Play: Hamlet Double Bill
The challenge of surtitling a Shakespeare out of joint
Hamlet Double Bill is La Ribalta Teatro's deconstruction of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The Italian-British company won the ESFN ShakeSphere 2024 and performed the piece at Teatre La Biblioteca (La Perla 29) as part of the Preludi Edition of Festival Shakespeare Barcelona 2025. Both acts (The Play's The Thing and The Rest is Silence) take their titles from direct quotes in the original.
What isn't visible from the outside: the production reconstructs the classic almost word for word, combining verse from distant acts and scenes. A three-line passage can draw from Act II, Act I and Act V. Every fragment carries the weight of the context it comes from. Translating the text means understanding its full backdrop.
The first phase was immersion: identifying the seams of the deconstruction, tracing each line back to its source in Shakespeare, and making translation decisions independently. On the technical side, I used Glypheo and QLab to the specifications of the La Perla 29 team.
The company was foreign and the show had a single run: no prior rehearsals. On the morning of the performance I noted the divergences between the recording I was provided with as a reference and the live staging; at the second rehearsal I stepped in to adjust the surtitles. Adrian Hughes, Alberto Ierardi and Giorgio Vierda —actors, directors and text authors in one— brought me in as a full member of the team: during rehearsals they were kind enough to suggest changing their lines to match the way I had them in the surtitles. I told them that was out of the question: my job was to get the production to the audience the way they had conceived it.
My job was to translate a live performance. The text had to lock onto what the actors were delivering in real time.
Register was the first decision: literary Catalan without gratuitous archaisms. Hamlet has acquired a timeless quality that a fossilised language would have betrayed. This extended to the titles: The Play's The Thing becomes L'obra és el truc in the surtitles. Truc [trick, ruse] captures exactly what Hamlet does with the play (uses it as a trap to expose the king) while keeping the light touch of the first act.
The gravedigger scene turns on the two meanings of "to lie" in English: to recline and to deceive. When Hamlet says "for thou liest in't" to the gravedigger working inside the tomb, he accuses him of lying there and of lying, simultaneously, with the same word. The gag holds because the wordplay runs through the whole exchange: each reply exploits one of the two senses and turns it back on the other speaker. In Catalan, jeure (to lie down) and mentir (to deceive) share nothing; there is no single word that does both.
The solution was to find a third term that approached both from its own angle: amagar (to hide). It connects with both readings: the gravedigger hides physically inside the tomb, and what he hides is the truth. "Perquè t'hi amagues a dins" ("because you're hiding in there") replaces "for thou liest in't", and the moral charge implicit in the original's double meaning appears explicitly a few lines later: "el que amagues és la veritat" ("what you're hiding is the truth"). The structure the pun sustains is what carries the scene: six exchanges in which each speaker picks up the other's term and turns it around. Without a pivot that works in both directions the exchange collapses. Amagar holds it because it admits both readings, physical and moral, without straining either.
The songs required a different approach. The company performs them live with flute and guitar, and they recur as leitmotifs throughout the production: first setting an emotional register, then returning to reactivate it. Every lexical choice had to hold across all the passages; a solution that only worked for one scene didn't work at all. Musicality and rhyme came before literalism, but the meaning had to be equivalent to the original. Fragments in Italian I left untranslated in the surtitles: the priority was for the audience to catch the humorous intent of the register shift.
The divergences between the recording and the live staging were resolved in a single morning. The adjustments were implementation-only; the underlying decisions held through rehearsal without needing to be revisited.