouse, London), Cuzco by Víctor Sánchez Rodríguez (Theatre503, London), and Chamaco by Abel González Melo (HOME, Manchester). A Visiting Research Associate at King’s College London, he was Translator in Residence at the British Centre for Literary Translation and a finalist in the Valle-Inclán Award for The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Plays. Other publications of his translations include Selected Plays by Cuban Playwright Abel González Melo (Methuen), The Children of Taltal by Bosco Israel Cayo Álvarez (Laertes), The Uncapturable by Rubén Szuchmacher (Methuen), The Widow of Apablaza by Germán Luco Cruchaga (Inti), An American Life by Lucía Carballal (Antígona), and contributions to Mexican Plays (Nick Hern) and The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Argentinian Plays. He is a member of the Ibero-American theatre and translation collective, Out of the Wings, and in July 2024 joined the artistic team of the Orange Tree Theatre, London, as Literary Associate.

Sophie Stevens is Senior Lecturer in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London, where she specialises in Latin American theatre, performance, activism and translation. She has previously worked at the University of East Anglia in collaboration with the British Centre for Literary Translation, where she held a prestigious Leverhulme Fellowship, and King’s College London where she also completed her PhD. Her book Uruguayan Theatre in Translation: Theory and Practice was published in 2022 by Legenda and includes three stage-ready translations alongside chapters of analysis. Her translations have been published by The Mercurian: A Theatrical Translation Review and Inti Press. She is a member of the Ibero-American theatre and translation collective, Out of the Wings, and her translations have been presented in London at the Royal Court Theatre (2024), Barons Court Theatre (2022, 2023, 2024), Omnibus Theatre (2019, 2021, 2022, 2023), Cervantes Theatre (2017) and Southwark Playhouse (2017).

Rachel Toogood is a freelance producer and translator. She has translated two plays by Laura Rubio Galletero: Shopping Centre Paradise was featured at the 2021 Out of the Wings festival (Omnibus Theatre, London) and later published by Inti Press; The Glass Ceiling: Anne & Sylvia was published by Estreno Contemporary Spanish Plays (Pace University, USA). Her other translations include La Distancia for the theatre company La Société de la Mouffette (Spain) and, forthcoming, a Cuban reimagining of The Bacchae by Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten. Her other translation projects include working with Manchester International Festival and Jewish Book Week, and translating the lyrics of the Cuban singer and dancer Omara Portuondo. She is the co-translator of Rongo, The Forgotten Story of Easter Island by Patricia Štambuk. As a producer Rachel has worked on several translation projects for theatre companies such as the Royal Court, Foreign Affairs, Modern Culture and Performing International Plays. She is a member of the Ibero-American theatre and translation collective, Out of the Wings.

Chairs and Moderators

Jozefina Komporaly is Reader in Performance & Dramaturgy at the University of the Arts London and a literary translator from Hungarian and Romanian. She is editor and co-translator of the drama collections How to Explain the History of Communism to Mental Patients and Other Plays (Seagull, 2015), András Visky’s Barrack Dramaturgy (Intellect, 2017) and Plays from Romania: Dramaturgies of Subversion (Bloomsbury, 2021), and author of numerous publications on translation, adaptation and theatre, including the monographs Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights, 1956 to the Present (Palgrave, 2007) and Radical Revival as Adaptation: Theatre, Politics, Society (Palgrave, 2017). Her translations were produced by Foreign Affairs, Trap Door, Theatre Y, Trafika Europe Radio, Menagerie Theatre, and were among the finalists for the EBRD Literature Prize, longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and recipients of the PEN Translates Grant. She is a member of the UK Translators Association. Website: https://jozefinakomporaly.com/