|
It's difficult to imagine why classic plays need to be adapted, let alone who would dare to tinker with them. After all, they are called classics precisely because of their lasting greatness: superbly written investigations of the human condition and humbling reminders that people of all eras - the ancient Greeks, the Jacobeans, us - have wrestled with the same ethical quandaries without ever resolving them.
Every production is an adaptation, says playwright Andrew Upton, who has specialised in reworking classical texts of late. He adapted Ibsen's Hedda Gabler for the Sydney Theatre Company in 2004: a star vehicle for his wife, Cate Blanchett, who is about to lead a month-long season of the production in New York through March.
He adapted the production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, directed by Englishman Howard Davies, which is playing at Sydney's Wharf at the moment, and has translated, adapted and is directing Dissident, Goes Without Saying, by the contemporary French playwright Michel Vinaver, which opened on Friday, also for the STC. The production of Edmund Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, seen in Melbourne and Sydney last year, was also adapted by him.
"It's a process of finding out where the play resonates today, and how best to tell the story for today, and to keep that play alive because that is the final point of the exercise," Upton says. "Theatre is a live medium and the process of adapting is the process of giving it life."
The formal process of adapting begins before the director goes to work. It's not just about updating, though it can be about that. More importantly, it is a thorough revision of the text itself, usually not only written in a foreign language, but in the language of a particular era: Moliere's 17th-century French, Chekhov's late 19th-century Russian, Ibsen's Norwegian of the same era.
The texts are riddled with allusions and locutions which would have been clear to the audiences of the day - and may even still be, with hindsight, to audiences who speak the language - but which fail to connect, or to connect with the same impact, here and now.
Upton begins with a specially prepared literal translation of the original: not a literary translation, but the words directly transferred into English, with no concession for idiom.
"A bad translation," Upton calls it, "which is quite hard to read. A lot of it doesn't make sense. So, 'a big day for frogs', say, means nothing to us, but in Russian, it might be quite funny."
The playwright's intention becomes clearer on reading and pondering the literal translation. It clarifies the "linguistic register" in which the dramatist has written and allows accommodations which can bring out the same reactions in Australian audiences that the play in its original brought out in its audiences.
In The Cherry Orchard, for example, Gayev uses a word which might idiomatically be translated as "crap". And yet, that word didn't bring out the arrested infantilism of Gayev's expression in Russian: Upton translated it as "poo", a very Australian word which better evokes the tone of the original.
Robyn Nevin, the actor and director who heads the STC, is appearing in Upton's The Cherry Orchard.
She recalls the frustration of working on a Hedda Gabler some years ago when half a dozen different English-language versions were floating round the rehearsal room. "The consistency of one clear voice is very important," she says.
Nevin says she has two reasons for commissioning adaptations, which she has done often since taking the artistic reins of the STC in 1999.
"First is to find a contemporary voice that speaks to us now," she says. "There is a difference between a contemporary translation and one that was written five years ago, and particularly a version that was written for a different culture. British versions are very different to ours."
The other reason she commissions is for the health of the art form. "It keeps writers in work," she says. Original plays can take five years from commission to stage.
Upton is not the only playwright working on adaptations for the STC. Beatrix Christian, who wrote the text for Ibsen's A Doll's House for the company is discussing other projects with Nevin. Katharine Sturak is working on Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for a new production to be directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon later in the year. And Tom Wright, who adapted Homer's Odyssey for the stage last year, is now doing the same with Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Upton says his adaptations begin with conversations with Nevin and/or the director of the particular play. In the case of Hedda, Nevin gave him what he calls a "tonal brief".
He set out, among other things, to re-balance the character of Hedda's husband, Tesman, because it seemed to him that if he were painted a total fool, as he often is, it then becomes difficult to convince the audience that Hedda would have married him in the first place, let alone be eventually driven to the extremes of desperation that trigger the play's tragic denouement. By making him more reasonable, it raised the stakes for Hedda.
"The stakes for her, what a scandal meant, were much more powerful to an audience of 1890 than it is to us," he says. "So I needed to find an insight into what was going on then, that transition into modernity, and a way for us to read, possibly at times anachronistically, that sense of 'Oh, that's very abrupt', or 'That's very louche'." A hard ask today, when almost anything goes.
(It's why Hedda smokes, for example, a habit which is becoming as "naughty" - Upton's word - for people to do today as it was for women then. He is racking his brains for a device to use at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, where smoking is not allowed in the theatre. For the moment, he is thinking a hip flask, maybe, something that can be both surreptitiously used and shared.)
While he works with the words in these plays, Upton says the sequence of events is generally sacrosanct. The narrative is the essence of a great play and even slight scene shifts must be handled with great care. He did tweak Hedda, something he says was even more important, in a way, for modernising than updating the speech. Contemporary audiences are quick at reading stories, and a dramatist risks losing our attention if we get way ahead of him.
It seems some playwrights, though, cannot be messed with under any circumstances. "Chekhov is actually a different beast, because Chekhov's plays are almost like pieces of music," Upton says.
The Russian playwright is completely different in that way to Ibsen."Hedda's really about keeping it quite lean," Upton says. "When I saw the literal translation I realised a lot of the dialogue is quite broken up" - short sentences, people speaking over one other - "and they're quite manipulative people.
"You can feel Ibsen's hand, not forcing the characters at all because he's a fabulous writer, but you can really feel his hand guiding that story over 36 hours towards that conclusion. But with Chekhov, there's still this phenomenal authorial hand at work, but there's no sense of push or guidance at all."
For The Cherry Orchard, Upton sensed what the director Davies wanted by sitting in on auditions. "He was very interested in why Chekhov called it a comedy," Upton says, adding with a grin: "We all know that he called it a comedy partly to stop Stanislavsky turning it into a turgid nightmare.
"But, he did call it a comedy, so we had to find that in the archetypal Slavic rhythms of quite extreme emotional states and quite wild maudlin grief."
Such things do not necessarily have to resonate directly with contemporary audiences, Upton says, but adapters must ensure that the play continues to have internal resonance.
Upton doesn't know Russian or Norwegian, but he does have French. It is ironic, then, that the adaptation he is least proud of is his Don Juan, Moliere's meditation on amorality. What didn't work there, Upton says - and he shakes his head as though he still can't shake the feeling - was his realignment of hell to satisfy a modern secular audience. It stopped the play resonating within itself.
"We went into this strange zone that was like Hollywood in the '70s, and then back into Don Juan's reality in the third act - and ended up with a notion of hell that couldn't be used as a coup de theatre," he says.
"I felt that I had then undermined that end of the play, the moral end of the play and the finality of it.
"It's a question of experience, but it's also about what you owe the play. I learned a very strong lesson there: the play is itself and it should be allowed to be itself, or let's do something else."
© The Australian
