You may recall that Sean Lewis recently exhorted us all to read more plays in translation. "But," you may have asked, "where can get all these damned plays?" Indeed, I asked the same question, and with some help from Sean and Google, I've done the legwork and tracked them all down for you. So, get reading.

Firstly, though, let me point out that these are all links to buy the plays. You'll probably have an easier time of it finding them at your local university library. They're great for that kind of thing.

List and links if you click-through.

To get the ball rolling on his challenge below, Sean has put fingertips to keyboard and provided a list of ten international plays that we should all read right now

Presnykov Brothers - Terrorism
Charles Mulekwa - A Time of Fire
Wole Soyinka - Madmen and Specialists
Bernard Marie Koltes - Return to the Desert
Djanet Sears - The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God
Colleen Wagner - The Monument
Marius Von Mayenburg - Fireface
Amelie Nothomb - Human Rites
Jon Fosse - Sleep My Baby Sleep
Reza Abdoh - The Law of Remains

Nicholas Hytner, the 50-year old artistic director of The National Theatre, has tongues wagging and keyboards clicking in the UK today, thanks to comments he made recently in The Times that look an awful lot like this:

They would be horrified by the accusation, but I’m afraid I’m making it. I think it’s fair enough to say that too many of the theatre critics are dead white men. They don’t know it’s happened to them but it has.
...
The theatre establishment changes regularly and representatively because the audience changes. We have to change or the audience would stop coming.
...
I won’t stay in my job for as long as they stay in theirs. When I become a dead white male I will only be hired to do dead white male theatre.
...
In private the female critics are voluble about this. I know that Katie Mitchell gets misogynistic reviews, where everything they say is predicated on her sex. Gay males have never had a problem in the theatre . . . The ones who have it worst are the gay women. They really get it in the neck and there’s a lot of sniggering.

In a time when we're blogging our worries about our authenticity in the face of class discussions on the internet, how do we deal with the realities faced by The Belarus Free Theatre?

They had mostly been outlawed from appearing in state-run theatres. Their own performances often took place in private houses. Several of the company had been in prison; yet there was no self-pity in their descriptions. They were simply determined artists who wanted to work ...