Sources
INDUSTRY REFLECTIONS
THROUGH INTERVIEWS & OBSERVERSHIP
Interview with Emma Harris
December 2019, London
Emma is a London-based director, dramaturg, and writer, originally from America, who makes work across the boundaries of opera, early modern theatre, and new writing. She is interested in developing new work and in applying contemporary theatre practice to canonical texts in order to interrogate their relevance.
One of the main things that I discussed with Emma was Robert Icke’s recent production of Hamlet, starring Andrew Scott. We discussed how he approached the text starting with removing the formatting and adding only forward slashes in certain places for clarity and rhythm, with which he essentially “dismantles the hegemony of the printing press.” The textual variants of Hamlet allowed him to create a version that served his vision, reordering some of the scenes, including scenes and lines that are only part of the so-called “bad quarto”, adding non-verbal scenes, condensing the time frame. This is one of the approaches to a director’s adaptation that Emma has encountered also when working with Joe Hill-Gibbins, where the “adapted” version is like a Frankenstein’s monster containing bits and pieces from various versions of the same story or text.
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The other perhaps more apparent method Emma discussed is taking a radical lens through which to view and interpret the text. In either of those cases, importantly, we are dealing with director-led interpretation where the director’s vision subordinates the text.
The discussion around “the cult of Shakespeare as a figure” in the Western world connected more generally to our impulse for this to be a collaborative process that challenges the post-Enlightenment, male-dominated view of a single author/creator. This also begins to address one of my leading questions for this project about the differences in adaptation practices between the UK and mainland Europe. As Emma suggested, perhaps doing Shakespeare in translation liberates the text in a productive way because the performers circumvent the textual piety that seems to exist in the Western anglophone world.
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Being conscious of how “a text can be a violent tool and making a very conscious choice not to go there, trying as hard as you can to mediate that” as opposed to perpetuating those structures is one way in which as a director you can begin to resist the problematic moments that a 400-year old original might suggest. Even though in the case of ECHO we took on a text that does have textual variants, our project extended a step further and is perhaps what could be called a writer’s adaptation in that it borrows somewhat from the original but largely departs from it to offer an “alternative and an addendum” to it (Georgieva, 2020).
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For Emma, and I have to say that I wholeheartedly agree, there is a great benefit in continuing to return to the same texts over and over again. Adaptations reveal the zeitgeist, which is how we end up with major theatres doing productions of the same plays within a year or so from each other. Some are more successful than others, especially when they have something to say, a project at heart, that leads the intention with which they approach the text and aims to “interrogate the inherent systems of hegemony” in those old texts.
Observership on Tim Crouch's I, Cinna
January, 2020, Unicorn Theatre, London
Tim Crouch is a UK theatre artist based in Brighton. He writes plays, performs in them and takes responsibility for their production. He started to make his own work in 2003. Before then he was an actor. His play I, Cinna was recently performed at The Unicorn Theatre in London.
The observership on I, Cinna was somewhat crucial to the direction that our project took since February particularly in two ways: design and framing. While at that stage our piece already featured music and projections quite heavily, seeing how that might work in practice was hugely beneficial and reaffirmed that artistic decision. With the new focus on Ophelia being a fairly new and unexplored direction at that point in time, after this observership, we felt more confident about the development of our practice and firmly grounded in a feminist interpretation about performativity and correcting how the story is remembered.
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Observing the process of I, Cinna came at a crucial point in the process when we were trying to pin down the question of what is our adaptation about. It helped us articulate the political project of the piece and further solidify our choices in terms of form and design vision. In particular the notion of bringing a frame to the original text and quite literally looking at what the original puts in brackets was an idea that I took away from this experience and which is particularly helpful when thinking about adaptations in a contemporary context. Bracketing is a technique of deconstruction that can be found in the writing of Derrida and Husserl, but when applied to the practice of adaptation it provides a useful frame through which to examine a story, reading between the lines and shedding light on the things that the original puts in brackets.
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This notion helped clarify the overall political project of the play by re-centering the story around Ophelia. And when it comes to the design vision for the piece, our use of multiple tools and disciplines such as projections, sound design, and music as elements to convey the story became more concrete as a result of witnessing how that can be successfully employed in practice.
Interview with Nastazja Somers
May 2020, London
Originally from Poland, Nastazja is a London based feminist theatremaker and director. She has worked both in the UK and abroad and was the founder and curator of HerStory: Intersectional Feminist Festival. Nastazja 's recent work includes collaborating with Middle Child on their Brexit cabaret US AGAINST WHATEVER written by Maureen Lennon, directing a feminist call to arms 10 by Lizzie Milton at Vault Festival 2019, directing the English world premiere of Stanislaw Wyspianski's The Death of Ophelia at Shakespeare's Globe and directing This Kind of Air by Romanian playwright Vera Ion at The Bunker Theatre. She just finished working with Peyvand Sadeghian on her show Dual دوگانه at Vault Festival and prior to the outbreak of Covid 19 directed Argentinian piece Invisibles by Lola Lagos, which never played to the public. Nastazja's work is rooted in Eastern European practice through using theatre as the tool of resistance and amplifying underrepresented voices She holds an MA in Applied Theatre from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.
Nastazja recently worked on a staged version of Stanislaw Wyspianski’s early 20th century play The Death of Ophelia at The Globe in its first-ever translation in English. Wyspianski’s approach is one that sees Ophelia “as a fully developed character… not just a young woman gone mad” - a project that is very similar in its intentions to ECHO. Written as “a monologue which sees Ophelia holding the male centered world she inhabits to account”, it affords Ophelia the space, agency, and ownership over her own life (and death) that she doesn’t get in the original.
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According to Nastazja, this is a world in which the male gaze is absent, which stands in stark contrast to the male-dominated, surveilled world of the court. What we are witnessing is a woman unravelling under those pressures in a space where she can finally speak out. There is still room for interpretation when it comes to her madness: “In a way her madness doesn’t follow the usual stereotype of a mad woman in white dress...What I found especially gripping was that the madness was not straightforward, and there was a space for interpreting the text as Ophelia’s mocking of the court” (Somer, 2020). In addition, Wyspianski’s work gives a real depth to the Ophelia-Hamlet relationship, which furthers the political statement in the play, empowering Ophelia with more agency over her body – a conversation that is quite relevant today.
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This is an interpretation that I found resonated a lot with my own reading of the original and with the project of ECHO. The way Ophelia is portrayed in The Death of Ophelia has a similar agenda to what we aimed to do in ECHO. It is a good example of a writer’s adaptation centering something that is lacking in the original text. We wanted, however, to provide a positive spin to the ending of Ophelia’s story – one in which she survives, which is where our version differs.
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Nastazja also talked about approaching the work collaboratively and working with the text in both Polish and English in order to highlight and give a platform to voices that are not often heard on the British stage. This and other decisions when approaching the text as a director can be used purposefully to challenge the dominant modes of representation and theatre-making, as I discuss at length in my critical evaluative commentary. As an artistic manifesto more generally, this is something that I am also committed to and my work on ECHO has contributed to my practice over the past year.