Two striking revivals last week – of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf and Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming – bring up again the rumbling question of the level of fidelity that an old text can demand from directors and designers.
From what I can tell by comparing his English text with an earlier academic translation from the Dano-Norwegian original script, Ibsen adapter-director Richard Eyre seems to have taken only occasional liberties of idiom and trimming dialogue in his version at the Almeida theatre of the 1894 drama about the personality-revealing grief of a couple whose only child has drowned.
Eyre, however, has conflated the playwright’s specified settings for the three acts – a conservatory, a wooded glen and a hill – into the single location of a veranda overlooking a fjord. And, in a standoff between Jolyon Coy’s Alfred Allmers and Lydia Leonard’s Rita Allmers over their now sexless marriage, Rita shows her husband what he’s missing by exposing her naked breasts and midriff to just below the navel, in a new stage direction which, if Ibsen had written it, would have led to the theatre being closed or burned down.
Although theatrical nudity would still have been impossible by the time Harold Pinter premiered The Homecoming in 1965 – three years before the abolition of stage censorship in Britain – the era was more liberated, and so the erotic leg-crossing by the character of Ruth (Gemma Chan) in Jamie Lloyd’s new staging at Trafalgar Studios is exactly as scripted 50 years ago. Lloyd also maintains the period setting. The north London family into which Ruth has married - and visits from America for the first time, with her husband, an English academic - gives the impression, especially in the precisely seedy clothes and tones that John Simm and Keith Allen give to their characters, that the men of this clan might easily run errands or drive getaway cars for the Kray brothers.
But with regard to the stage picture imagined by the playwright, Lloyd has been even more radical than Eyre. While the furniture, including an armchair and radiogram, are correctly antique, Soutra Gilmour’s set dispenses with walls, enclosing the scenes within a red steel frame, to which the designs of lighting (Richard Howell) and sound (George Dennis) add nightmarish flashes of colour and noise. The absence of walls allows the characters reaction shots, unscripted by Pinter, after they have exited, thus creating an expressionistic version of a realistic play.
Such changes are similar to those a tailor might make in adjusting a suit for a different body shape, and are mild in comparison with revivals that fashion a completely different garment from the material. That happened a few years ago to Little Eyolf at the National Theatre, which the dramatist Samuel Adamson renamed Mrs Affleck and refitted it with a new location and characters. An equally extreme makeover is currently to be found at the National in Husbands and Sons, an evening created by knocking three DH Lawrence one-act plays into a single drama.
The latest stagings of Little Eyolf and The Homecoming suggest, though, a middle way in which the speech and plot remain unchanged but the setting and stage directions can be optional. In permitting this visual freedom, the Pinter estate is at one with the literary executors of Arthur Miller, who approved Ivo van Hove’s thrilling non-naturalistic interpretation of A View from the Bridge, returning the story to its roots in Greek tragedy.
This approach of being more prescriptive about what is heard than what is seen was promoted in recent times by Stephen Daldry’s influential 1992 National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls, which reinterpreted JP Priestley’s 1940s moral fable as a noir nightmare.
Even the Samuel Beckett estate, notoriously protective of texts that often describe actions with choreographic precision, now seems prepared to relent. At the Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett festival this year, I saw the Berliner Ensemble production of Waiting for Godot, and was thrilled by both the quality of the acting and the playfulness of the staging, which included interaction with a prompter-stage manager, unscripted business involving conversations with the audience, and moments when the German-speaking actors commented on the English surtitles above their heads.
The key test – whether the intended tone and meaning of the script survive the changes – was easily passed for me by those versions of Priestley, Beckett and Miller, and is also by the new views of Pinter and Ibsen.
Eyre’s decision to undress Mrs Allmers is clearly his most contentious intervention, but can be justified because it creates a modern parallel to the shock that a 19th-century audience would have felt at Rita’s attitudes to marriage, sex and motherhood. Parodoxically, although theatrical nudity is now far from being a legal or social taboo, it still induces unease in an audience because of the exposure of actors to voyeuristic scrutiny and the uncertainty, at least for this man in the stalls, over whether the male gaze should be averted or maintained in such situations.
In the case of Little Eyolf, Eyre’s addition of nudity is especially bold because Ibsen had already included in the play two of the other riskiest elements in live drama: a child and a dog. The title character is a nine-year-old boy, and a supporting character, a peripatetic old woman who specialises in a primitive Scandinavian form of rodent control, at one point produces from her bag a pet pug.
The jeopardy of such moments is that the spell of the play may be broken by the theatre-goer’s concern for the participants. Does the exposure make the actor feel uncomfortable? Will the child star remember the lines? Might the canine co-star be frightened by the lights and the loud “aaaah” from the audience? However, on press night, Lydia Leonard, Tom Hibberd (one of three alternating Eyolfs) and a charismatic lapdog, who is cruelly denied a programme credit, all powerfully negotiated their moments, and, if the ghost of Ibsen is affronted by Rita’s semi-frontal, the playwright’s shade should give the director credit for being entirely faithful to the treacherous requirement to work with children and dogs.
One aspect of the Pinter production also offers a contrary perspective on the perceived obligation to respect a playwright’s intentions. In the backstory of The Homecoming, Max, a widower, seems to have brought up his three children largely on his own. Lines in the play about the nasty patriarch having “tucked up” his sons in bed each night, and a reference to the “fun” that they used to have in the bath, have tended to be inflected in recent productions by our current sensitivity to the possibility of child abuse. During an interview late in his life, Pinter told me that he was irritated by this interpretation, as he had intended no such innuendo. Even so, the pederastic stresses are there again in Lloyd’s production, and – particularly with a dramatist whose dialogue tends towards ambiguity – readings of this kind seem justified.
Both thrilling examples of intelligent revisionism, these 2015 versions of The Homecoming and Little Eyolf suggest that, in revivals of modern classics, fidelity can consist of respecting the overall composition while adding a contemporary gloss.
- Little Eyolf is at the Almeida theatre, London, until 9 January. Box office: 020-7359 4404. The Homecoming is at Trafalgar Studios, London, until 13 February. Box office: 0844 871 7632.
