|
Anton Chekhov can be turgid and Howard Davies is the first to admit it. Imported to direct Sydney Theatre Company's final offering this year, The Cherry Orchard, the celebrated British theatre man hopes to rip the sepia glasses off his audience's eyes and revitalise the Russian writer's 101-year-old masterpiece.
"It's [sometimes] like people playing on a collection of cellos," says Davies, 60, who is associate director of Britain's National Theatre. "All the characters are a bit mordant and sad and mournful ... It's romantic and wistful and I find that very boring. I wanted to make it about real people having a crisis."
In her first appearance on stage in more than two years, STC artistic director Robyn Nevin leads an impressive cast as Madame Ranevskaya, the head of a family of dreamers deeply in debt and resolutely refusing to face the changing world around them. Forced to sell their beloved ancestral home, they cling to the delusion that a miraculous solution will present itself at the eleventh hour.
"The Cherry Orchard is just fascinating, partly because the other character in the play is money," says Davies. "It's the working-class figure - the [1904] equivalent of the real estate person - who makes money. He's completely uneducated but he's got a great deal of enthusiasm and ... it's the person who has the capitalist vision who ends up buying the cherry orchard.
"I don't know whether Chekhov wanted to approve of that, but he could see that's the way it was going: unless people shape up, they're not going to inherit a world they're necessarily in favour of."
A century later, the contemporary resonances aren't difficult to identify. People are so inward-looking, so obsessed with their material wealth, argues Davies, that they've lost sight of the bigger sociopolitical picture.
"The world has become international in the [past] 10 years with al-Qa'ida and terrorism, and if people don't acknowledge that and see the reasons for it, we are going to, and we are, getting ourselves in a mess," he says.
Andrew Upton, who reworked Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the STC last year, has returned to adapt The Cherry Orchard. Unlike Michael Frayn's translation of about 15 years ago, which now seems "a bit rarefied and a bit English", according to Davies, Upton's adaptation retrieves much of the muscularity of Chekhov's language.
"Andrew is a rather remarkable writer of character," Davies says. "He's got a great instinct and insight and ... he has made people a lot more direct in how they say what they want out of life. As a result it's much funnier and much cooler."
Chekhov's characters are so rich and his plays so full of both comic and tragic potential, that actors and directors traditionally have fallen over themselves to add his plays to their resumes. That's why, despite a stellar 30-year theatre career, Davies says he has never directed a Chekhov play before. "In England," he says, "the people who run the theatre companies hog it for themselves."
When Nevin, whom Davies met through David Hare about five years ago, invited him to direct a larger piece for the STC, he didn't hesitate to suggest The Cherry Orchard or The Seagull.
"Any of [Chekhov's] plays are rich to work with because he broke the mould," Davies says. "He's the equivalent of the impressionist school of painters ... Instead of drawing your eye to the central motif of the painting they let your eye wander. It's much more about mood and texture than narrative drive."
A Welshman, Davies started out in alternative theatre, directing left-wing plays by Bertolt Brecht and Edward Bond, before infiltrating the establishment, working on the West End and Broadway and taking up associate directorships at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Almeida Theatre.
"What I really enjoy doing is directing plays that combine white-hot emotion with a social or political purpose," Davies said last year. The works that most fit that bill, he says now, are Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Mourning Becomes Electra and Hedda Gabler.
According to The Guardian, his recent productions of The Iceman Cometh and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Almeida and All My Sons and Mourning Becomes Electra at the National "suggest he may be the best interpreter of American drama since Elia Kazan".
Davies hasn't lost his bolshie sensibilities, although he admits that time has mellowed him; he's more mindful now of life's ambiguities and constraints. "The answers that I thought were so obvious are a lot less obvious now; arriving at any answer is quite a complicated process," he says.
"When you have kids you realise your life is changed for good and people who don't have kids don't understand that. People become preoccupied with money and mortgages ... All those kinds of complications have robbed me of the blind certainty I once had, but that's not a bad thing."
His directing style has changed with time, becoming more about compassion and less about judgment, and his political approach these days is less overt. He says he has revised his class prejudices and become more open-minded since he was sent Noel Coward's Private Lives four years ago and dismissed it as meaningless drivel: "I chucked it at the back of my desk until my wife said, 'You're being incredibly arrogant."' When he read it, he discovered a powerful, well-crafted play, and his eventual West End production went on to Broadway in 2002, winning three Drama Desk Awards and two Tonys.
Hailed by some as the best director in Britain, Davies says listening is his key skill. "When I'm on the rehearsal floor I try to listen very acutely to the nuances of what actors do with what they're given: their characters," he says. "The good ones have a fantastic talent and if you don't watch what they're contributing you'll miss things and railroad your production ... There have been a lot of film directors who have no love or interest in actors, but in the theatre you come adrift if you don't have that."
Davies, who started working in television a few years ago, harbours an ambition to be a movie director, not for the fame or the fortune, he stresses, but to master the craft. It's a fickle, money-driven industry, though, and he's not prepared to "start dribbling in a craven way", opting instead to step back and leave it in fate's hands.
"I suppose I don't have the instinct to go chasing it in a crazy, please-give-me-a-job way because it wastes so much time and I'd rather do interesting work," he says. "I can't go knocking on people's doors; that's probably for a young person."
For the moment he's concentrating on his Australian debut next week. Speaking just before going into technical rehearsals yesterday, he says he's in his customary queasy stage of the production process, feeling "as sick as a parrot".
A bit of performance anxiety, however, never stops him from coming back.
"The lucky thing is I still enjoy it," he says. "It's still very challenging. It's not easy, but it's very rewarding when it works."
