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Toneelgroep's performance of
Rouw siert Electra (Mourning Becomes Electra)
The Eugene O'Neill Review
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Volume 26, 2004
THEATER REVIEW | 'MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA' in Amsterdam
By EGIL TÖRNQVIST
MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA [Rouw siert Electra in the Dutch translation of Ger Thijs], presented by Toneelgroep Amsterdam, directed by Ivo van Hove: Opening at Het Toneelschuur, Haarlem, 15 Nov. 2003.
When Ivo van Hove in 1989 staged Mourning Becomes Electra at the Zuidelijk Toneel Company (the performance is reviewed by Marc Maufort in The Eugene O'Neill Review,13.2 [1989] 73-77), he was already stressing the existential aspects of the trilogy rather than its surface realism. This was modestly suggested by visually linking the mid-nineteenth century with the late twentieth century. In his new, second staging of the trilogy, he went one step further. The references to the American Civil War were hardly noticeable. We were concerned with war in general; even the music of the brass band heard intermittently did not especially relate to the war O'Neill had in mind. In fact, the war aspect was altogether marginalized in the performance.
In the Oresteia the chain of guilt begins with Agamemnon's sacrifice of his and Clytemnestra's daughter Iphigenia; this partly motivates Clytemnestra's fatal revenge on her husband. In Mourning Becomes Electra there is no sacrificed daughter; Christine's revenge here concerns the lifedenying Mannon Puritanism. In van Hove's performance the American setting was universalized. We were here concerned with the plight of man. What O'Neill hides under a veneer of surface realism, van Hove presented undisguised as a mental conflict within each of the characters, made visual through sudden shifts between closeness and distance, tenderness and cruelty.
Van Hove cut the trilogy to a running time of three and a half hours. He left out O'Neill's counterpart of the Greek chorus, the townsfolk, who keep commenting on the Mannons, and he had the ship's scene in Part Two, presented as a film, radically shortened.
The simple permanent set, by van Hove's regular scene designer Jan Versweyveld, showed a gray wall with a rectangular black opening in the middle, a visualization, it seemed, of the Mannon coolness, angularity, and death-in-life. Rather than a private environment, the bare setting had the characteristics of an office or a classroom By means of an overhead projector, assisted by the Mannons' man of all work, Seth Beckwith (Hugo Koolschijn), the titles of the three trilogy parts were written in blood-red letters on the wall.
Contrasting with the grim interior was the attractive exterior, shown in the form of a stream of pictures emanating from a TV set. Here both the characters and the audience could see the impressive, fake-Greek facade of the Mannon house, interspersed with beautiful landscapes and idyllic scenes of the past, corresponding to the characters' nostalgic longing for a return to virginal nature and childhood. At one point a clumsy animated film, showing a man, a woman and a palm tree on a tiny island, seemed to be an illustration of this childish longing and, when the couple was suddenly swallowed up by an enormous wave, a rejection of it.
The costumes were all modern and rather insignificant, except for the color. Van Hove abstained from the men's uniforms, retained O'Neill's contrast between the masculine black of the deathly Mannons and the feminine green of their women, and had Lavinia change from gray to green to black.
Each part opened in the same way. Before taking their various stage positions, the characters lined up downstage, faced the audience which at this point could be seen as corresponding to the peeping townsfolk in the trilogy. The characters took off their shoes and placed them in front of them on the stage. Was it a generic announcement, an indication that what the audience were to witness was not a trilogy on cothurni, i.e., not a tragedy, but something more modest, more suited to our time? Was it a hint at the Moslem custom of taking off one's shoes before entering the mosque? Or even a suggestion of the victims of the holocaust? The significance of this opening gesture was enigmatic in its suggestiveness.
Lavinia and Orin's healthy, everyday friends Peter (Alwin Pulinckx) and Hazel (Karina Smulders) were retained. Present on the stage throughout the trilogy, they witnessed like a second audience the destruction of the Mannon family, in this respect acting as a substitute for the omitted townsfolk chorus. In other respects they functioned as classical confidants, speaking partners and supporters of the main characters.
Like them, Ezra Mannon, engagingly incarnated by Pierre Bokma, by many seen as the most prominent male actor in the Netherlands today, was constantly present on the stage, both before his return from the war and after he was murdered by Christine (Janni Goslinga). Sitting next to his unfaithful wife and faithful daughter in an immobile position, he was a study in lifelessness, augmented by his stereotypical, monotonous way of speaking. Without looking at Christine, he undressed, declared his love for her, and then "raped" her from behind on the family table, while Lavinia, next to them, filmed their intercourse with her video camera, envious and rationally cool at the same time. In the last part Orin and Lavinia ended up in the same loveless love position as their parents. After his death, Ezra figured prominently in the form of two huge photos, projected on the gray wall, one of which showed him intermittently opening and closing his eyes, a striking image of the husband-father haunting his family.
Sharply contrasting with the lifelessness of the characters were their sudden outbursts, revealing their suppressed emotions. Ezra could suddenly break through his grown-up military mask and show us the weeping child behind it. Lavinia, superbly acted by Halina Reijn, could suddenly reveal herself as the vulnerable little girl she is underneath her grown-up mask, when childishly attacking her mother.
While the actors belonging to Toneelgroep Amsterdam, this goes also for Hans Kesting as Adam Brant, showed a highly theatrical, at times grotesque style of acting, Jochum ten Haaf, a guest performer earlier successful as the young van Gogh in the play Vincent in Brixton, played Orin in a psychologically somewhat more realistic way. Although not specifically intended, the difference made sense since Brant is, after all, an outsider with regard to the Mannons.
O'Neill's stark ending shows Lavinia, left alone, joining her departed family in the darkened Mannon house, atoning for her sins by burying herself alive. Van Hove let her instead be embraced by old Seth, the guard of the Mannon mansion and at this point even a figure of Death. This was to my mind a more harmonious but less stark way of concluding a trilogy whose very title points to Lavinia's post-scenic self-affliction.
Fond of so-called cross-overs in the arts, van Hove's Mourning Becomes Electra was a veritable multimedia performance. While we watched Ezra live on the stage, we saw his face greatly enlarged projected on the back wall. Since an audience always tends to focus on the faces of the characters, the paradox arose that we disregarded the live person in favor of the film image of his face, as we often do in our daily life in the present media era. The danger of van Hove's approach is obviously that our attention is divided between various simultaneous stage effects: live theater, TV transmission, and video images. These stage effects inevitably distracted our attention from what the characters were saying, especially since they often spoke so fast, at times simultaneously, that it was difficult to hear what was being said. In short, the question is whether the noble aim, finding an arresting equivalent for the modern human condition, was not somewhat defeated by the means.
What van Hove seemed to be dealing with in this performance is our inability to communicate directly with one another. He even indicated a sad development. While the parents still attempted, without much success, to communicate directly with one another, their children were no longer able to do this. Thus a crucial dialogue between Orin and Lavinia occurred not face to face but via laptop messages. In agreement with this device, the characters' undressing themselves should be seen, I believe, as a way of finding a modern equivalent for O'Neill's mask-face dichotomy, especially since the contrast between costume (culture) and nudity (nature) is inherent in the trilogy, where it is expressed as a contrast between the life-denying Puritanism of New England and the joie de vivre of the South Sea islands.
As is often the case with his productions, van Hove's second Mourning Becomes Electra was a far cry from the more or less realistic way in which this trilogy is usually presented. To some it would, like some of O'Neill's plays, seem to be the result of an all too eager desire to experiment. To others it would show a forceful determination to stage the text in such a way that it would, to quote O'Neill, indicate a sense of fate "which an intelligent audience of today, possessed of no belief in the gods or supernatural retribution, could accept and be moved by."
The Eugene O'Neill Review
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Volume 26, 2004
STAGING O'NEILL TODAY
An Interview with Ivo van Hove
By EGIL TÖRNQVIST
Of all the more prestigious directors in Europe today, no one is so concerned with O'Neill as Ivo van Hove, presently heading both the foremost theatre group in the Netherlands, Toneelgroep Amsterdam, and the annual Holland Festival.
When I visited him in his office on a canal in central Amsterdam where Toneelgroep Amsterdam has been located for about a year, he had just returned from a teaching period in San Diego. An attractive man in his mid-forties, not altogether unlike O'Neill, he is in good spirits, having just received several offers to direct in reputable American theaters. He has even had a new play written for him by an American dramatist who, unlike van Hove, does not like O'Neill.
Born and bred in Flemish Belgium van Hove had studied law for a few years in Antwerp when he decided to turn to the theater, much to the dislike of his parents. His first production, in 1981, passed unnoticed in his native country but received favorable comment in The Drama Review. In 1987 van Hove was allied with the theater group De Tijd (The Time). During the 1990s he was head of Het Zuidelijk Toneel in Eindhoven, Holland. Since then he has held a central position in Dutch-Belgian cultural life. As a theater manager he knows what he wants, and has the characteristics of a leader. As a director he has staged a number of acclaimed, some would say controversial, productions, often devoted to the classics. His productions have been shown at festivals in several European cities. For his New York version of More Stately Mansions he received an Obie.
As a director, van Hove strives to be very clear and at the same time polyinterpretable. The directorial "message" should, he says, be distinctly formulated and at the same time open to various interpretations. Clearly averse to Stanislavski realism, he creates performances directed to what he sees as the heart of the matter, the inner, universal-psychological realism, what O'Neill called "the drama of souls." Characteristic of the acting style he cherishes is that the characters switch very quickly from one mood to another, from passionate outbursts to cool distance, but "every moment is true in itself." The restlessness of modern man can be sensed in this changeability.
The work process from initial decision to opening night, he describes metaphorically as a journey from, say, Amsterdam to Moscow. The director, he finds, has an obligation to map out this journey to his theatrical team already at the start. By that time he has already, together with his scene designer, decided on the setting in which the drama is to take place. The team, notably the actors, then have the opportunity to decide, together with the director, whether the journey should go via Berlin or Vienna, whether by air, train or coach. As for the theater critics, he is skeptical of those who see the trees rather than the woods, the "special effects" rather than the underlying concept. "A piece of art should not be hacked into pieces" is what he tells his students at the Theater Academy in Antwerp.
Despite or because of his Catholic upbringing, he does not believe in a higher power. Yet his upbringing may well have affected his belief that we are responsible for our own actions and that what we call fate or destiny is simply hypocrisy, a way of trying to escape responsibility. The relationship between free will and determinism is obviously of key importance to van Hove, as it has been to many dramatists. A rational person with an intense wish to explain the actions of the characters, he regards himself as "a psychological theater maker." But psychology is not enough. The performance must reach out beyond everyday reality and become "poetically" true. This naturally brings us to O'Neill. As van Hove has said:
I have once in a while called O'Neill America's Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare he manages to present a very personal message in totally different ways.
A second, even more important reason why he appeals to me is that the oeuvre of O'Neill is characterized by a great amount of necessity, the need, even while writing, to fathom why you are in this world, how you see this life and which oppositions you are confronted with. These are big themes close to my heart.
O'Neill wrote out of necessity. I make theatre for the same reason.
When van Hove chose to do Desire Under the Elms (Begeren onder de olmen) in the early nineties, many were surprised at the choice. But having been brought up in a small village surrounded by farmers, van Hove sensed a connection between that kind of life and that of New England farmers a hundred or more years ago. Moreover, he declared, "I'm in love with this play. It is a small, forgotten jewel." van Hove has often shown a predilection for forgotten jewels. The idea behind the production was to create a piece of emotional theater, to make the emotions behind the laconic lines obvious. The translation was based on a somewhat constructed East-Flemish dialect. The names were adjusted to the Flemish environment. Ephraim became Jozef, Abbie was called Bie. The most startling effect was the placing of live cows on the stage. The idea behind this extreme form of naturalism was to emphasize the genuineness of the people in the play by surrounding them with an authentic environment. However, when I saw the performance I found the bellowing cows more of a distraction than an asset.
In the mid-nineties van Hove nourished the plan to do first A Touch of the Poet, then More Stately Mansions and finally to combine the two, thereby "providing a glimpse of O'Neill's gigantic Cycle." A Touch of the Poet was both translated and rehearsed when it appeared that the actor cast as Melody had problems with his part and the production was called off.
More Stately Mansions, somewhat prosaically entitled Rijkemanshuis in Dutch, on the other hand, was an immediate success when it opened in Eindhoven, a success that was repeated when van Hove directed it again with an American cast in New York. (The latter production has been reviewed by Robert S. MacLean in The Eugene O'Neill Review [1997]: 178-182, and by Yvonne Shafer in The Eugene O'Neill Review [1998]: 218-220.) Dutch critics had no problem with the fact that More Stately Mansions, though uncompleted, was staged. In the United States opinions were somewhat divided on this point. When comparing the Dutch situation with the American one, van Hove expressed the belief that European actors, more than their American colleagues, focus on how the text should be interpreted. They see the text primarily as gas to enable the car to ride.
It was on the occasion when he had already conceptualized his second production of Mourning Becomes Electra (reviewed above) that van Hove happened to see the American documentary film Capturing the Friedmans. The film which demonstrates how a once happy family disintegrates under pressure of their alleged hidden crimes, had a great impact on him and confirmed, as it were, the actuality of O'Neill's trilogy and the meaningfulness of his own approach to it. Characteristic of the Friedmans is that they record their own misery by filming it. Similarly, van Hove lets Lavinia create her own "photo album" by having her film her own family in exceedingly revealing situations. The central underlying idea behind the production has much to do with van Hove's own experience of denying the importance of your parents until, eventually, you realize that you cannot escape them, that you are not unique, that whether you like it or not you are a product of a father and a mother. Van Hove: "At the end Lavinia realizes that she cannot escape her parents. Even though they are dead, she has to live with them. She must learn to mourn the terrible things that have happened. If you don't learn to reconcile yourself with past wrongdoing or with your own origin, you will never find peace. I feel a strong emotional connection to this view of life."
The unabridged translation by Ger Thijs, himself a prominent and experienced director, is published by Toneelgroep Amsterdam so that the interested spectator can buy it before or after seeing the performance. It is the first time, van Hove told me, more proud than ashamed, that Mourning Becomes Electra, the play that more than any other helped to get O'Neill the Nobel Prize, is published in Dutch. The translation both reads and plays well. But of course there are now and then untranslatable words or passages, as when Seth, the gardener, at the end "pretending to search the ground" says: "Left my clippers around somewheres." He is obviously referring not so much to the garden tool as to the clipper ships which, together with the South Sea islands, stand for the longing for release that characterizes the Mannons as representatives of Man. This reference is not, and cannot be, carried over into the Dutch translation.
Van Hove denies that he has any concrete plans for a new O'Neill production. Early plays like The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape do not interest him particularly, although he can value them as testaments to O'Neill's wide thematic and formal range. But he would very much like to stage The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten or Strange Interlude. And while the troubles around A Touch of the Poet have given him cold feet and made him shy away from that play, he would not mind doing Desire Under the Elms again, in a different way. There is hope that sooner or later he will launch another O'Neill on the stage. Which one, when and where, remains to be seen.