British theatre needs to start treating the classics with respect
Earlier this week, I witnessed Ewan McGregor's theatrical return in My Master Builder. The 54-year-old actor has not been seen on the London stage in 17 years, and his homecoming has made headlines.
The production itself, however, at Wyndham's Theatre, seemed to me the real story. It's an extremely tenuous update of Ibsen's 1892 play Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder), about Halvard Solness, a self-made man whose lack of formal training prevents him from calling himself an architect, and whose life is brought tumbling down by the reappearance of a piquant young woman, Hilda, with whom he was once infatuated. In this tacky new version by Lila Raicek, I cared little for Solness, here a self-satisfied, espadrille-wearing starchitect, and even less for Hilda, now known as 'Mathilde' and played by The Crown's Elizabeth Debicki with all the fervour of a saluki left out in the rain.
My Master Builder is being billed as a new play, but it's a thin approximation of a classic that's vivid and psychologically rich. Because this is the thing about Ibsen: like all great artists, he's always contemporary. A really great production of The Master Builder, such as that seen at the Old Vic in 2015 with Ralph Fiennes and Sarah Snook, makes you confront its stark modernity. You don't need a rewrite to make it hit home.
But My Master Builder is part of a trend to 'update' theatrical classics – and Ibsen is particularly susceptible. Across town, the Lyric Hammersmith is currently staging a version of Ghosts in which the sickness of Helena Alving's son isn't syphilis but a sort of manifestation of his father's toxicity. And at the Duke of York's Theatre a year ago, I saw Thomas Ostermeier's version of An Enemy of the People, which starred Matt Smith, and I loathed it: Ostermeier turned what should have been a timely tale about freedom of speech and the perils of group-think into a terrible dollop of student agitprop.
Ibsen is the most frequently performed European playwright in Britain. After him comes Chekhov, who's treated only a little better than his Norwegian 19th-century counterpart. Recent radical versions of both The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull have managed to convince us that Arkadia, Anya and the rest are very much our contemporaries – though the latter, also directed by Ostermeier, was patchy. But things can go badly wrong: in 2014, I saw a production of Three Sisters at the Southwark Playhouse in which the titular ladies, stranded implausibly in a far-off country, pined for London (when they were all clearly wealthy enough to book the first flight home).
We could blame Patrick Marber for all of this. In 1995, his play After Miss Julie transposed Strindberg's 1888 tragedy of desire, Miss Julie, across class barriers to Attlee's Britain. (It was originally directed, coincidentally, by the estimable Michael Grandage, who's also responsible for My Master Builder.) But Marber is a sublime talent and managed to make a new play in its own right, while respectfully teasing out what makes Strindberg so important, not least the overwhelming psychological attrition.
I appreciate that part of theatre's duty is to reinvent old works; and the recent success of shows such as Oedipus, starring Lesley Manville (and also at Wyndham's Theatre), proves that there's always an appetite for radical takes on the most ancient of stories. But adaptation needs a skilled hand. That latest version of Sophocles's tragedy was adapted and directed by Robert Icke, who has made his name deconstructing classics and bringing out their cerebral nature in surprising and shocking ways. Think of his famous Hamlet with Andrew Scott, first performed in 2017: it kept a lot of Shakespeare's text, but re-ordered it in a fascinating way, making it more urgent, less declamatory. And Icke has made a successful translation of Ibsen, with The Wild Duck in 2018, showing a clear and cohesive grasp of his source material and never forgetting the play's ultimate message: that we're all, ultimately, propelled by self-delusion.
The problem is that Icke is bordering on a national treasure, and few can match his level of dramatic erudition. My overriding feeling, looking around at the state of British theatre, is that you should take on rewriting landmark works only if you're certain of living up to the original. I'll be interested to see how a new version of Euripides's The Bacchae – announced by Indhu Rubasingham on Tuesday as a part of her inaugural season as National Theatre artistic director – turns out, not least because it's the first time that a debut playwright (Nima Taleghani) has been let loose on the capacious Olivier Stage.
Even if Marber started the trend, I think the 2020s has seen directors cede more and more ground to writers. Dramatists seem compelled to muck around with their source material and make it virtually unrecognisable. It's as if producers were too afraid to proudly present the classics, lest the audience feel they're being forced to pay top dollar to watch old material.
And it's particularly frustrating that this is happening when in most other respects, the theatre industry has – like many other creative sectors – become miserably risk-averse. Although I disliked Raicek's play, I didn't want to: she clearly has an ear for dialogue, and she could have been commissioned to write something entirely new. But a wholly new play by a young playwright is becoming increasingly rare.
Theatre needs to do two distinct things. One, give those young talents time to write, and produce, new work; and two, revere the greatest works of our past in the way they deserve. They're classics for a reason – and half-baked attempts to make them appealing to modern audiences will only put off the new generation that British theatres need in order to thrive.
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