Adaptations of Classic Works – How Far is Too Far?

2016 Broadway revival of ‘The Crucible’ (Photo: Jan Versweyveld)

In the fall of 2018, I had the great privilege to see Robert Icke’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and in the years that have followed, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It wasn’t just a staging of a classic work with modern clothing and furniture – it was a top to bottom overhaul. The language was modernized to the point of being almost unrecognizable next to the original script and likely would have been as foreign-sounding to an audience in Ibsen’s time as their language sounds to us today.

And yet, the story that was told had me walking home in tears, far more of an emotional impact than the original script had ever had on me.

The reviews I read were very divided over this production, ranging from exalting praise over the reimagining to scathing condemnation over what they considered to be a massacre of Ibsen’s work. I began to wonder – what is too sacred to be touched? At what point do we draw a line, if at all, when it comes to classic works of theatre? And, most of all, what are we hoping to gain by changing or not changing them?

Those of us with an appreciation for theatre know in our hearts that the theatre will never truly die because live storytelling holds that intangible essence that exists in all of us – life. Life is engrained into every component of theater, down to every member of the creative team, cast, crew, and audience. It is the unique life that each and every one of us brings into the room that makes the kind of magic that can’t be captured on film and that we find so intoxicating.

The thing about life, though, is that it keeps going. The life that we bring into a room is always changing and will always be changing because all of us and the worlds we live in are always changing. Considering that the life we bring to a live performance is an integral part of how we interpret and experience the story, it’s only fair to say that the story itself will change as the life brought to it does.

Even if you performed a play as originally accurate as possible you will never be experiencing the same story as the original audience, because you bring a different life to the room than they did. The story has already changed because who we are and what we project onto it has changed. The life of every person involved is a part of the script that is different not just from year-to-year or production-to-production, but night-to-night.

Just look at Shakespeare, full of then-modern pop culture references and inside jokes that are no longer ingrained in our society. You can study the meaning and understand them at an intellectual level, sure, but it will not resonate within you the same way a modern pop culture reference would.

So, what do we do with all of these classics that don’t resonate anymore? Do we continue to perform them as-is for the few die-hard theatre aficionados and a couple of family members we lure in with discount tickets who walk out saying that they “didn’t get it”? Is it sacrilegious to consider doing anything else?

In my opinion, there’s little we can do at this point to make pieces that are over a century or more old convey what the playwright intended without changing them. A playwright has an idea or a message to convey to their audience, and the story they tell and the language they use is the vehicle in which this core idea rides in. If the play is no longer making the audience feel what the playwright wanted them to feel or ask the questions the playwright wanted them to ask, we need to update the vehicle to get that core idea of where it needs to go.

Take Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, for example. When Nora walked out on her family on opening night in 1879 Norway, the audience was in outrage. The very idea of a married woman leaving her unhappy marriage and her children was so powerful an idea that Ibsen was forced to rewrite an ending that implied that Nora stayed for her children in order for it to be legally performed in some countries. Does this story have the same impact on audiences today? Do we ask the same questions about women’s roles in society, or their place as “first and foremost, human beings”? Or is the vehicle designed for this idea over 100 years ago no longer delivering the core message?

I think we need to be taking a page out of Icke’s book and making bold adaptations of classic works to deliver the powerful ideas from the playwrights of yesterday to the audiences of today. I don’t mean to say that we should be abandoning the original scripts altogether, but I also don’t think that we should be holding them so sacred that we’re afraid to breathe new life into them.

Walt Disney’s philosophy for Disneyland, in my view simply a large piece of constantly evolving immersive storytelling, falls into line with this idea. He said that Disneyland would never be completed “as long as there is imagination left in the world.” He felt that if the park were to be held in such sacred regard that nothing ever changed that it would cease to be an exciting place and would just become a museum. I believe the same applies to the classics we produce for the stage. The stories these playwrights tell will never be finished as long as we have the imagination to tell them with the life we bring into the room.

No matter how badly we might wish it, classics cannot remain the same forever, because the artists who tell the stories do not remain the same. We can, however, bring the ideas and questions from the past along with us, if only we are brave enough to do so.