Nothing lost in translation of the classics for a modern theatre audience

Great plays are getting a working over by a new generation of Australian writers and directors

The Wild Duck

SUSAN Orlean, whose book The Orchid Thief was adapted into the movie Adaptation, once wrote that the entire process showed her that "the answer to everything might indeed be adaptation".

Certainly adaptation seems at least one of the answers for Australian theatre right now as the classics from Chekhov to Shakespeare get a good working over by a new generation of writers and directors.

In Sydney tomorrow, Belvoir Theatre presents its final performance of The Wild Duck, a 90-minute version of the 19th-century Henrik Ibsen classic that has been well and truly mashed-up by a 26-year-old Australian called Simon Stone and which has played to enthusiastic houses for more than a month. On the other side of town at the Sydney Theatre Company, co-artistic director Andrew Upton has made an art form out of adapting the classics. Next month, his take on The Cherry Orchard opens at London's National Theatre; his Uncle Vanya, which starred his wife Cate Blanchett, was the hot ticket at the STC last year and goes to Washington in August; and in June the STC will perform his version of Bulgakov's The White Guard.

There is nothing new about reinterpreting or adapting the great plays. Theatre is by its nature a fluid operation where the text is just the starting point. Belvoir's associate director Eamon Flack says that a radical approach to the classics has always been a central pursuit of Australian theatre. While the 1970s "new wave" focused on work by people such as David Williamson and Jack Hibberd, Flack argues it was also about "vernacularising" Shakespeare and an innovative approach to the classics.

"It has always been the way that old questions about national identity have been explored through the work of other countries" he says. "What's shifted is that it in no longer about [Australian] identity. It's about a set of global questions . . . not just a set of local questions."

Upton says the difference now is the licence writers are taking with their adaptations. "In Ibsen, for example, there has been a set of 'endorsed' translations by Michael Meyer," he says. "They are very good translations, they are good to act, but he is British and there is stuff in Ibsen about class which becomes a factor in the plays but which doesn't need to be a factor. So it is quite good for us to do our own version so we can get rid of the facets that are not of much relevance to us."

He says no one is bothering to produce much 20th century work by Sartre or Camus or Ionesco because the French estates have "tied themselves to translations done in the 1980s and which don't always work today," but which can't be messed with. But it's open season on the 19th century where Ibsen and Chekhov and others are out of copyright. Upton says it was after American playwrights such as David Mamet began doing more radical adaptations in the 80s, that Australian writers realised that they could also "do our own" versions of the classics.

It's not just copyright laws that make the 19th-century Europeans interesting fodder: they are proving to be a way to engage with some of the big themes of that period that some argue remain largely unexamined by a popular culture that defines the 19th century through our bush poetry.

Class, affluence, individualism, colonialism, the role of women -- it's all there in the plays according to Tom Wright, an associate director at the STC who has carved out a genre of his own by adapting Greek and Roman classics. Reworking the old stuff makes sense and he likes to quote British director Jonathan Miller who argues theatre is a way to break bread with the dead, to get in touch with our ancestors.

Flack says the approach to adaptations and translations has changed in the past 30 years and cites two plays just published by Currency Press, the performing arts publishing house. One is the 1978 Nick Enright-Ron Blair reworking of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, which he says is "quite ocker"; the other is his own 2009 version of Antigone which scarcely touches on the Australian vernacular. The point, he argues, is there is a generation of directors and playwrights who grew up on arts festivals here and overseas and who watch performance clips on YouTube. Their aesthetic is relentlessly global.

Upton believes seeking a "specifically Australian" voice in an adaptation is a "bit of a furphy".

"We hear a turn of phrase that makes us more comfortable, the dialogue seems natural, but that is not a profound shift," he says. "The biggest shift is taking out the themes within a play and deciding what resonates today." That's why his reworking of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler a few years ago emphasised the heroine's internal, psychological struggle rather than the social pressure that caused the central tragedy of the original, but which is harder to get across to a modern audience. He says the classics, especially those written in a foreign language, are wonderfully "plastic" in today's increasingly collaborative approach to theatre.

"We can do more with Ibsen than with [George Bernard] Shaw and other English writers because they are more locked in time," he says. "Ibsen had large chunks of exposition [that tells the audience the back story] and this is very clunky stuff. It's there in Shaw as well but there is not as much freedom [to change it when it is in English]."

The interest in adaptations is also fuelled by the modern, collaborative approach to theatre. Wright says the difference between a new work and an active adaptation can often be blurred, just like the increasing blur between the roles of writer and director. He rejects the hierarchical model developed in the UK "where the director is there to serve the playwright". Certainly, the notion of the writer delivering a pristine text is dead. Simon Stone, like others, is a director, not a playwright, interested in directing a production, not creating a publishable text and that approach is driving the work. Upton says: "In the 1970s and 1980s there was a push for writers to write in an Australian voice. That was good but now we are going back to the classics for more collaborative work."

There are practical issues too in putting on Shakespeare, for example, with theatres often forced to make changes and cut characters to cut costs. Shorter also works better for today's speedy audiences.

Bell Shakespeare is touring a 90-minute version of Romeo and Juliet, designed with one eye on school students. The Weekend Australian's theatre critic John McCallum says it's a knockout with students who don't seem to know the play but respond to its contemporary treatment.

Stone, with his colleague Chris Ryan, reduced the characters in his Wild Duck but the real excision was the dialogue.

With none of the original left, it means some have argued that while the Belvoir production is good, it sure ain't Ibsen. May-Brit Akerholt, one of the country's best known dramaturgs and an Ibsen specialist who has done countless translations from the Norwegian -- her original language -- loves the version but says: " I don't think that you can call Simon's work an adaptation. He readily accepts that it is a complete reworking."

Worrying about how closely a production follows the original text is not the point here, according to McCallum: "It is not as if you are killing the text, it's in the library."

Nor does he get hung up on whether the new versions "improve" the originals as some of the more passionate adaptors sometime claims: "Sometimes these plays just do not work in a modern context."

McCallum was warned that the Belvoir Duck was a whole new play: "I didn't expect to see The Wild Duck and I went along and I did see The Wild Duck. Simon delivered the experience the play should give and too often doesn't when it is done too respectfully on a modern stage."

But is it just too easy to redo the classics, even so audaciously?

Flack says directors and actors just want to work on the best plays and that often means the classics.

"Australian playwriting is about to break out but it is still finding its way and it requires much more work to get a new play up and than a classic," he says, while emphasising Belvoir's proportion of Australian work is at one of it highest levels ever.