It was a different world when David Greig first
adapted August Strindberg’s play, Creditors, a decade ago. Back then, when the
playwright and current artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre,
Edinburgh, was first approached by the late Alan Rickman to look at the play
for a production at the Donmar in London, Strindberg’s lacerating study of a
marriage in crisis seemed
eyebrow-raisingly modern for a piece written in 1888, but no more.
Ten years on, and Greig is revisiting his version of
the play for a new production at the Lyceum directed and designed by Stewart
Laing. In the light of the MeToo movement and a culture of high-level misogyny
previously hiding in plain sight, the extremes of Creditors now appear even
more startling.
“It’s about marriage,” says Greig, “and it’s about men
and women, particularly men’s emotional fragility. There’s an extraordinary
theatrical energy that Strindberg releases in actors. He creates a room which
is like a boxing ring, and then he puts the characters in the room and lets
them slug out relationships in a very modern way.”
Greig previously adapted a version of Strindberg’s
play, The Father, for a production in New York. Watching this as well as
various productions of Creditors, Greig observed similar reactions.
“In both cases, in London and in New York, I was
struck by how much the audiences got involved. They were like the audience at a
boxing match. They would gasp when certain blows were landed, or even sometimes
be a bit like a wrestling crowd, particularly in New York, where they could be
quite loud. If the woman landed a blow verbally on her husband, they would be
like, yeah, you go girl.”
Creditors focuses on the relationship between a couple
while on holiday in a Swedish seaside town. A chance meeting with an apparent
stranger opens up old wounds that question the very foundations of their
marriage.
“There’s something perennially interesting about
wanting to see the innards of a relationship where two people are tearing each
other apart,” says Greig, “but if that was all they were doing, it wouldn’t be
very interesting. The thing about this play is that each character is as much
driven by love and vulnerability as they are by anger, jealousy and fury.
“It’s very vulnerable. It’s a very tender play. I’ve
been making comparisons between Strindberg and Ibsen, and I think Ibsen tends
to present the world kind of as he thinks it ought to be, whereas Strindberg
can’t help himself, he writes the world as he experiences it. And he’s a very
raw emotional and quite a foolish man in a way. So his characters are
undefended. They reveal themselves as if they’re naked in a way that feels
really contemporary. It doesn’t feel at all Victorian.
“A lot of the things that they say, you would
absolutely hear them in the way that a couple might talk now. Strindberg is so
desperate to dig out the truth about how we feel and why we feel the way we do
about each other, so it’s all quite voyeuristic to watch his plays, and if it
works it should feel a bit like that.”
In this sense, Creditors is a warts and all study of
the play’s writer as much as any of the things that brings out.
“Up to a point it’s a portrait of Strindberg’s own
marriage,” says Greig, “but where another playwright doing that might tend to
show themselves in a positive light, he doesn’t. It’s very rare that someone
does a portrait of a marriage in which they are unaware that they are showing
themselves as an absolute mess.
“One of the things that’s interesting about Strindberg,
particularly in terms of masculinity – and this of course is something that
wasn’t terribly present in the play ten years ago, but is much more present now
– is that Strindberg’s masculinity is tremendously threatened. He’s completely
terrified of the power that he perceives women to have over him.
“Strindberg is writing a play which shows how women
are terrifyingly powerful, and is meant to be a sort of warning to men.
Actually, in a weird way, what he ends up showing is men’s weakness, and the fragility
and unsustainable façade of masculinity, while the woman comes across as
complex and interesting in a way that some other heroines of the period are
not. That’s because they’re written by men who think women are victims and the
weaker sex and should be treated better.”
While Laing doesn’t see his production, which was
programmed a year ago, as any kind of deliberate response to recent events, he
does identify three very current tropes within the play.
“One is that one of the men is a man-child,” he says.
“He’s a young man who can’t find maturity, and even in his late twenties as a
married man, is still behaving like a child. The other one is an
unreconstructed alpha male, and then there’s this strong independent woman, who
I think has really clear ideas about what she should be allowed to do. That all
feels pretty modern to me.
Like Greig, Laing too has a track record with Strindberg.
The Father was the first play that Laing ever directed. That was at the
Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, where he also oversaw a production of what is
arguably Strindberg’s most extreme play, Dance of Death.
“It feels like good territory for me,” says Laing, who
first saw Greig’s version of Creditors in a 2015 production at the Young Vic,
which featured an all-male cast. For his production, Laing will remain faithful
to the play’s gender dynamic as written. He will also oversee its design. Given
some of his visual work on productions at the Citz and with his Untitled
Projects company, which are works of art in their own right, it will be
interesting to know what to expect.
“I think I’m doing it period,” he says, “but I’m not
doing a lot of period research, so I think I’m doing it period, but in a not
very authentic way.”
Laing’s production aims to address the onstage gender
imbalance in other ways.
“I think it’s interesting in a play about independent
women that there are two men onstage and one woman. It feels to me that she’s
got to fight a little bit harder for her corner, so we’ve looked at that.”
The end result of all this is an inadvertently timely study
that goes beyond dramatised biography.
“Strindberg’s anxieties are the anxieties of all
masculinity,” says Greig. “It’s just that he can’t hide it. And I think it’s
more dangerous hidden than it is open. Is Strindberg misogynist? Yes. I’m not
going in to bat for him as a feminist or anything like that. But I think only
to the extent that masculinity as constructed in our society is already
constructed as a tottering edifice of paranoia, fear and the desire to control
that which you desire.
“In a way I think I’m more distrustful of the writers
who try to make the world nice than I am of someone like Strindberg, who just
isn’t in control of himself, so reveals the world in all its dark and complex
truth. As a result of that, you end up with something quite vulnerable and
interesting. And actually, something quite funny. I don’t know if it’s
redemptive, but it’s certainly cathartic. In the past Creditors seemed like a
boxing match between specific characters. Now, it seems to be about the mess of
masculinity.”
Creditors, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, April
27-May 12
The Herald, April 23rd 2018
ends
Comments