State of play

This article was first written in March 2013 and revised three months later for publication on an online editorial website. It was never published, so I am posting it here, now, in light of a recent production of Hedda Gabler in Sydney.

In the past two years in Sydney alone, audiences have been given the opportunity to see numerous classic plays in their intended form or in new ‘updated’ versions by various writers and directors (and writer-directors). Following Simon Stone’s reworking of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, versions of Seneca’s Thyestes, Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, Bergman’s film Face to Face, and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof have all been reinterpreted from their original ‘classic’ texts. While these have resulted in many critical and popular successes, I have come to realise that there is a very distinct view or presentation of the world that comes across in a large number of these new versions. Beneath their accomplished surfaces is a more troubling issue – the misrepresentation of women in theatre.

Belvoir's Strange Interlude

The whiteness is total, all encompassing. Like a void, it swallows the vanishing point into its depths so you are convinced something strange is happening in the fabric of reality. Like the backdrop in a photographer’s studio, Robert Cousins’ set for Belvoir’s latest production (a Simon Stone rewriting of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play) creates a blank page in the open book of Belvoir’s corner. Ingenious in its simplicity, it recalls Peter Brook’s at-the-time groundbreaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970, the foremost example of Brook’s ‘empty space.’ You might’ve seen the pictures – a white cube of a set, with doors and panels set in its walls, swings hanging from the flies, the giant red feather of Titania’s bower, the actors dressed in brightly-coloured costumes, purples, reds, yellows, blues, greens; a circus-like aesthetic, as it’s often been described as – and as the play progressed, you could tell that the audience too, was aware of the intertextuality, the meta-theatrical allusions at play. Much of what Brook wanted to do in his Dream, was to strip away the tradition of realism that theatre had become entrenched in since the 19^th century, and liberate it into a heightened realm of metaphor and symbolism, where the audience was part of the theatre-making process, involved implicitly in completing the circle of theatrical illusion.