Performing Heteroglossia: The 'Translating Theatre' Project in London

London is home to more than eight million people who speak more than three hundred languages, but the theatre scene in the British capital far from adequately represents this cultural richness and diversity. London theatre remains predominantly white, British, middle-class, and performed in the standard London dialect and accent combination. In the first part of this article I offer a contextualization and classification of types of heteroglossia available to London theatre-goers. In the second part, I describe my research project "Translation, Adaptation, Otherness: 'Foreignisation' in Theatre Practice". The aim of the project was to investigate new strategies in theatre translation that would enable us to disrupt audience expectation and challenge ethnocentrism. In this article, I assess the difficulties we encountered and the audience's response to our experiments. The project offered many timely opportunities to interrogate perceptions of "foreignness" among London-based theatre-makers, scholars, and spectators, immediately following the "Brexit" referendum vote.