The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 44

The Guardian Wednesday July 22 1998 15 Arboreal Living in Trees Scarabeus Theatre perform spectacular high jinks above the audience's heads with stilts and pyros. McRobert Arts Centre, Stirling. Friday and Saturday only. Eyam Based on the true story of a Derbyshire village gripped by plague in 1665, this modern musical is movingly portrayed by a superb cast. Bridewell, London, till August 1 Comic Potential Alan Ayckbourn mixes feminism and futurism in a world where comedy and emotions no longer exist.

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, in rep till September. Ken Campbell's millennium project language. The key step in this plan? To is to create a world stage Macbeth in Pidgin Who's big where? Wol nambawan! rij IT 7 general but a playwright or play in particular that strikes a chord. Ayub Khan-Din's East Is East, a comedy about a mixed race Anglo-Pakistani family, has gone down well in Germany, which has a large Turkish population and where people understand the resulting cultural collisions. The Welsh writer Edward Thomas (House Of America; Gas Station Angel) goes down a storm in Galicia and Catalonia, where audiences share the writer's sense of cultural alienation.

The appeal of some plays abroad is harder to fathom. Grimm Tales has sold well abroad but since the script consists of Carol Ann Duffy's version of the original stories and a set of instructions on the staging, it is puzzling that foreign theatres haven't just commissioned their own versions and done it themselves. The demand abroad for Enda Walsh's Cork City thriller Disco Pigs dispels the myth that plays with a strong local element can't make the transition. The fact that it is written in a made-up dialect rather like Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange makes translation even more problematic than usual. But the translation of any play is a leap in the dark.

If, like Christopher Hampton, you are multi-lingual you can at least check the translation yourself, but most playwrights and their agents are reliant on strongly worded contracts that forbid substantive changes, and the expertise and goodwill of agents and licensees. Changes that happen in translation are nothing compared to the changes to a play that can creep into a production. In some instances these are merely a change of emphasis and reflect the stylistic bias of that particular culture. But they can still be disastrous. The theatrical agent Rod Hall recalls seeing a production of My Mother Said I Never Should in Paris 10 years ago in which Kcatley's modest Northern characters had metamorphosed into the chicest Parisians it's possible to imagine.

Kevin Elyot was slightly taken back by an operatic Berlin production of My Night With Reg in which a shower of rain became a Wagnerian thunderstorm and the sound of bird-song at the end a full-scale chorus. In some cases, the changes only benefit the play: a Dutch production of Hare's Skylight recently transposed the play to an Amsterdam suburb with great success. But not all departures from the original are welcome. Ben Elton had his breath taken away by a German production of Gasping which had an entirely different ending to the one he had written. In far-flung countries itjs particularly hard to keep track on what is being done to plays.

Rod Hall was only alerted to the fact that something odd was going on with one of his client's best-known plays being produced in South America when the advance publicity arrived and all the characters' names had been changed. But, for the majority of writers and their agents, the fact that the work might be being tampered with is a risk worth taking. After all, ignorance is bliss when those royalty cheques keep rolling in. 1. Japan Caryl Churchill, whose Cloud 9 was revived in Japanese last year.

Also Kevin Elyot, whose gay play My Night With Reg is about to be staged there. 2. France Ben Elton: Popcorn was a big hit in Paris. Also Gregory Motton, whose plays are confined to studios in this country but get main house treatment in France. 3.

Latvia and Estonia Martin McDonagh. Though, to be fair, McDonagh is big everywhere. His Beauty Queen Of Leenane has been translated into 22 languages. 4. Germany Nick Whitby.

Who? The guy whose Edinburgh fringe comedy about a pizza restaurant was bought by a German agent There, Whitby is seen as an "important" British playwright. Also big in Germany is David Harrower, whose play Knives In Hens boasts eight planned productions there. 5. Argentina Patrick Marber. The yardstick for exported plays, Closer is being produced or is about to be produced here and in 1 9 other countries, including Iceland.

6. Spain Ed Thomas. The Welsh writer of House Of America and Gas Station Angel goes down a storm in Galicia and Catalonia, where audiences apparently share Thomas's sense of cultural alienation. revived constantly in Germany where it is known as Grilled Husband she's not thinking about retiring. Agent Sebastian Born, who represents several successful new writers including Kevin Elyot, whose My Night With Reg is just about to be staged in Japan, says that because most plays run in repertory abroad the writer is only going to earn big money if the play is on in lots of productions in lots of countries.

It's as hard to second guess which plays will prove a success abroad as it is to predict their success here. But there are clearly differences of national taste. Gregory Motton, whose uncompromising, expression-istic plays are mostly seen in studio spaces here, is revered as a major writer and given main house productions in France. Conversely, until Skylight which has become a worldwide hit David Hare's plays didn't have huge appeal on the continent. Somehow you can't imagine the Catholic Spanish getting to grips with Racing Demon, his essay on the malaise of the Church of England.

The lack of a strong, well-developed, indigenous play-writing culture in many other countries accounts in part for the British and Irish success abroad. But often it is not just the English language play in 'e could have a World Language by next Thursday. Everybody able to talk to every body. For my millennium project I am alerting the world to this opportunity. I do nothing these days that isn't in some way towards the World Language goal.

And my intention is to keep going until noon, January 1, 2000, and then look back and sec how far I got, and swank or weep. If you wanted to come up with a World Language that could be learned in a couple of days, and was quite beguiling once learned, how might you go about it? Here's one way: you round up thousands of geezers, preferably illiterate, none of whom speak each other's language, barbed wire them in a compound, make them live and work and play together for years, and for the guards round-the compound get Irishmen. Actually, you don't have do all that, because it's already been done. And we the British done it. The Great World Lingo Experiment began in 1863.

Obviously, back in those times it was difficult to get adequate funding for large-scale language experimentation, so it was done under the guise of supplying us with cheaper sugar for our tea. Eighteen sixty-three saw the opening of the mighty sugar cane plantations of Queensland. We would have used Aboriginal labour, but it was too good at getting away. So we went slaving and blackbird-ing for staff up the Cannibal Island chain of the New Hebrides: Tanna, Erromango, Malekula, Espiritu Santo, Pentecost, Ambrym. Take the small island, Tanna there are 26 utterly different languages on Tanna.

Each tribe speaks in a completely different tongue because they don't want the other tribes overhearing their dinner plans. Eventually, in order to communicate, the slaves adopt and adapt the one linguistic constant, the language of the guards. And that was English as spoken by Irishmen. As new "indentured labour" arrived on the plantation, they wanted to teach the newcomers the Plantation Language (TokblongPlantesen) as quickly as possible. By means of song and dance and fooling around they were able to have a new recruit ably expressing himself in a couple of days.

Today, millions speak it It's the official language of Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Republic ofVanuatu (formerly the "New It's called variously Tok "Pidgin" and And it takes but two days to learn, wherever you arefrom. To speak English is an advantage for the first hour or two, but then it holds you back, because you start making assumptions. There is a lot the English in my Wol Wantok production of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Nambawan! Makbed blong Wilum Sekspia, wan cvri pies evri pipe wol wantok ningsing konset A dozen absolutely top notch young and youngish performers, calling themselves, for the occasion, the Pidgin Players, have not only learned Wol Wantok, they have committed the entire text of Makbed to memory, all the parts! And the audience will choose who they want for the major roles on each occasion, following a little demo by each contender. Maybe they'll go for Tim Newton's Toshiru Mifune Seventh Samurai Makbed, or maybe they'll vote for my daughter's Beano Spiv cum football hooligan Makbed, or maybe they'll go for Nina Conti's Port Moresby Spoons Assassin.

And if none of those appeal there are another nine (all goodies) to choose from. The plan is then for the company to split into ones, twos and threes and go off round the wol doing productions of Makbed and other stuff with local talent, thus doing their bit to spread the tok. What's it like then, Macbeth in Wol Wantok? An improvement. Reducing iambic pentameters to rude voodoo telegrams is just the thing the piece has been needing. The plot seems much more likely in Pidgin there are a couple of holes which become apparent when you de-soporificise the text and these I've deftly bunged.

Like, for example, Fleance (Flanis). The witches (Klevas) tell Banquo (Banekhu) that his kids and his kids' kids are going to be kings (bigfalajifs) in the future (bambae). The only child we meet is Fleance, and he gets away, but then some arse makes Malcolm (Melekem)jif '(king, I mean). I don't think the New Millennium Wol wants to be served this sort of dramatic sloppincss, so I've fixed that. (Mi bin fiksimap.) Plgdln Macbeth is at the Cottesloe, London SE1 on Saturday and on August 1 speaker has to unlearn.

World Language for World Language is Wol Wantok. "WoF means world, "Wan" one, "tolc" language. Why is it so easy to learn? Because it's got virtually no grammar. It's got a few habits, that's all. I spent years learning adequate German and poorish French, and tenses are the number one (nambawan) hold up.

Wol Wantok doesn't bother with them. If it's in the past you bung in the word "bin" (and there's no one to bother you about whereabouts in the sentence you stick it) and if it's not happened yet, ie in the future, you say like bye-and-bye, and if it's now you would assume so, wouldn't you, but if you want to stress the nowness of your communication here's a useful little word: pronounced similar to the English Subjunctives they looked into, but reckoned they'd not really brought anyone any happiness. And how about this: no verb "to It turns out you don't need one. Take the simple sentence "I am yes we understand that; "here" yes, get that, but what does the "am" mean? What nuance do you get from the "I here" surely does it? But Wol Wantok thinking is that might get muddled with one of the things in your head you see through so it opts for the clarity of "me here" (mi ia). I've been really getting ahead with my millennium project and on Saturday July 25 and Saturday August 1, Trevor Nunn has given over to me the Cottesloe to present The Great Lingo Experiment began in 1863.

It was difficult to get funding then.