Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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Two recent news stories have attracted my attention. The first concerns the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) in London, which is currently celebrating the centenary of its founding. The story, published with pictures in The Independent, provided a list of the actors and actresses who studied there. The list starts with John Gielgud, who graduated in 1923, and ends with Ben Whishaw, who left the Academy in May last year.

In between is a who's who of British theatre and film. Vivien Leigh, Joan Littlewood, Richard Attenborough, Robert Atkins and Joan Collins were all students at RADA.

Two names that are missing from the list are Aly Fahmy and Mohamed Tewfik. I do not know what became of Aly Fahmy, someone I got to know in London in the 1940s. Mohamed Tewfik, however, did play a role in Egypt's theatrical life, and also appeared in a number of films.

The Academy is organising a series of events to celebrate the occasion which have attracted a host of famous alumni. The occasion is being used to bring "RADA into the 21st century and attract vital funds".

RADA's director, Nicholas Barter, insists that the occasion is "more significant than just a celebration of what has been a remarkable 100 years. It's about the whole repositioning of RADA for the 21st century."

Courses at RADA cover a vast range of subjects: television acting, radio and voice- over work are taught alongside the more traditional stage crafts. The students' high level of training, according to Barter, "ensured that they were ready for anything, from Shakespeare to modern plays."

"If you can do classical acting you can do anything," he says.

RADA was established a century ago at His Majesty's Theatre in London's Haymarket by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the leading actor manager of the day. According to Louise Jury in The Independent "it quickly won the backing of Bernard Shaw who donated the royalties from Pygmalion."

The second story that attracted my attention appeared in The Herald Tribune under the headline "A literary site for foreign imports". Its subject was an Internet site, Words Without Borders, that features writers from around the world in English translation. Run by three women, its avowed aim is to acquaint US readers with foreign literatures. The magazine is supported by two grants, totalling $65,000, from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The first three issues have contained essays, reports and extracts from books by writers in North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Alane Salierno Mason, the magazine's founder, says: "I really thought after 11 September we would feel more of a need to know about the rest of the world, to realise how urgent it was to know how people were thinking and feeling and writing about America and themselves."

It was not just in response to 11 September that the site was established. It was given added impetus when Mason heard a group of publishers voicing the perennial complaint about the parochialism of the world of letters. It forced her to think about her own "lack of knowledge of new writing from other countries". That process resulted in the decision to try and set up an online magazine.

After successfully applying for a grant Mason began to look for people who might help her: it would be time- consuming and make very little money. Yet, she found two like-minded souls, Dedi Telman, an editor at OUP Press in New York, and Samantha Schnee, a former senior editor on Zoctropes All Story, a literary journal.

Words Without Borders has met with much enthusiasm among those in the translation business.

"It makes us feel not as lonely trying to do what we do," says Lucinda Karter, director of the French Publishers' Agency in New York.

In the past two decades sales of titles to US publishers have been in decline, from 80 a year in 1980, when the office was founded in 1983, to less than half of that in 2000.