How directors' interpretations can obscure and even counteract the real shocks and scandals of great drama

Is the theatrical scandal dead?
How directors' interpretations can obscure and even counteract
the real shocks and scandals of great drama

John Stokes
From The Times Literary Supplement
February 17, 2010

At a symposium entitled “Ibsen from Page to Stage”, held at the Riverside
Studios on Saturday February 6, a small number of theatre scholars, the
English director Stephen Unwin, and a representative of the National Theatre
in Oslo debated the place of the Norwegian playwright in the international
theatre of today. The issues focused as, perhaps surprisingly, they still
tend to, even now, on the right of directors to reshape texts according to
their own interpretative inclinations and to the surrounding circumstances.
This is a battle that seems to have to be continually refought and the usual
asides were directed at the “text-based” conventionalities of English
directors.

The most illuminating contribution came from the Norwegian Ba Clemetsen, whose
job it is to circle the globe searching for Ibsen productions worth inviting
back home. Clemetsen is always on the look-out for intrinsically local
enterprises that might be of interest by virtue of their extreme otherness,
and she is clearly finding them. Any early impulse to shrug off her
predictable loyalty to postmodern principles, her denial of any kind of
textual “original” or any idea of ultimate “authority”, was soon dispelled
by the extraordinary range of examples she presented: from Ramallah, where
an audience of Muslim women exposed to A Doll’s House showed no patience
with Nora’s bid for self-realization, from Cuba, where the costumes chosen
for An Enemy of the People reflected the uniform of local political groups,
and from both Galway and China, where productions of the same play evoked
imminent environmental threats. Inevitably, provocation leads to repression:
Ghosts was banned in Iran when Pastor Manders was represented as an imam.
All around the world Ibsen can be seen to have attracted not just members of
the internationally celebrated avant-garde such as Robert Wilson, Susan
Sontag and Thomas Ostermeier, but lesser-known, equally questioning talents.
Witness an allfemale Hedda in China and, not necessarily the same thing, a
lesbian version in Denmark. Meanwhile, back in Bergen, a production of A
Wild Duck had to be called to a halt after twelve hours of continuous
performance – with the end of the play still not in sight. Ibsen himself was
a director, said Clemetsen, so he of all people would have understood the
need for experiment. His texts actually “allow” interpretation, and the
evidence for that lies in physical movement as much as in speech, in what is
not said along with what is. Since theatre can only be a temporal event,
nothing more but nothing less, directorial freedom is the inescapable
privilege of the moment.

While members of the panel as a whole had praise for the Dundee Rep production
of Peer Gynt, which came to the Barbican last year, they – tactfully no
doubt – made no mention of another recent show, a modernized and anglicized
Little Eyolf at the National Theatre which, though dull in execution, was
ambitious in its own parochial way. The British have not always been supine
in the face of foreign greatness, and the right to interpretative freedom is
certainly claimed by a current production, also at the Riverside, of Hedda
Gabler – though it isn’t entirely vindicated either. Directed, translated
and adapted by a Norwegian, Terje Tveit, this is staged by the London-based
Ibsen Stage Company with some capable young British actors. Undeni-ably
creepy and atmospheric though it is, Tveit’s Hedda Gabler nevertheless
demonstrates how postmodern possibilities can obscure as well as enlighten.

The acting area is a large circular island space surrounded by a sea of torn
white paper and a few wooden chairs. Outside – and sometimes inside – the
circle, the lighting is extremely dim, though spots will pick out faces.
There is a single major prop: a throne-like chair, covered with a white
sheet that is usually in the centre of the circle. Sometimes it is facing
us; sometimes all we see is its back. Hedda will spend a good deal of time
in that chair which is alternately her place of refuge (the equivalent of
the inner room in more realistic productions), a power base for controlling
others, and a screen for eavesdropping on what is being said at the back of
the stage. At extended moments, Sarah Head, a fiery and noticeably youthful
heroine, looks straight ahead at us while her flashing eyes register what
she is hearing behind her with all the regularity of a digital display.

An ambient soundtrack of synthesized noise, sonic booms, nervy strings, icy
chords, and what may well be robotic seagulls acts as accompaniment. There’s
a brief new prologue describing Hedda’s arrival back home which is
distributed, sentence by sentence, among the actors. It will be repeated at
the end. Entrances and exits involve pacing around the perimeter before
stepping into the central circle. This process gives a distinctive
clip-clopping sound and, when several characters are lined up, the
impression is of circus ponies, although, because many lines are delivered
out into the void rather than to another character, the dominant suggestion
is obviously supposed to be of a domestic prison or cage. As if we needed
help. All through, much that is implied in Ibsen’s text is made visible,
which is not to say that it is made more apparent. Indeed, a reverse process
may be taking place since some innovations are newly puzzling. Lovborg’s
manuscript is a long medieval-style paper scroll described as a “poem”
rather than as a speculative and prophetic book. It is destroyed not by
Hedda alone –there’s no stove – but collectively by the whole cast in a
series of tearing movements. Protracted physical gestures frequently outlast
their significance.

Tveit’s heavily choreographed Hedda is the kind of production that might
confirm Theodore Ziolkowski’s worst fears, since Scandal on Stage is as much
a polemic against directorial imposition as it is a history of theatrical
outrage, the link between the two being Ziolkowski’s belief that when
directors stamp their own personal vision on a work in order deliberately to
cause a sensation they are effectively pre-empting, or even counteracting,
its innate provocations, denying rather than amplifying the writer’s wishes.
He begins in the early nineteenth century with the weakening of aristocratic
and clerical patronage, and the ensuing dependence of artists on the rise of
a paying public. The emergent quandary is that the artist must sometimes
attract and serve that public by challenging or insulting its avowed
standards. This can be done either by uncompromising engagement with
unrepresented political issues (at one extreme agitprop) or, conversely, by
refusing any social involvement whatsoever and serving “Art” alone. The
“freedom” of the artist becomes a shibboleth that is produced precisely out
of his initial situation. The public must continue to pay – and in more
senses than one.

The historical starting point of Ziolkowski’s argument, like many of his
examples both old and new, is German: Schiller’s famous essay on the theatre
“as a moral institution”, which the poet defines as an activity above law
and religion, and yet necessary to both. Theatre, according to Schiller,
takes us into human realms that conventionalized ethical systems may ignore
or suppress, and in so doing it reveals more complex truths. It is for this
reason that society cannot survive without the ancient art form, and that it
should be institutionalized, a step taken in many European nation-states
with national, regional or civic initiatives.

Ziolkowski, respecting Schiller, argues that a genuine scandal occurs when the
sacred responsibilities of theatre are believed, at least by some, to have
been abused and corrective action or protest is thought to be necessary.
This may take many forms according to context. Ziolkowski’s well-documented
but selective survey takes in responses to Schiller’s Die Räuber, Hugo’s
Hernani, Hauptmann’s Vor Sonnenaufgang, Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Wilde’s (and
Strauss’s) Salome, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, Schnitzler’s Reigen,
Brecht’s Mahagonny, Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellverteter and Hans Werner
Henze’s Das Floss der Medusa. Ibsen, one might note, isn’t included – though
he obviously could have been, given the scandalized reactions to A Doll’s
House, Ghosts and, indeed, to Hedda Gabler.

In most cases, responses, all the way from legal reprimand to street-based
riot, involved some external or peripheral cause, whether partisanship on
aesthetic grounds as with the first night (or nights) of Ubu Roi (occasions
recently rehearsed in the correspondence columns of the TLS), or some more
directly political commitment, as was the case with Synge’s The Playboy of
the Western World in 1907 or Genet’s The Screens in 1966. Neither Synge nor
Genet is discussed by Ziolkowski, nor does he mention the two great English
examples of theatrical scandal in modern times: Edward Bond’s Saved and
Sarah Kane’s Blasted, both serious plays about violence and poverty where
the scandal should be seen as social in the first instance and theatrical
only in the second. At least, that seems to have been their authors’
intention. In the event, the scandals lay in the treatment given them by
journalists. Similarly, purity campaigns have been periodically mounted by
people who would never normally go near a theatre, while, as Ziolkowski
makes pointedly clear, some twentieth-century interventions cannot be
separated from outright anti-Semitism.

When we speak of a scandal as “created”, this is often what we mean: something
exceptional that takes place outside the text as such and is to do with
aspersion or tainting, orchestrated and maintained by specific vested
interests that only profess to be concerned with the general good. And it’s
this feeling of manipulation that encourages Ziolkowski to go on to argue
that today the directors are increasingly part of the process, sometimes
with the excuse that they are keeping texts alive, but in actuality always
submitting them to some external imperative. His leading example is Hans
Neuenfels’s direction of Mozart’s Idomeneo, which caused a considerable fuss
in Berlin in 2006 because of an imported scene considered, and probably
designed, to offend organized religion.

It is true that in Britain “scandal” has become a small word, restricted for
the most part to the related to physical gender and the financial. Dodgy expenses and office
affairs are scandals; invading a foreign country may be a crime or a
courageous moral decision, either way it’s something to which gossip may
contribute but which ultimately lies beyond its delighted buzzing. Scandals
go with gossip, the unverified, which is why the tabloids love to create
them. When Schnitzler’s Reigen was first published in 1903, long before its
first authorized performance in 1920, it suffered ugly attacks from both
Left and Right and was seen as a slur on the German people. Years later, in
1998, when the play was revived in London in a new translation by David Hare
as The Blue Room and the director opted for brief full-scale nudity, the
scandal, such as it was, seemed trivial, no more exploitative than the
average popular newspaper and mostly generated by the fame of its movie-star
lead.

Is a genuine theatre scandal still possible? At our own national institution
on the South Bank, Alan Bennett’s The Habit of Art currently features related to physical gender
behaviour (with language to match) that was illegal within the lifetime of
many of its appreciative onlookers, while David Hare’s The Power of Yes
addresses the economic crisis in a manner that is baffled but oddly
unshockable. Representations of financial irregularity and explicit physical gender no
longer in themselves make for scandal in the theatre – as they did in
Ibsen’s time – and that is no bad thing if we are seeking the deeper origins
of human behaviour. According to Judge Brack, contemplating Hedda Gabler’s
suicide, “people don’t do such things”, a famous irony that is played down
in the current Riverside production, perhaps as too obvious, too well known,
no longer startling. But what people do and what they don’t do, and where
and how they do it, must always be the primary concern of any worthwhile
theatrical practice requiring intellectual purpose as well as interpretative
vision.

Henrik Ibsen

SCANDAL ON STAGE
EuropeanTheater as Moral Trial
Cambridge University Press.
978 0 521 11260 4

John Stokes is the author of The French Actress and Her English
Audience, 2005, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Actress,
2007.