Scholar-translators Bryce Lease and Aneta Mancewicz introduce Peter/Piotr Lachmann’s Gliwice Hamlet, offering an account of the text’s cultural circumstances, of its grounding in Lachmann’s personal narrative and in Mitteleuropean history, and of its complex relationship to Hamlet and to theatre as a medium. Lease and Mancewicz also talk us through the question they encountered in translating the text: how to deal with the text’s inherent multilingualism? How to ethically balance the text’s ‘universality’ with its ‘particularity’? How does the cultural icon of Polish theatre in the UK exist in contrast to the wave of anti-central and eastern european sentiment moving through the country?