Simon Stone adapts Ibsen for Australians: 'And why would you even go to the theatre if you live in Sydney?'

Holland Festival

Simon Stone (28) wrote a new play based on Henrik Ibsen's 1884 stage classic The Wild Duck. The Swiss-born Australian provided the Norwegian play with entirely contemporary language and dressing. The actors sit behind glass, but close to the audience, who can hear their voices through microphones. A technical invention, familiar to Dutch theatre viewers from the work of Toneelgroep Amsterdam's Ivo van Hove, for example.

We give the interview here in parts. With the translation underneath. The whole interview can be listened to on our soundcloud .

Australian actors are the best actors in the world.

How un-Australian is your work?

"It's very un-Australian. I basically just pretend I'm still in Europe. But note: I love Australia. I love Australian actors. There is something in their way of playing that is much more real than what I see actors doing in other countries. That is why this may be an un-Australian play in the director's view, but it can only work because it is played by Australian actors. They can be so simple, and a second later so extreme, and yet you never think they are faking you. Of course it's fake, theatre always is, but for me, theatre should always be like it's really happening right in front of you. It should be for the audience as if they are sitting in a restaurant and the couple next to them gets into an argument. Or you open your window, and see a couple arguing across the street. That you can't believe it's really happening because it's so private, but still you see it. Australian actors are very good at that. They are close to their emotions, and at the same time they have to keep training their technique every day, because there is little work for actors, so you have to stay the best."

People in Australia don't know Ibsen.

How big is the Australian theatre?

"It is getting bigger, but there is no history. Australia is a country stolen from the people it actually belongs to. And then it was recreated in a new artificial form by a lot of convicted criminals, murderers and thieves. And corrupt policemen, of course. What's really interesting about that: that has created that equality mindset in Australia. Everyone deserves a chance. Everyone deserves to be looked after. We don't judge anyone, but we have no respect for tradition and no respect for history.

"At the same time, the idea of going to theatre is so totally foreign. It's very different from Europe: there it's something your parents did, that their parents did again. Everyone has been taken to the theatre by their parents. Even if you don't like theatre, you've been there at some point. It's not like that in Australia. There, you only go if you are part of an intellectual metropolitan elite.

So my biggest ambition in Australia is to get people into theatre. I want to let them know that that's something cool. And that it's cool because they see something happening that's different from anything else in their lives. It's not that old-fashioned, boring old thing. They see people talking like we talk now. They talk like people talking like you talk in the pub, or on the street. But the context is tragic, and apparently done by someone who has been dead for a hell of a long time.

"People in Australia don't know Ibsen, they don't read him. So they see a new play, which looks like their own life. But you also have to appeal to the people who do know Ibsen. That's why I do research. I have read all Ibsen's works. I have studied them, reread them. I make sure to keep all the nuances of the original story.

"But Australia is a beautiful phenomenon. Because if you can convince Australians about theatre, it's going to work elsewhere. Because Australians get bored very quickly. And why would you even go to the theatre if you live in Sydney? He's got the beach, You've got sunshine all day.

You have the famous opera house, right?

"But you go to the opera house to see the building. From the outside. You don't go inside to see an opera."

It is a cultural inversion

"Where I was born, in Basel, there you had the Fastnacht. A few days a year people there go crazy, while the rest of the year they are very neat. Pure theatre. It's an outlet. I was able to explore my rougher side in Australia because society there is more tolerant. In Europe, people like rough theatre, while everyday life is not so wild at all. In Australia, it's the opposite. There they don't want to see wild theatre, because then they say, 'if I want to see that I'll just go to the pub. Why do I have to see that on a stage?' It's a cultural inversion.

 If the actor couldn't make it sound real, we rewrote it.

"I wrote half the text first. Then I started working on it with the actors. We decided what must happen next. That's how I always work. After all, you can't know what a character will or won't do next if you don't know the character yet. So with the actors, I do the first parts of the script so they get to know their characters. That's why the dialogue sounds so natural, because I kept rewriting it. If the actor couldn't make it sound real, we rewrote it. Just until it sounded like real life."

 Structure is most important

"Catharsis is the reason why we go to theatre at all. Theatre is about a man finding out that he has been fucking his mother all these years. Or a woman killing her husband. Or a woman killing her children to take revenge on her husband. These are the plots that gave birth to the art form of theatre. The greatest writers in history are all people who sought the extremes, The theatre is a place for extremes. On TV it is milder, there the laws of continuous soap opera apply. In film, you have to be more careful."

"We go to the theatre to be undressed by tragedy, or ridiculed by comedy. It may look like a Dutch performance because I have kept everything so bare, right down to the microphones that allow the sound to come very close. But the structure is incredibly well thought out and clever for the greatest effect on your emotions.

"Structure is so important to me. The order in which things happen and the rhythm with which they follow each other and how and where and in what context: that's all my work. You only need an actor in the end to make it sound real. My job is the where, why and how quickly.

"After that structure I put in place, there is room for total chaos. That's where the actors take over. Then the stage becomes that glass box where anything is possible but the outcome is always the same."

 Without that wall, it becomes self-gratification

The actors play behind glass. Have you ever considered not using a glass wall?

"I only use a glass wall once in my career, and that's in this show. And that's because of the melodrama. The further away you take it, the easier the audience accepts the tragic. These people have to sort it out for themselves there in that glass box. It's about them, they are on their own. You build much more sympathy with people who don't ask you for help. Without that wall, it becomes self-gratification. Then those actors just show how bad they can be. Then they start impressing. That's often how traditional theatre feels when things get so extreme. Thanks to the glass, I can also put them much closer to the audience. Because there is a reason why they have to go there: they look out of a window, or want to lean against a wall. So there is distance, but there is also proximity, because you hear them in such detail. This is a paradox, but it also ties in with the paradox of the play. Which is about the fact that you can never know what is going on inside someone, no matter how close you are to someone, no matter how intimate you become."

 'Do you see what's happening now? If you act like this, girls will die.'

"The original version of Ibsen, of that I liked how it told about truth and its importance, but I didn't like the way people talked about it. I don't like it when people talk about the content of the play while they're in it, unless it's a comedy. With Ibsen, all the characters are exactly aware of what they want, why they want it and how to achieve it. They talk about that all the time. That's a theme for them. It was appropriate at that time. It was at that time in Europe when people were busy approaching the world intellectually. In a way, Ibsen also ridicules his main character. Audiences will have recognised in him we the intellectual who starts talking about Nietzsche in a café in a loud tone. Now that is less fashionable. People are no longer so ideological. It would be to the detriment of realism to leave all that in. It would distance it in the wrong way. I was also not happy about Ibsen using Hedvig's suicide as a conclusion to a conflict. Like, 'Do you see what happens now? If you act like this, girls will die.' I don't believe that. No one is to blame for a suicide. Someone decides to end it. It is a choice of the suicidal person. It's a tragedy, but it's nobody's fault. It is a chain of situations that together led to that outcome.

"What interests me is that Gregor thinks the truth will help everyone. I disagree that that's what the play should be about. For me, it's about people not understanding themselves and that's why things go wrong. It's not that we misunderstand ourselves, it's that we don't understand ourselves. That's the big problem with life: we can never come up with a set of rules that prescribe how to live. I got that from growing up in all these different countries: every culture has different views on how to live. And nobody has a solution for life. Every time I run into that. But we keep going. We can't do otherwise."

That's what your epilogue is also about.

"You have to keep going. Shitty things happen, but you have to keep going. That's the real tragedy. You always have to go on. The tragedy is that eventually the two parents will stop crying when they talk about Hedvig. That might take 10 or 20 years, but eventually they will almost just be able to talk about it. That's the really sad thing. The audience is torn apart, but the characters will eventually move on. But that's also the essence: if everything that was terrible destroyed us too, we wouldn't amount to much as a species."