In a kind of artistic two fingers up to Brexit, this Autumn’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts at HOME, starring Niamh Cusack, looks set to be a beautiful marriage of European and British theatre. And, as director Polly Findlay tells Kate Feld, HOME’s readiness to blend the two traditions is a large part of what drew her to Manchester.
“The ethos of the building, Walter Meierjohann’s sensibility as Artistic Director and the kind of spirit in which work is being undertaken here… it’s a similar spirit to what I’ve encountered working in Berlin. And generationally, the connection between British and German theatre is going to be increasingly important.”
Viewed as one of Ibsen’s dark masterpieces, Ghosts is a claustrophobic family story in which incest, venereal disease, euthanasia, immoral clergymen and illegitimate children all figure. All of which made it unspeakably scandalous for 1881.
“The challenge is in making it feel like a play that speaks to us now,” says Findlay, whose arresting work at the National Theatre (including As You Like It, Treasure Island and Antigone), and acclaimed work with the RSC have marked her out as one of the brightest lights of British theatre. “It’s very easy to locate it in the realm of Victorian melodrama. But I think there’s something very different here: the mode of the delivery is extremely socially precise, naturalistic if you like, but there’s a quality of surrealism, a kind of deep weirdness running through the way that the characters behave and speak to each other.” Ibsen goes so much further into the extremity of the human experience than other plays of the period – creating “a fascinating tension between the construct of social mannerism and the epic force of the dynamic undertow.”
Findlay says there’s a theme running through Ibsen’s plays of pressure producing madness, and this is certainly true of Ghosts – a story in which everyone is frantically trying to keep the truth from coming to light. “This central problem of burying things under the carpet and the kind of pressure cooker that builds up as a result of having done that for so long – that really feels like something we can all relate to. I think that there’s something about the way we operate now which affords us ever more mechanisms for not really looking at the world as it is,” she says (from social media to virtual reality and Pokemon Go.) “There are so many things on tap that allow you to have an increasingly short attention span, an increasingly narrow range of focus and an increasing tempo to the way you live – all of which produce a kind of anesthetising effect.”
Niamh Cusack will perform the role of widow Helen Alving and Ken Nwosu (who Findlay worked with recently on a much-admired production of The Alchemist at the RSC) in the role of Oswald, her troubled son – an intriguing pairing, to be sure. As the production is still at ‘white card’ planning stage (rehearsals start in October) major decisions about how the play will be staged are still ahead, though early ideas for a multi-roomed set and “a fully evolved sound and music-scape” sound exciting. In addition to the HOME team, Findlay is working with German set designer Johannes Schütz – they’ve worked together before and she describes him as a key collaborator, and David Watson, who has been commissioned to write a new version of the play. He has, says Polly, “an extraordinarily fresh, accurate approach to creating tone – his sense of pitch and precision in his language is incredible.” Today, though, Findlay is preoccupied with re-wiring the rehearsal dynamic.
“One of the things that makes Ibsen so interesting,” she says, “is that he’s trading explicitly in the currency of metaphor. It’s springing off a much darker seam of imagination somehow than British equivalents of that period. There is an explicitly metaphorical current running through all of the work that is crucial to the tone. If you don’t somehow allow that to be the troubling thing that it is – if you try and find a way of containing it and making it polite by pretending that it’s pure naturalism, you’re cutting off your own blood supply.”
So at the moment, she says, “I’m thinking a lot about how British rehearsal rooms work and the conversations you have with actors… the perimeters you set out unconsciously which push you toward an onstage dynamic which makes audiences feel comfortable rather than challenged. In European theatrical culture with its ensemble tradition, relationships between actors, and between the director and actor, allow for a different kind of exploration. Whereas, in the British rehearsal room so much of your energy is taken up with management and building consensus. I think a European model more naturally opens up the opportunity for you to produce work that feels weird or ambiguous onstage.”
Theatre of the new Europe in Brexit Britain, located at the unsettled in-between – this production of Ghosts sounds like it’s got the zeitgeist on speed dial.
See Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, in a new version by David Watson from Fri 8 Nov to Sat 3 Dec.
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