It is not, I think, a coincidence that the contemporary English stage, where so many of the new plays are so deeply concerned with problems of communication, is in some measure a translator's theatre, steadily giving us new translations – or ‘versions’, or ‘adaptations’ – of old classics. It is more than a coincidence when No Man's Land and a new English version of John Gabriel Borkman appear side by side in the National Theatre repertoire, as they did both at the Old Vic in 1975 and in the Lyttelton in 1976. For, as we follow the pattern of intimacy or (more often) mutual incomprehension traced by a Pinter dialogue, or as with Osborne we watch the English language come down, we are made forcibly aware that any verbal interchange involves each speaker in acts of translation. Or, as George Steiner puts it in a book which also appeared in 1975, ‘whether inside or between languages, human communication equals translation’. There is of course a sense in which any director of any play is a translator who, by the time the play is put before an audience, has searched for and found a theatrical language – verbal and non-verbal – to convey to the audience his vision of the play. But it is remarkable how often, recently, directors have themselves turned translators in the more orthodox sense, driven back to the original by a sense of the importance of the text.