Performing Queerness through Translation and Adaptation
Performing Queerness through Translation and Adaptation

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses the process of translating and adapting Charlie Josephine’s I, Joan (2022) for the Komedie Theatre in Prague, tracing how queerness is negotiated across linguistic, cultural, and theatrical contexts. Drawing on my dual role as a translator and a collaborator of the creative team, I examine the tensions that arise when the play’s explicitly queer dramaturgy – deeply embedded in the fluid and inclusive possibilities of contemporary English – encounters the grammatically gendered and more normatively structured landscape of Czech. The article explores how linguistic inclusivity, gender-neutral pronouns and performative ambiguity function in the source text, and what happens when these strategies are transposed into a language with more limited tools for expressing gender fluidity. Commissioned in the aftermath of the Globe production, the Czech version developed within a dramaturgical framework that sought to foreground queer experience and collaborate with artists from the Prague-based platform PiNKBUS. I discuss the translation’s linguistic constraints and creative solutions. The article further considers the subsequent adaptation led by dramaturge Lenka Dombrovská and director Alžběta Vrzgula, featuring the creation of the allegorical figure Q and the integration of drag, choreography, and embodied queer performance. Drawing on agonistic pluralism, I argue that the Czech I, Joan demonstrates how translation, adaptation, and productive contestation can together generate new forms of queer agency and expand the expressive limits of language.

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