In my experience, good playwrights and directors of new versions are often delighted by the wit, quirkiness and natural charm of the original Russian, qualities to which as non-Russian speakers they had previously been oblivious, thanks to decades of over-papering by translators of the original, vibrant Russian idioms with lacklustre English equivalents. Such playwrights and directors are usually also receptive to the translator's defence of the integrity of the original text, even if they do not ultimately take on board their objections to what seem rather-too-free renderings of it. But whilst dedicated theatregoers might be able to recognise liberties being taken with a long-familiar classic play, they will not be aware to what extent a new version of an obscure or forgotten foreign playwright is the exaggeration or even invention of the adaptor.

The playwright approaching a new version of a foreign-language play is bedevilled by many conflicts, not the least of which are maintaining a degree of linguistic loyalty to the original text and honouring the original playwright's intentions, whilst making the text accessible to the actors. But, more important, they must constantly resist the injection into the script of their own personal bias and linguistic tics. Writing in the Sunday Times about his own production for the Oxford Stage Company of a new version of The Cherry Orchard by Sam Adamson, Dominic Dromgoole (2003: 22) argued that 'you have to bring yourself, and your own time and your own language, halfway towards [the original]. And you have to make sure you don't impose any pattern, social or political or aesthetic, on an independent life that only wants to stay free'.

In an illuminating introduction to his new version of The Seagull, commissioned by Peter Hall for the Old Vic in 1997, Tom Stoppard touched upon the difficulties of adaptation, and of grappling with what he called the 'ledger principle' of adaptation–the need to scrupulously account for every linguistic nuance, word by word, line by line (Stoppard, 1997: vi). Arguing that the main purpose of the playwright's craft in this instance is to serve the actors, he stressed that ultimately the playwright had to work 'for the event', that is the performance, at the risk of sacrificing elements of linguistic authenticity. His aim had been, he explained, to 'liberate' the text 'without taking undue liberties' (1997: vi). In similar vein, in the introduction to his 1977 version of The Cherry Orchard, Trevor Griffiths made the point that his primary objective had also been 'to prepare a version of the play for performance'; it was 'not, finally, the literary tradition' that he intended to act upon, 'but the theatrical' (Griffiths, 1978: v).

A particularly complex challenge is presented by Chekhov’s Platonov – 'six hours of sometimes repetitive and ludicrously overwritten speechifying', as David Hare described it, that he, in the process of adapting, nevertheless found full of 'thrilling sunbursts of youthful anger and romanticism' (Hare, 2001). Hare’s was the second most recent reworking of Chekhov’s deeply problematic play, which had previously been adapted in a new version, Wild Honey, by Michael Frayn in 1984. Frayn, who is the only Chekhov adaptor who is also a Russian-speaker, openly admitted that, for his version, he had cut out many sub plots and minor characters and reorganised the chronological sequence; he even went so far as to change the suicide at the end. David Hare, for whom I provided the literal translation for the 2001 production, was more rigorous in retaining Chekhov's original structure and plan, his objective being to 'recoin and rebalance' the play, as he put it, by 'clearing away massive amounts of repetition and indulgence' rather than implementing a more drastic reworking. In so doing he hoped that his new English version would still reveal to the audience a young, unrestrained Chekhov who 'lets his own passion, emotional confusion and political despair show uncensored and unmediated' (Hare, 2001).

Surprisingly perhaps, it is often not the freer linguistic versions of Chekhov's original Russian text that provoke objections in the translator; indeed, some of the best versions I have worked on are those that capture the spirit and atmosphere, the 'dramatic core' as fellow translator David Johnston has put it, of the original whilst being fairly free. It is the truth of Chekhov that matters, and where adaptation becomes dangerous and erroneous is where assumptions are made about Chekhov's personal point of view, and where the historical or social context is distorted to the point of no longer being 'Russian'.

Trevor Griffiths' version of The Cherry Orchard was a bold attempt at unshackling the play from the deadening English theatrical tradition of nostalgia, the hallmark of which Jonathan Miller once described as the 'Keats Grove, genteel, well-mannered' style of acting. Griffiths's intention was clear: to do away with the tired old standard approach that had set Chekhov productions in stone in the British theatre – what he called 'the fine regretful weeping of the privileged fallen on hard times'. For 50 years Chekhov had, Griffiths (1978: v) argued, been 'the almost exclusive property of theatrical class secretaries for whom the plays have been plangent and sorrowing evocations of an "ordered" past no longer with "us", its passing greatly to be mourned'.