Between Tradaption and Adaptation: Glocal Imaginaries in British Asian Drama

Abstract

In the context of British Asian theatre and the search for a diasporic theatre aesthetics the practice of adaptation has emerged as a recurring feature. Over the last decades, British Asian theatre has sought to create a language of the theatre that can reflect the cultural heritage of Asians in Britain; this search has taken different directions testified also by the plurality of voices that today make up British Asian theatre and has responded to the need to challenge the conceptual binary of British and Asian, aiming to affirm South Asian culture on the stage as an integral part of British culture. Adaptation also plays a role in highlighting the dialectic between local and the global particularly in those cases where regions of Britain such as the Northwest of England can be recreated on stage as South Asian British cultural spaces. After tracing Tara Arts’s pioneering journey from adaptation to tradaptation, we will examine two British Asian plays that are adaptations of English plays which belong to a tradition of playwriting located in the social and cultural life of the Northwest of England and which are given a new life or an afterlife in translations.