You never quite know where you are with a play these days. Of three French dramas that have recently opened in London – by Jean Anouilh, Jean Genet and Florian Zeller – two have been relocated to the US. Theatregoers can also see an Uncle Vanya in middle England, and a Dublin production of Patrick Marber’s After Miss Julie that moves the action from England to Northern Ireland.
The Truth, which has just opened at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, is the third of Christopher Hampton’s Zeller reworkings to be seen in the UK over the last 18 months. A dazzling, shape-shifting marital farce, it uses English language and accents but takes place around Paris, as does The Father, his unsettling presentation of Alzheimer’s disease, which is having another West End run ahead of a UK tour.
However, for The Mother, recently seen at the Kilburn Tricycle, Hampton moved Zeller’s Parisian characters to London. As a consequence, a businessman has to trek for a conference not to Dijon, which is presented in the French original as a dreary place that no one would really want to visit, but to Leicester – a city famed for crisps rather than mustard. (Some in the audience might object that Dijon FCO don’t match the glamorous table-topping football of Leicester City.)
Taking a script on a trip in this way can make a local audience feel more at home. But, as my colleague Helen Meany suggested in her review of the Irish After Miss Julie, putting a play somewhere else on the map isn’t as simple as changing the dialect and the landscape outside the window. There is an additional difficulty with Marber’s play because his narrative has already travelled from the late 19th-century Sweden of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie to England on general election night in 1945.
This was a clever parallel because of a similarity in the stand-off between an entrenched upper-class and a restless proletariat in those places at those times. But, although the author has approved the revival’s further jumps across the Irish sea, and to VE Day in 1945, the class, political and especially religious situations were significantly different in England and Northern Ireland at that period.
In the Donmar’s Welcome Home, Captain Fox!, also in London, Anthony Weigh retains the basic premise of Anouilh’s Le Voyageur Sans Bagage – an attempt to reunite an amnesiac soldier with his lost family – from France 18 years after the first world war to the US at the same remove from the 1939-45 conflict. The revised text is very clever and extremely funny – making this, with The Truth, a fine time for French-derived farce in English theatre – and is full of knowing nods to the Anouilh play, such as a couple of pretentiously Frenchified East Coast arrivistes, the Dupont-Duforts.
However, this translation also demonstrates that nations are not interchangeable. Weigh’s American soldier is an ex-POW who has been found in postwar East Germany not knowing who he is. As Welcome Home, Captain Fox! is set during the cold war, Americans of that era might have worried that the homecoming hero had been brainwashed by communists, a period fear reflected in Richard Condon’s 1959 novel The Manchurian Candidate, which became a movie three years later.
This subtext, though, is scarcely present in the play because Weigh is adapting a text set three decades earlier, in another culture. The problem is similar to the Northern Ireland-set Miss Julie: a writer aiming to end up in 1950s Long Island wouldn’t have begun from 1930s France, and so is always dragging unnecessary baggage.
A contradictory combination of geographical liberty with textual fidelity also causes a stumble in Robert Icke’s otherwise superb version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at London’s Almeida. Icke has exported the source story from late 19th-century Russia to the contemporary English countryside, and turned the character of Astrov, a country doctor, into Michael, a GP. However, because Icke gives Michael Astrov’s professional memories and anecdotes, he recounts journeying for hours between patients, and seems regularly to perform both major surgery and anaesthesia. In a present-day context, this medical workload is so unlikely that some members of the audience may suspect a satire on Jeremy Hunt’s suggested new working hours for NHS staff.
Among these country-jumping productions, the one that settles most comfortably into its new territory is The Maids, a transportive adaptation of Jean Genet’s 1947 play by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton. Although the writers are based in Australia, this version of Genet’s savage comedy about two servants who plot to kill their mistress has been shifted from France to present-day America. Because director Jamie Lloyd has cast black actors, Uzo Aduba and Zawe Ashton, as employees of a white lady boss, played by Laura Carmichael, the imposed locale adds a racial subtext that deepens the play, while the religious references in Genet’s text remain as plausible for African Americans as for French characters in the respective periods.
Not all theatrical productions can be as free in their movements. With some plays, the subject matter acts as a satnav. For example, Anders Lustgarten’s highly entertaining adaptation for the Red Ladder company of David Peace’s novel The Damned United is doubly site-specific. Dealing with Brian Clough’s spells as manager at Derby County and Leeds United, it has to be set in the places where those football clubs are based and has been thematically scheduled for runs at both the West Yorkshire and Derby playhouses. Even more fixedly, Richard Bean’s The Nap, which opened at the Sheffield Crucible last week, is a comedy about snooker that was written to be performed on the very stage where the World Snooker championships take place each year. The script is good enough to travel but could never be as perfectly positioned elsewhere. Sometimes plays need to know their place.
