One of the strange fascinations, I think, about Ibsen is that this writer —
whose works are kind of second only to Shakespeare, now,
in the way that people think about drama —
wrote about and was fascinated by an extraordinarily provincial place
which was right off the mainstream.
No great writer in history has been so dependent on his translators.
Because Dano-Norwegian, there's a tiny number of people who speak the language,
so his work was translated simultaneously
into lots of different languages.
I don't think there's yet been invented the right word to describe what I've done
and what lots of other writers do with foreign language plays.
Which is you sort of rewrite the play in English.
You're mindful of being faithful but you're not wholly faithful.
There needs to be a word but I can't think of it.
It's somewhere between "adaptation" and "version".
I find that, if I read too much about a play
I'll have a lot of different academic opinions in my head when I do the version.
I think, "I must work on that theme and that theme."
I much prefer to approach it with a kind of naivety.
I read the literal and work through it.
That's what the playwright wrote and that's what I want to work with.
The way I make the versions of the plays,
there's a small amount of consideration
of what the writers are doing or living through or searching for,
but it's mainly sifting through the language to find clues.
So the work's linguistic when I make a version, rather than historiographical.
I wanted to find its mess and its contradictions
and its violence and sexuality
because I think Ibsen's rich in violence and sexuality.
One of the things that I like about Simon's Doll's House,
which I've never seen as vividly before,
is that he
It's really detailed and it's really focused and it's really right!
You really feel that this was about money.
One of the reasons I was drawn to it was it's a play about debt.
I wrote it in 2011, 2012.
It was produced in the four years
after the collapse of the financial markets in 2008.
Nora Helmer lives an apparently idyllic life
with her husband, Torvald Helmer, and their children,
but she borrowed money
and has spent the last five years trying secretly to pay it back.
At the end of the play, her husband finds out about the debt,
is appalled.
The loan shark, Krogstad,
then rescinds the debt, says, "Look, I'll forgive you. I'll let you off."
There's extraordinary acceleration from condemnation from the husband,
to a kind of celebration and forgiveness that she refuses.
She says, "I can't live with a man who's going to contain me like this."
And she leaves.
The danger is that it feels melodramatic.
You've got this extremely quick extremity of emotion.
Writing the version, I thought, "This is mental!
"This isn't going to work! There's no way audiences are going to go for this.
"They will reject this acceleration."
It was only when we played it in front of the first preview audience
that I realised how thrilling that is, actually,
that humans
The
STEPHEN: There are good scholarly translations,
but there is this thing called the live theatre
which keeps needing new ways of thinking about it and new material.
He's writing in the language of everyday life
and I think that what, then, the responsibility of the translator is to do
is to make sure that it's still being written in the language of everyday life.
With all three Ibsen plays that I've done
I've tried to make it "speakable" —
as accessible as possible
without making it slangy or archaic,
so it has a kind of dramatic energy.
What I've done is have a literal translation,
which is really awkward and unspeakable English.
I have the Dano-Norwegian original.
I have a dictionary.
And then I write my version.
I try not to look at a single other version until I've written mine.
I try to understand what Ibsen was after.
I sometimes look at the length of a line
and think, "Actually, in the literal translation, this line is twice as long.
"Yet he wants something
"that sounds like that..." (CLICKS FINGERS)
It's very subjective, though.
One person's version
of what a particular set of lines means
is different from another.
It is
I'm trying to be as true as possible because I think he was a great writer
and because I think his ideas are so original.