[I’ve
just posted my report on the Scandinavian rep at Theatre for a New Audience
(see 13 June), which included performances of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and August Strindberg’s The Father. In
passing, I mentioned that among the recent appearances of Doll’s House on New York stages was a German production entitled
Nora in an updated adaptation from
Berlin back in 2004. I thought it would
be interesting to post my pre-ROT
report on that performance because it was quite different from Thornton
Wilder’s adaptation that director Arin Arbus used at TFANA. In fact, as you’ll read, I had some problems
with the modernization—but I’ll let you discover what that’s all about for yourself.]
On
Friday evening, 12 November 2004, I went to Nora, a new German version of Ibsen’s Doll House by Schaubühne
am Lehniner Platz, a Berlin company, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Nora is the standard
German title for Doll House,
but this was more than just a new translation—and less than a full
adaptation. The pay is reset in the 21st century, both in look and in
language, but everything from the original is still in this version—the Helmers
are still Norwegians (that is, they weren’t transported to Berlin or
something); Torvald (Jörg Hartmann) is still a banker; Nora (Anne Tismer) is
still a stay-at-home wife; they still have three kids (Milena Bühring,
Constantin Fischer, Robin Meisner); Rank (still a doctor, played by Lars
Eidinger), Krogstad (Kay Bartholomäus Schulze), and Kristine (Jenny Schily) are
all still there in the same relationships as Ibsen put them in; and, most
significant, Nora has still secretly forged her father’s signature on the loan
agreement with which she had borrowed money to pay for her and Torvald’s trip
to Italy when he was ill. There are a few minor changes—there’s no nurse
in this version, and Helene, the maid, has become Monika (Agnes Lampkin), an au
pair from Africa.
According
to the Schaubühne’s dramaturgs, the story of Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel’s adaptation
of Nora for managing director Thomas Ostermeier
is as follows:
Torvald Helmer has worked too hard. So much, in fact, that he could die. To raise money for a journey south that could
save his life, his wife Nora secretly takes out a loan and forges her father’s
signature. This secret is her pride and
joy, and the fact that she has to pay back the loan builds up her
self-confidence as a woman in a male-dominated society. Nonetheless, she continues to lead the life
of a devoted mother and childlike, dependent wife whose main purpose in life is
to create a cozy nest for her family.
When her con is revealed, her husband betrays her and sticks to his
bourgeois principles. Nora will leave
him and her children; she will face an uncertain future.
The
Schaubühne did make some more significant changes to the text/story to make it
seem more current, however, and some of them seem to have diluted the original
dramatic impact. One isn’t very large—though the meaning is more
significant than it might seem: Rank isn’t dying of cancer; he’s got AIDS from
having been omni-sexual in his youth. Now this may not seem like much of
an alteration, but it strikes me as weakening Ibsen’s point—which is, itself, a
little hard to buy today also. Ibsen believed, as did many in his day,
that moral corruption is manifested later in physical illness—and could be
passed on, like a hereditary disease, to the children. This was a
pseudo-scientific belief in the late 19th century, and Ibsen used it in a more
prominent way in Ghosts,
of course—where Osvald’s father’s sexual profligacy is inherited by Osvald as
syphilis. What’s the difference between this and the new version?
Well, as I see it, cancer isn’t a disease we generally blame on willfully bad
behavior—especially in the 19th century when no one knew about the connection
to smoking and other carcinogenic activities. So, if Rank has cancer and
he blames it on his corrupt youth, then it must be some kind of moral
retribution since the youthful behavior didn’t directly cause the cancer.
However, if he has AIDS because he had unprotected sex with men, his illness is
a direct result of his willful behavior. (Because the play is now set in
the 2000s, he can’t even use the excuse that no one knew what caused AIDS when
he engaged in the behavior—unlike I can say when I go to the dermatologist and
have lumps cut off my skin because of sun exposure when I was 8 or 9 when no
one knew suntans and sunburns were actually carcinogenic.)
Unless
you subscribe to the notion that AIDS is God’s punishment for gays, the moral
element has been erased from the situation. (As I said, this aspect of
the play is hard to play today, but it only works at all if the play remains
set in the 19th century when people actually believed this theory.)
This is somewhat more significant than just as an element in the Rank-Nora
subplot—the same theory is applied to Krogstad, who is considered to be morally
corrupt and therefore a danger to his family, especially his children. It
is this moral corruption that permits Torvald to reject Krogstad and forces
Krogstad to blackmail Nora with the letter and loan document he leaves for
Torvald at the end of the play. It is also this belief, which Krogstad
explains to Nora, that impels her to leave her children when her transgression
has been revealed—she can’t stay in the house with them for fear that she’ll
infect them with her corruption. Without this motivation, she doesn’t
have to leave, and the play’s ending becomes a purely selfish act and has no
dramatic strength.
Now,
if all that’s true—have I convinced you?—then the other, really big change in
this version has even greater repercussions. According to the New York Times review, the
company wanted to restore the shock Ibsen’s original audience felt at the end
of the play. (According to theater history, there were even riots when
the play opened in Europe when Nora leaves, it was such a unheard-of
action.) If you haven’t read the review then you would never guess what translator/adapter
Schmidt-Henkel did. He has Nora shoot Torvald before she
leaves. And it’s not just one quick shot—she unloads an automatic pistol
into him, even as he’s writhing on the ground, half in the giant fish tank that’s
a prominent part of the starkly modern apartment set conceived by Jan
Pappelbaum (and lit by Erich Schneider). Okay, this is shocking, but it
changes the whole dynamic of the ending, and makes Nora into a straight-out
murderer rather than a distraught but enlightened woman who acts out of what
she believes is selflessness.
First,
for her departure to be justified, she still has to believe that by staying,
she endangers her children. That’s hard to do in the 21st century, but
with the “evidence” of the physical manifestations of mortal corruption no
longer as clear as it was in Ibsen’s original, it’s even harder. Second,
Torvald’s only real fault is still that he doesn’t leap to Nora’s defense when
he learns of her forgery on the loan document—just like in the original, he
fears for his position at the bank and that Krogstad will now be able to
manipulate him. Perhaps even more today than in Ibsen’s time, this comes
off as a supremely egocentric posture, and that makes him a chauvinistic pig,
as we used to say—but it’s hardly a capital crime. It justifies leaving
him—maybe enough today not to need the matter of corrupting the kids—but hardly
shooting him. So, instead of being a brave and selfless woman, Nora’s a
fugitive from a murder charge—and maybe even nuts. This alone changes the
entire meaning of the play. The shock may have been restored, but it’s
shock for its own sake, as a theatrical effect, not based on dramatic
necessity.
I
suppose that’s enough to make the translation/adaptation questionable, but
there were other problems I had with this show. I know that Europe is
behind the U.S. in enfranchising women, especially in the
marketplace, but they’re not 50 years behind.
[At the time I wrote this report, a woman was the head of one of
Germany’s major political parties, the Christian Democratic Union. A year after I wrote this, in 2005, Angela Merkel
was named Chancellor of Germany; in this country we’re just now celebrating the
nomination of the first woman as a major party’s presidential candidate—11
years later.] It’s hard for me to accept that a woman as self-consciously
modern as Nora here—the costume she wears to the Christmas party isn’t some
peasant outfit so she can dance a tarantella; she goes in complete punk get-up,
blood smears and all (costumes are designed
by Almut Eppinger), and does a techno dance (of which the Germans are
fond, I believe)—could be so bereft of options that a) she has to forge her
father’s signature for a loan and b) she can’t resolve the problem by some more
rational means than either leaving or, even more drastically, shooting
Torvald. The whole idea of the “doll-wife” (and that expression is still
in the German text, by the way: Puppenfrau)
is a throw-back, even in Europe today. In fact, moving the whole thing up
to the 2000s seemed to make everything a little incredible—contrived, I
guess. Instead of an indictment of a social problem that the playwright
saw as universal, this version makes the whole thing a play about a seriously
dysfunctional couple and their dysfunctional friends. (I ought to add,
too, that the very idea today that a sick man had to go to Italy to recover—and
that this was his only remedy—is hard to buy also. Germans still believed
in “taking the cure”—going to a health spa for mineral baths—at least when I
was living there, but needing to go south for one’s health is still pretty much
an anachronism—more like Death
in Venice than 21st century. It’s another aspect that really
has to remain in Ibsen’s own time to work.)
There
was some problem with the acting—I presume the direction of Ostermeier,
really—too. The actors were good, and I didn’t have any problem believing
them in their roles/situations most of the time (aside from the problems of the
script above), except that every so often they went off their rockers
emotionally for no apparent reason or motivation. One character might all
of a sudden shout (or bark)
at another, or another character would behave as if he were in the grips of an
epileptic fit or some other odd physical condition and throw himself about the
stage violently. (The final shooting was sort of like this. Nora
had the gun—she was contemplating suicide—but she’d put it away and had even
gone off into her room off stage. Then she came out, pointed the gun at
Torvald for a few seconds, and started pulling the trigger again and
again.) Now, maybe I missed something in the German text or in the
translation (titles), but I don’t think so. (Those titles were a problem,
too. There were three screens—one just below the raised set of the
apartment, but its text was pretty small for us in the mezzanine; the other two
were on either side of the stage, but far enough away from the set that you
couldn’t read them and watch the action at the same time. Just to make it
harder to follow, the dialogue came fast at times and the titles showed nearly
every line so the screens changed rapidly, much faster than you could go back
and forth. I really wish my German were still good enough not to have had
to refer to them as much as I did—even though I knew the play fairly well,
having taught it up at the State University in Oneonta a couple of years
earlier. I did want to see what the translator did with the text.)
It doesn’t help matters that the performance was two hours and ten minutes without an intermission—and
the Harvey Theater’s seats are not
soft!
Anyway,
the experience was disappointing, but not actually bad. I pretty much
concluded that updating Doll
House isn’t profitable—you lose too much that isn’t made up in the
modernization—but it was interesting to see the attempt. It also made me reconsider
the original—and how good Ibsen was at constructing plays to say what he wanted, such that
trying to make them say something else in part destroys them. Ironically,
I also concluded that though Ibsen must remain in his own period for the plot to work, the drama—the
point, the message, the theme—still communicates to a modern audience. I
mean, we may no longer believe in the nonsense of moral corruption = physical
decay, but if we accept that they
did, we can still see Ibsen’s point about trust and respect and honesty within
a marriage.
[As
I noted above, I saw Nora on 12 November 2004, but the production ran at BAM’s Harvey Theater from 9 to 13 November 2004. Nora had its première at the
Schaubühne in 2002.
[I didn’t do the review round-up back in ’04, so
I’ll pick up a few notices that are still on line a dozen years later. (BAM shows often don’t get a lot of
coverage even today because their runs are so short and there are no previews a
reviewer can see before opening. Nora only
played in New York for five evenings; a review written on day one would appear
in print with only four performances left—if it came out on the next day. Programs like BAM’s Next Wave Festival or the
Lincoln Center Festival frequently get put off in favor of regular Broadway and
Off-Broadway runs that get next-day publication.) Since I didn’t do a survey, the only notice I
saw before now was in the New York Times.
[The Times’
Christopher Isherwood called Ostermeier’s staging “slick,” but advised that “you have to listen carefully to hear the impact.” The “highly regarded,
provocative” director making his U.S. début with Nora, “pumps up the volume in more ways than one in his brash contemporary
gloss on” A Doll House. “At unexpected intervals, the characters emit
strange, sudden shrieks or fling themselves into the giant aquarium that
dominates the living room,” reported Isherwood. “And as promised, the play ends
not with a housewife's quietly delivered manifesto, followed by a seemly exit,
but with an act of unexpected violence.”
[This was the passage I alluded to in my report above, by the way.] “This strikingly designed, sensitively acted
production,” asserted the Timesman,
maintained an “overriding fidelity to the trusty mechanics of Ibsen's drama”;
far from being “a radical, mind-bending reimagining,” the production was “a
clever but essentially naturalistic updating, with a few eccentricities tacked
on here and there, often, you suspect, simply to amp up the quirk factor.” As one example, Isherwood described how
Ostermeier's “actors are sometimes allowed to indulge in bursts of physical or
vocal hysterics that are more showy than revealing.” While Ostermeier’s adaptation “translates the
play's social dimensions,” acknowledged the Times reviewer, he found that “it also violates its spiritual ones.” Isherwood seemed to have agreed with me, at
least somewhat, about the new ending: “In altering Ibsen's ending, Mr.
Ostermeier has drawn a veil across Nora's spiritual awakening.”
[In the Village Voice,
Michael Feingold summed up one view of the Schaubühne’s Nora:
In 125 years of audiences, undoubtedly many women
have wanted to shoot Torvald Helmer, but most directors, male or female, would
hesitate to louse up a great play by turning the famous door-slam into a
gunshot. Leave it, one might say, to the
Germans. Thomas Ostermeier, artistic
director of Berlin’s Schaubuhne, has managed, by giving Torvald a gun for Nora
to borrow, to louse up not only a great play but what was in many ways a great
production. The gun wasn’t his only dumb
idea: The one question in my mind is which will remain stronger in my memory of
this Doll’s House after
months and years have passed—the frequent brilliance of the acting and
directing, or the equally frequent lapses into directorial
self-indulgence. It’s aesthetically
unjust for an artist so gifted to be so foolishly wasteful of his gifts.
Feingold explained that “the element in the play that Ostermeier’s
gunshot effectively killed [is] Nora’s spiritual transcendence.” The Voice reviewer had many of the same complaints
that the Times’ Isherwood and I
voiced, so I won’t quote them again just to prove we all seemed to agree. Like the man from the Times and me, Feingold also found that the cast’s
“five principals were uniformly excellent,” giving “lively and detailed
performances” that were largely wasted on Ostermeier’s self-indulgent
production concept “to prove that he was up-to-date.”
[Variety’s
Marilyn Stasio capsulized her opinion thus:
It would be too easy to dismiss “Nora (A Doll’s
House),[“] a trendy modernization of Ibsen’s seminal 1879 drama, as hopelessly
wrong-headed. For all the sound and fury
of its iconoclastic production . . . this German import never makes
its case that the European hausfrau of today is as enslaved to bourgeois convention as her 19th century
sisters. Still, the boldness of
Schaubuhne artistic director Thomas Ostermeier’s smash-and-burn concept and the
fierceness of Anne Tismer’s attack on the leading role make for invigorating
theater.
Stasio conceded, “This is a production that grows on you—if you can
survive the initial onslaught of the f/x staging, blood-sport performance style
and rock-concert decibel level.”
[In a wrap-up of 2004’s year in theater, Michael Lazan wrote of Nora in Backstage that Ostermeier’s adaptation “thrillingly
manages to raise questions about violence as a legitimate reaction to social
decay.” The Backstager described the play’s last moment: “When
Nora ends the play by shooting him to a bloody pulp, the audience watched, slack-jawed. Quite an event it was.”
No comments:
Post a Comment